Wars have played a momentous role in shaping the course of human history. The ever-present specter of conflict has made it an enduring topic of interest in popular culture, and many movies, from Hollywood blockbusters to independent films, have sought to show the complexities and horrors of war on-screen. In The Philosophy of War Films, David LaRocca compiles a series of essays by prominent scholars that examine the impact of representing war in film and the influence that cinematic (...) images of battle have on human consciousness, belief, and action. The contributors explore a variety of topics, including the aesthetics of war as portrayed on-screen, the effect war has on personal identity, and the ethical problems presented by war. Drawing upon analyses of iconic and critically acclaimed war films such as Saving Private Ryan (1998), The Thin Red Line (1998), Rescue Dawn (2006), Restrepo (2010), and Zero Dark Thirty (2012), this volume's examination of the genre creates new ways of thinking about the philosophy of war. A fascinating look at the manner in which combat and its aftermath are depicted cinematically, The Philosophy of War Films is a timely and engaging read for any philosopher, filmmaker, reader, or viewer who desires a deeper understanding of war and its representation in popular culture. (shrink)

Speaking about the state of the Hollywood film industry at the 2008 Academy Awards, the Oscars’ host – comedian Jon Stewart – made the following wry assessment: ‘Not all films did as well as Juno obviously. The films that were made about the Iraq War, let’s face it, did not do as well. But I’m telling you, if we stay the course and keep these movies in the theatres we can turn this around. I don’t care if it (...) takes 100 years. Withdrawing the Iraq movies would only embolden the audience. We cannot let the audience win.’ The films he is referring to include Home of the Brave (2006), In the Valley of Elah (2007) and Stop-Loss (2008) – all of which focus on the personal cost to American soldiers on their return to civilian life, as well as exposing the failure of the US invasion of Iraq at home and abroad. Despite their topical subject matter, these movies were, for the most part, commercial failures. This article seeks to investigate audience indifference (Jean Baudrillard claims a certain indifference is a fundamental consequence of the Western globalising ideology) to mainstream cinematic depictions of the post September 11 invasion of Iraq, via a consideration of the trauma and abjection depicted in these films. Baudrillard’s hypotheses on terrorism – as a symbolic challenge put forth by terrorism (embodied by the attack on the Twin Towers) – and the West’s incapacity to respond to it, forms the basis for our investigation of the limits of these films to incite and engage viewers. His writings offer a lens through which to consider how ‘terrorism’ operates symbolically, and fundamentally, the dilemmas this raises for a Western psyche grappling with how the ‘terrorist threat’ might be answered, engaged with, responded to. (shrink)

To develop my arguments about this revision of the logistics ofdisappearance, I will turn to several recent Iraq War films, look at thedifferent types of screens they present and investigate their aestheticdimensions and ethical implications. Among the multiple screens present inthese films, the video war diaries made by the soldiers at the front are mostsalient. These diaries will be an important focus of my analysis of acontemporary logistics of perception, which, following the implication ofWeb 2.0 applications, I will (...) call the logistics of perception 2.0. (shrink)

This article is about weaponisation of emotions through visual culture. It interrogates how geopolitics trickles down to everyday life and becomes personal through the embodiment of screen actors....

In this essay, I want to explore one of the most ironic episodes in the history of propaganda, the attempt by various federal agencies to moderate American WWII anti-Japanese propaganda films. My texts will be four films, two produced by the military, and two by Hollywood: December 7th (1943), directed by Gregg Toland and revised by John Ford; Air Force (1943), directed Howard Hawks; Know Your Enemy: Japan (1945), directed by Frank Capra; and Betrayal for the East (1945), (...) directed by William Berke. As all of these films are readily available on YouTube, I will be brief in my description of them. Instead, I will focus on how they served to intensify racial hatred of Japanese in general and Japanese-Americans in particular, and how the federal government tried to control that propaganda—but was limited by its own policies regarding Japanese-Americans. (shrink)

From The Philosophy of War Films, page 335-354, available online: https://www.kentuckypress.com/live/title_detail.php?titleid=3324#.WBPirVdeCi4. Copyright?? 2014 by University of Kentucky Press.

