The question of the cinema

Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19 (3):250-266 (2005)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Terrance Malick's film _The Thin Red Line is notable for its inexorable tendency to undermine the ontological status of the very times, places, and people it portrays. The film consists in an unrelenting questioning of cinematic reality. Such questioning does not lead to definitive truth or thematic resolution but only to more questions, more incredulousness at the continual disclosure and withdrawal of difference and multiplicity in their own accord. The film thus adopts what one might call a Heideggerian posture of questionableness without the expectation of answer. Far from striving to depict a truth, meaning, or moral that allows it to achieve a verisimilitude with some reassuring dimension of reality, _The Thin Red Line labors to intricately destructure the ontological ground of every such unifying principle, and thus every correspondence with an external reality. In doing so, it meticulously questions the material status of every filmic pretense to coherent and natural representation, thereby striving to affirm in cinematic space the irreducible difference and multiplicity that conventional cinematic productions typically negate

Categories

Keywords

Reprint years

DOI

10.1353/jsp.2005.0025

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 91,846

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

My notes

Similar books and articles

Film theory: rational reconstructions.Warren Buckland - 2012 - New York, NY: Routledge.
The future of the past: The cinema.Zsuzsa Baross - 2006 - Angelaki 11 (1):5 – 14.
Review of Scotland: Global Cinema: Genres, Modes and Identities. [REVIEW]John Marmysz - 2011 - Film-Philosophy 15 (2):159-165.
Theories of cinema, 1945-1995.Francesco Casetti - 1999 - Austin: University of Texas Press.
Cinema, memory, modernity: the representation of memory from the art film to transnational cinema.Russell James Angus Kilbourn - 2010 - New York: Routledge.
Passions and Actions: Deleuze's Cinematographic Cogito.Richard Rushton - 2008 - Deleuze and Guatarri Studies 2 (2):121-139.
What is cinéma vérité?Mohammad Ali Issari - 1979 - Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press. Edited by Doris Atkinson Paul.
What cinema is!: Bazin's quest and its charge.Dudley Andrew - 2010 - Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Cinema as a representational art.Catharine Abell - 2010 - British Journal of Aesthetics 50 (3):273-286.
Deleuze on cinema.Ronald Bogue - 2003 - New York: Routledge.

Analytics

Added to PP
2009-01-28

Downloads
31 (#515,349)

6 months
3 (#973,855)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Cinema 1: The Movement Image.Gilles Deleuze, Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam - 1988 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46 (3):436-437.
Contributions to Philosophy.Martin Heidegger, Parvis Emad & Kenneth Maly - 1999 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 63 (1):179-180.
The Collected Dialogues of Plato.H. G. Plato - 1961 - Princeton University Press.

View all 6 references / Add more references