Philosophy of Film

Why is it that we then all go to dark rooms to collectively commune over empathizing with fictional characters, as we do when watching films? Specifically, there have been few cultural touchstones to cause as much discussion and communing in the past ten years as Marvels' Avengers series and the film industry as a whole!

This book shows how a masterpiece of experimental cinema can be interpreted through hermeneutics of the film world. As an application of Ricœurian methodology to a non-narrative film, the book calls into question the fundamental concept of the film world. Firmly rooted within the context of experimental cinema, Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man was not created on the basis of a narrative structure and representation of characters, places and events, but on very different presuppositions. The techniques with which Brakhage worked on celluloid and used frames as canvases, as well as his choice to make the film without dialogue and sound, exhort the interpreter to directly question the philosophical language of moving images.
https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030124250

Hunter Vaughan interweaves phenomenology and semiotics to analyze cinema's ability to challenge conventional modes of thought. Merging Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception with Gilles Deleuze's image-philosophy, Vaughan applies a rich theoretical framework to a comparative analysis of Jean-Luc Godard's films, which critique the audio-visual illusion of empirical observation (objectivity), and the cinema of Alain Resnais, in which the sound-image generates innovative portrayals of individual experience (subjectivity). Both filmmakers radically upend conventional film practices and challenge philosophical traditions to alter our understanding of the self, the world, and the relationship between the two. Films discussed in detail include Godard's Vivre sa vie (1962), Contempt (1963), and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967); and Resnais's Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and The War Is Over (1966). Situating the formative works of these filmmakers within a broader philosophical context, Vaughan pioneers a phenomenological film semiotics linking two disparate methodologies to the mirrored achievements of two seemingly irreconcilable artists.

The 'end of the world' opens up philosophical questions concerning the very notion of the world, which is a fundamental element of all existential, phenomenological and hermeneutical philosophy. Is the 'end of the world' for us 'somebody's' death (the end of 'being-in-the-world') or the extinction of many or of all (the end of the world itself)? Is the erosion of the 'world' a phenomenon that does not in fact affect the notion of the world as a fundamental feature of all existential-ontological inquiry?

This volume examines the present state of these concerns in philosophy, film and literature. It presents a philosophical hermeneutics of the present state of the world and explores the principal questions of the philosophical accounts of the end of the world, such as finality and finitude. It also shows how literature and cinema have ventured to express the end of the world while asking if a consequent expression of the end of the world is also an end of its expression.

Przysługujący widmom wywrotowy, niemalże rewolucyjny potencjał został odsunięty oraz zagubiony poprzez pozbycie się tej kontrowersyjnej kategorii z terytorium metafizyki i zbyt pośpieszne odesłanie jej do przestrzeni badań nad literaturą, sprowadzając ją jedynie do roli użytecznego, bezpiecznego narzędzia interpretacji.

Książka Andrzeja Marca odzyskuje niepokojący charakter widmontologii i ponownie wprowadza widma do myśli metafizycznej. Czym nawiedzona i przeniknięta jest tradycyjna metafizyka, co właściwie ją dręczy, nie daje spokoju oraz nieustannie podmywa jej stabilność?

Kategoria widma Derridy posłużyła Marcowi przede wszystkim do rozważań nad charakterem współczesności i przeobrażeń, jakie dokonały się w obrębie myśli ponowoczesnej. Współczesna kultura, zdaniem Marca, stała się miejscem powstawania widm, nieustannie powracających z przeszłości. Uznając, że nie jesteśmy już w stanie tworzyć utopijnych wizji przyszłości, autor stara się zdać sprawę z widmowego charakteru współczesnej kultury, analizując m. in. strategie vintage, retro, nurt no future w kulturze lat 70. czy nurt fantastyki naukowej w literaturze.