Virginia Woolf famously wrote 'as a woman I have no country', suggesting that women had little stake in defending countries where they are considered second-class citizens, and should instead be forces for peace. Yet women have been perpetrators as well as victims of violence in nationalist conflicts. This unique book generates insights into the role of gender in nationalist violence by examining feature films from a range of conflict zones. In The Battle of Algiers, female bombers destroy civilians while (...) men dress in women's clothes to prevent the French army from capturing and torturing them. Prisoner of the Mountains shows a Chechen girl falling in love with her Russian captive as his mother tries to rescue him. Providing historical and political context to these and other films, Matthew Evangelista identifies the key role that economic decline plays in threatening masculine identity and provoking the misogynistic violence that often accompanies nationalist wars. (shrink)

This third brand-new 'Star Wars & Philosophy' title once again takes a fresh look at the franchise with all-new chapters. The focus of this volume is the more recent entries into the franchise, including hit TV shows such as THe Mandalorian. Modern applied philosophy is also used to analyse the Star Wars universe: In addition to thorny metaphysical questions about the nature of time and free will, this volume highlights the staggering cultural impact of George Lucas's universe. The newest Star (...) Wars narratives tackle ethnicity on alien worlds and how love and sex with a droid like L3-37 would work ("It works"). The connections between the Separatist Freedom Movement and the struggle for social justice in the USA in the 21st century are brought to light. And philosophical second looks at Rian Johnson's The Last Jedi prove there is much more to this controversial entry in the Skywalker saga. (shrink)

This article builds on conclusions drawn in the article “Eyeless in America,” by the same author and considers how 50 American films about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan intended to function as what Jacques Ellul called “integration propaganda,” fared. This article considers and rejects a number of theories about why most feature war films failed between 2002 and 2012 and proposes what war films might look like in the near future.

This chapter lays out the paradox of fiction as it relates to the Star Wars films in three claims: we have genuine and rational emotional responses to the fictional characters and events in Star Wars; we must believe these characters and events really exist; and nobody believes these fictional characters and events in Star Wars exist. While many fans like to talk as if the characters and events in Star Wars are real, none of us actually believe that Luke's (...) heroic journey is real. The illusion theory claims that the fictional work creates in us the illusion that the characters and situations depicted actually exist. One observation that the thought theory makes is that we often have emotional reactions to imaginary situations. The pretend theory says that the emotions we experience while watching Star Wars are not genuine emotions. Rather, they're quasi‐emotions. (shrink)

A series of essays on film and philosophy whose authors - philosophers or film studies experts - write on a wide variety of films: classic Hollywood comedies, war films, Eastern European art films, science fiction, showing how film and watching it can not only illuminate philosophy but, in an important sense, be doing philosophy. The book is crowned with an interview with Wittgensteinian philosopher Stanley Cavell, discussing his interests in philosophy and in film and how they can (...) come together. (shrink)

This article examines 50 films produced and released between the years 2001 and 2012 that are concerned with the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Using Jacques Ellul’s theories set out in his book Propaganda, the article argues that while the films have failed at the box office, they were intended to function as integration propaganda. The article proposes six different tropes or common frames for understanding how the films avoid dealing with problems raised by the wars. (...) Why the films failed, and what functioned as integration propaganda instead, is the subject for a second article titled “Eyeless in America, the Sequel.”. (shrink)

Jonathan Rosenbaum _Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons_ Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004 ISBN 0-8018-7840-3 hb xxi + 445 pp. _Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia_ Edited by Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin London: British Film Institute, 2003 ISBN 0851709834 hb; 0851709842 pb 224 pp. Jonathan Rosenbaum _Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Films We Can See_ London: Wallflower Press, 2002 ISBN 1-903364-23-X pb 192 pp.

The trilogy is viewed through the lens of myth and metaphor. A wide variety of philosophical and mythological themes are presented and expounded upon, drawing from a rich source of scholars, thinkers, writers, and poets from East and West alike. Heretical or not, the Star Wars prequels are a surprisingly rich source of insight into the whole saga.

Some time between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, my grandmother, Kira Razlogova, translated an African film at the Moscow International Film Festival. It was an official screening, with the ambassador of the African country present in the audience. She sat in a translator’s booth at the back of the theater, reading into the microphone from a printed French dialogue list just given to her. She had never seen this film before. She watched it now for the first time (...) through the window of her booth, and synced her reading to the spoken lines flowing into her earphones, lines in an African language she did not know. Loudspeakers transmitted her voice into the cinema hall over the partially muted original.. (shrink)

The Iran–Iraq war, which took place from 1980 to 1988, was one of the longest and bloodiest conventional wars in the history of the last century. The war was also the largest mobilization of the Iranian population and was achieved primarily by producing and promoting a culture of martyrdom based on religious themes found in Shi'i Islam. It was the war that created and consolidated what we know today as the Islamic republic of Iran. For years there have been two (...) popular public discourses in post-war Iran: the secular discourse, which is to evade, to ignore, to escape to the Caspian; and then the state's discourse, of the strong, mourning women and the heroic martyrs. It is the group of women who exist betwixt the dominant discourses of the secular versus the religious and the idea of womanhood versus motherhood that I am interested in exploring here by looking at the most recent work of a secular female filmmaker, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad. (shrink)

This article examines three films made during the 1950s by Elwyn James Anthony at the psychotic clinic for children at the Maudsley Hospital that marked an important transition in the purpose and practice of visual documentation in a clinical setting: film as a research tool was transitioning from the recording of external signs as indicators of internal subjective states, to the capture of the visual flow of communication between subjects. It is a shift that had a particular impact on (...) the emergent classification of autism, a modality not yet properly separated from the broader term of psychosis, as a non-relational condition whose visual capture demonstrated a void of inter-human communicational exchange. Film was significant not only as a recording apparatus, but as a method of cutting and crafting sequences of movements into brief repetitive motifs. The filmed behaviour of children remained opaque to interpretation, a ‘finding’ that facilitated the modelling of an emergent autism as subjects who were isolated, alienated and automaton-like, inhabiting a separate temporality. The article situates this ‘second’, affectless autism, within a broader context of post-war research into gestures as a language of the body, developed largely through an intellectual network of German émigré psychoanalysts who had fled to the US and UK in the 1930s. (shrink)

Introduction: Why so serious? -- The super body-politic: nationally assembling Joss Whedon's exceptional The avengers -- "He was deceived by a lie": tragedy and the dark plague of the politics of fear in George Lucas' Star wars -- Dystopian polyvalence: emancipating the mediated life from The matrix.

Does it take faith to be a Jedi? Are droids capable of thought? Should Jar Jar Binks be held responsible for the rise of the Empire? Presenting entirely new essays, no aspect of the myth and magic of George Lucas’s creation is left philosophically unexamined in The Ultimate Star Wars and Philosophy. The editors of the original Star Wars and Philosophy strike back in this Ultimate volume that encompasses the complete Star Wars universe Presents the most far-reaching examination of the (...) philosophy behind Star Wars – includes coverage of the entire film catalogue to date as well as the Expanded Universe of novels, comics, television series, games and toys Provides serious explorations into the deeper meaning of George Lucas’s philosophically rich creation Topics explored include the moral code of bounty-hunter favourite Boba Fett, Stoicism and the Jedi Order, the nature of the Dark Side, Anakin and Achilles in a nihilism face-off, feminism and being chained to a giant slug, cloning, de-extinction, fatherhood, Wookiees, loyalty, betrayal, guardians, republics, tyrants, terrorism, civic duty, friendship, family, and more! Publishing in time for the global release of Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens on December 18, 2015 – hotly anticipated to become the first film to top $3 billion in worldwide box office sales. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper explores the relationship between the medium of motion-picture film and the representation of autobiographical memory during the middle decades of the twentieth century. The paper argues that a reciprocal relationship developed between film and memory, in which film was understood as an externalized form of memory, and memory an internalized record of personal experience similar in many respects to film. Memory was often represented as an object-like entity, preserved in stable form within the body, and able to be (...) extracted by the right stimulus or trigger. A particularly important community in which this representation was developed was psychotherapeutic practitioners with psychoanalytic orientations, particularly during and shortly after the Second World War. In special circumstances, therapists and others claimed, records of past life events could be projected, film-like, onto the screen of an individual's conscious, replaying previous experiences in real time. The paper develops a social historical account of this relationship, and reflects on its significance for the history of selfhood in the twentieth century. (shrink)

Most historical accounts of the relations between phenomenology and film take their departure from essays written by Merleau-Ponty and Roman Ingarden after 1945. Thus, they completely ignore the period before the outbreak of World War II. However, if one indeed has difficulties finding any detailed analysis of cinema among the writings of “early phenomenologists,” the subject is nevertheless referred to by authors such as Husserl, Heidegger, Eugen Fink, Moritz Geiger, Felix Kaufmann or Oskar Becker. The present article attempts to reconstruct (...) the implicit conception of cinema which circulated in the phenomenological movement during the interwar period and thus arrives at some significant conclusions regarding the conservative tendencies of phenomenology. (shrink)

Introduction: Why so serious? -- The super body-politic: nationally assembling Joss Whedon's exceptional The avengers -- "He was deceived by a lie": tragedy and the dark plague of the politics of fear in George Lucas' Star wars -- Dystopian polyvalence: emancipating the mediated life from The matrix.

Appropriate for both academic readers and informed general enthusiasts of the cinema it addresses, the book demonstrates both philosophy's particular usefulness for the analysis of modernist cinema and film form's inherent potential for ...

This article explores how post-war documentary film-makers negotiated complex social, formal, and autobiographical issues associated with representing mental illness and its treatments, and the extent to which their respective approaches helped to challenge conventional attitudes to alternative psychotherapies – especially within the context of advances in new documentary film-making technologies, alongside a wider culture of social activism. Focussing on A Look at Madness ( Regard sur la folie; Mario Ruspoli, 1962, France) and Now Do You Get It Why I Am (...) Crying? ( Begrijpt u nu waarom ik huil?; Louis van Gasteren, 1969, Netherlands), the article discusses how the collaborative, democratic aims of cinéma direct coincided with the ethos of institutional psychotherapy, and compares this with the relations between the documentary form and the subject of LSD-assisted psychotherapeutic techniques in Van Gasteren's film. (shrink)

A post-photographic cinema. The myth of "the myth of total cinema" -- The matrix: "a prison for your mind" -- The new realness -- Quid est veritas: the reality ofunspeakable suffering -- Social network -- Postscript: total cinema redux -- A chronicle of theBush years. 2001: after September 11 -- 2002: the war on terror begins -- 2003: invading Iraq-- 2004: Bush's victory -- 2005: looking for the Muslim world -- 2006: September 11, theanniversary -- 2007: what was Iraq and (...) where? -- 2008: the election -- Notes toward a syllabus.In praise of love (Jean-Luc Godard, 2001) -- Avalon (Mamoru Oshii, 2001) -- Avant-garde goesdigital: Corpus callosum, Cotton Candy, and Razzle Dazzle -- Russian ark (AlexanderSokurov,2002) -- Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, 2002) -- Goodbye Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-Liang,2002) -- Dogville (Lars Von Trier, 2003) -- The world (Jia Zhangke, 2004) -- Battle in heaven(Carlos Reygadas, 2005) -- The death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005) -- Day night daynight (Julia Loktev, 2006) -- Southland tales (Richard Kelly, 2006) -- Inland empire (DavidLynch, 2006) -- Between darkness and light (after William Blake) (Douglas Gordon, 1997/2006)-- Lol (Joe Swanberg, 2006) -- Flight of the red balloon (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2007) -- Hunger(Steve McQueen, 2008) -- Opening ceremonies, Beijing Olympics (August 8, 2008) -- Carlos(Olivier Assayas, 2010) -- The strange case of Angelica (Manoel de Oliveira, 2010) -- Onceupon a time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011). (shrink)

Patroni, Steve Review of: Oh! What a lovely war, directed by Richard Attenborough.

Ordinary people shudder at the thought that people in positions of power might do whatever they think they can get away with. But that is often the way it is in the real world, and the risks go even higher when opportunity is compounded with impatience. The ways of negotiation and diplomacy are not considered entirely outmoded. But more and more we are being duped by a dream of some ultimate technological fix: that one more fancy gadget is all it (...) will take to solve the vexing problems that less well-tooled folks have been stumbling over for centuries. Our success rate, this reasoning goes, has been limited so far only by the limits on our equipment. With the new super-missile, or the new super-plane, or the new superlaunching system in space, we will be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound-or, what is more to the point, just blow them away and walk across the crater. "Bombs can be clean." "Nuclearwar is winnable." The illusion of omnipotence that accompanies this megalomania is well nurtured by manufacturers who stand in line for contracts to help build some super-weapon. This should not be surprising. What at first glance is surprising is the almost total failure of our commercial media to call this myth into question. This criticism is meant to be sweeping, but I will here focus my remarks on film. (shrink)

What do we know about war crimes and justice? What are the discursive practices through which the dominant images of war crimes, atrocity and justice are understood? In this wide ranging text, Michael J. Shapiro contrasts the justice-related imagery of the war crimes trial with?literary justice?: representations in literature, film, and biographical testimony, raising questions about atrocities and justice that juridical proceedings exclude. By engaging with the ambiguities exposed by the artistic and experiential genres, reading them alongside policy and archival (...) documentation and critical theoretical discourses, Shapiro?s War Crimes, Atrocity, and Justice challenges traditional notions of?responsibility? in juridical settings. His comparative readings instead encourage a focus on the conditions of possibility for war crimes as they arise from the actions of states, non-state agencies and individuals involved in arms trading, peace keeping, sex trafficking, and law enforcement and adjudication. Theory springs to life as Shapiro draws on examples from legal discourse, literature, media, film, and television, to build a nuanced picture of politics and the problem of justice. It will be of great interest to students of film and media, literature, cultural studies, contemporary philosophy and political science. (shrink)

What do we know about war crimes and justice? What are the discursive practices through which the dominant images of war crimes, atrocity and justice are understood? In this wide ranging text, Michael J. Shapiro contrasts the justice-related imagery of the war crimes trial with literary justice: representations in literature, film, and biographical testimony, raising questions about atrocities and justice that juridical proceedings exclude. By engaging with the ambiguities exposed by the artistic and experiential genres, reading them alongside policy and (...) archival documentation and critical theoretical discourses, Shapiros War Crimes, Atrocity, and Justice challenges traditional notions of responsibility in juridical settings. His comparative readings instead encourage a focus on the conditions of possibility for war crimes as they arise from the actions of states, non-state agencies and individuals involved in arms trading, peace keeping, sex trafficking, and law enforcement and adjudication. Theory springs to life as Shapiro draws on examples from legal discourse, literature, media, film, and television, to build a nuanced picture of politics and the problem of justice. It will be of great interest to students of film and media, literature, cultural studies, contemporary philosophy and political science. (shrink)

Die andauernde Faszination des Films liegt nicht zuletzt in seinem Vermögen, Zuschauer_innen zu einer empathischen Reaktion zu bewegen – Filme rufen Gefühle hervor. Der Band betrachtet verschiedene Aspekte dieser Affekte und Emotionen. Neben dem Spielfilm wird dabei auch das bisher in der Diskussion wenig beachtete Genre der Dokumentarfilme analysiert. Die Beiträge aus Philosophie und Filmwissenschaft berufen sich sowohl auf die Tradition der analytischen Philosophie, die bislang eher kognitivistisch orientiert war, als auch auf aktuelle Entwicklungen in der ästhetischen Theorie, die (...) in der phänomenologischen Tradition steht. (shrink)

The essays in this volume tackle the philosophical questions from these blockbuster films including: Was Anakin predestined to fall to the Dark Side? Are the Jedi truly role models of moral virtue? Why would the citizens and protectors of a democratic Republic allow it to descend into a tyrannical empire? Is Yoda a peaceful Zen master or a great warrior, or both? Why is there both a light and a dark side of the Force? Star Wars and Philosophy ponders (...) the depths of these subjects and asks what it truly means to be mindful of the "living force.". (shrink)

Taking as its point of departure a reflection on Abel Gance’s 1919 film J’accuse!, and drawing on George Bataille’s theory of sacrifice, as well as the work of the cultural historian Jay Winter, this paper argues that one of the legacies of the First World War in intellectual and cultural history is a deep skepticism regarding the relation between war and sacrifice. This skepticism, which has its roots in the struggle with the meaning of the war during the years 1914-1918, (...) retains its resonance today, however enduring and even inevitable its evocation may otherwise be in our understanding of the Great War and the conflicts endemic to European and world history since. (shrink)

Pornography has been defined as sex separated from personality. In other words, life’s deepest need to express desire and affection and perpetuate the species is reduced to appetite and the satisfaction of appetite. War in many ways does the same. It depersonalizes killing by pitting stranger against stranger—uniformed or otherwise. Fatalities are reduced to numbers. Such killings are dignified by slogans (“Vietnamizing the Vietnamese” or “Operation Iraqi Freedom”),. Preparing troops for the killings in war is everything from oratory to close (...) order drill, parades and honors. Denis de Rougemont in LOVE IIN THE WESTERN WORLD has even traced this to the legend of Tristan and Isolde in which Tristan chooses a military life to define his manhood after leaving Isolde. All of these manifestation and pretenses gloss over the brutality of war just as films, photographs and other promotions disguise pornography as mere excitement. (shrink)

This article treats the ideational process that turns men into warring bodies. Beginning with a gloss on Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace, where he expresses optimism about the peace-fostering potential of publicity, the analysis notes Kant’s neglect of what Michel Foucault calls ‘the coercive structure of the signifier’ and goes on to a reading of Michael Cimono’s film The Deer Hunter, which focuses on the discursive frailties that grease the skids for youth to slide from child-like innocence to nationalist-macho violence. The (...) Deer Hunter, which provides an elaborate treatment of the transition from working to warring bodies, features a group of young men whose lack of a discursive rapport with themselves – much less with each other – makes them susceptible to becoming ‘warriors’, sent out to an exotic venue in order to ‘proudly serve their country’ (as the MC directing the wedding festivities in the first half of the film puts it). Contrasting the thought world of the characters in The Deer Hunter with more discursively complex models of thought, the article ends with a speculation on the importance of genre disruption, and the scrambling of codes as antidotes to the linguistic claustrophobia that often attends unreflective transitions from citizen subjects to warring bodies. (shrink)