Liz Watkins, University of Leeds. contact: e.i.watkins@leeds.ac.uk  'Threads of Colour and Meaning in the Film Work of Nicolas Roeg and Anthony Richmond', Guest blog for the Eastmancolor Revolution and British Cinema 1955-1985. https://eastmancolor.info/2018/07/25/threads-of-colour-and-meaning-in-the-film-work-of-nicolas-roeg-and-anthony-richmond/ From the vibrant hue of a detail that punctuates the image to a single colour that envelopes the screen, the chromatic, in films by Nicolas Roeg, signals a greater acuity than cosmetic distraction. In Roeg's work I would find both an attention to a central paradox of cinema – a photographic inscription of an image by light as permanent record of a fleeting moment – and an experimental approach to photography and editing that has frequently been described as fragmented and labyrinthine (Roeg 2013, p.5, p.29; Houston 1973, p.205). However, my initial textual analysis of Don't Look Now, found that the colour red demanded an attention to the materiality of the film. Colours fade and colour balances shift: cyan and yellow dyes diminish emphasising the red hues. In viewing a 1973 Eastmancolor circulation print it seemed that the degradation of the image underscored the effects of lens flare as an element of film style (Watkins 2015). What I want to suggest is that Roeg's approach to colour combines a fascination with photographic materials and effects, filmmaking practices honed through his work as cinematographer for directors including Roger Corman, François Truffaut, and Donald Cammell, and experimentation with the possibilities of different colour technologies, lighting and editing. From a stated interest in the 'retained image', which Roeg describes as much like the indexicality of the photographic (associated with Bazin's concept of the death mask), to the complexity of a film form structured through layered flashbacks, Roeg's work examines the disquieting of belief systems and social structures. The thread that can be tracked through the labyrinthine form of Roeg's film work – social order and its enactment – is underscored by a tension in the organisation of colour, as it shifts between the lighting and design of classic cinema (bright reds, yellows set forth against greys and browns, else contrasting hues) and a spontaneity of camera movement and naturalistic lighting. For example, Roeg has cited classic Technicolor designs (c.1940-1950) as an influence for his cinematography on The Masque of the Red Death (Corman, 1964) and Fahrenheit 451 (Truffaut, 1966). In The Masque of the Red Death the progression of colour rooms (blue, purple, green, orange, white, violet), drawn from Edgar Allen Poe's text, is interspersed with a vibrant red hue as something that spills and consumes from within. A thread of colour can be tracked throughout the film, from the plague of the Red Death outside the castle, to the fantasies that consume from within it (Branigan 2017, p.121): its meaning lies in its movement. For Fahrenheit 451, shot on Eastman Color, Roeg recalls Truffaut's request for the 'artificial and glossy' colour schemes associated with the studio lighting of three-strip Technicolor (Petrie 1996, p.136). The film contrasts colour details – red fire engines – with a background of naturalistic hues. Roeg's references to Technicolor design are interlaced with a broader cultural shift in the visual style of 1960s filmmaking. As Duncan Petrie has written in his essay on British Cinematography, the 1960s saw a transformation from 'hard-edged, high-contrast lighting to a softer, more diffused use of illumination; from carefully composed images and minimal camera movement to a much freer, more mobile and spontaneous visual register; from the aesthetics of classicism to a much more self-conscious use of form appropriate to a decade associated with a new emphasis on spectacle and sensation' (Petrie 2018: p.204). Petrie's argument, that the availability new lenses and increased light sensitivity of film stocks facilitated 'a new topography and environment' (Petrie, p.210) links film technologies and aesthetics with a decade characterised by social and political change. However, I want to suggest that Roeg's collaborations with cinematographer Anthony Richmond further erode the dominant teleological form of a film history that has been determined by technological innovations (see Elsaesser's critique, 2016) and concepts of authorship. Roeg's work with Richmond – Walkabout (1970/1971), Don't Look Now (1973), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and Bad Timing (1980) – combines naturalistic colour with photography considered experimental to commercial cinema: inverse images, slow motion, and mirrors extend and complicate the filmed space to convey dystopian landscapes.[1] Each of these films utilises lens flare, and shots which 'fall away into underexposure on the actors in the background' concealing the peripheral areas of the image. Richmond has linked these characteristics in Don't Look Now to the increased sensitivity of film stock (Richmond 1976; Watkins 2015). The effects of lens flare – causing the overexposure of the film as the light refracts on the camera lens and effaces the legible composition of the image – persists as the filmic expression of disorientation, intoxication and cultural displacement in contemporary works – Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and The Last Wave (1976) – shot by Russell Boyd for director Peter Weir. Boyd combines time-lapse sequences of dark clouds, backlit with golden sun and reflected in the windows of a skyscraper (The Last Wave) and slow-motion, high angle and 360˚shots in Picnic at Hanging Rock. The diminished hues of each overexposed image disquiets otherwise familiar landscapes. The entanglement of film technologies and aesthetics testifies to the persistence of filmmaking practices beyond the perceived obsolescence of a colour process such as three-strip Technicolor and questions the borderlines of national cinemas.[2] The selection of film stock was significant to colour design of Performance (1970), a film which Roeg co-directed with Donald

Philosophie, so pflegte der Philosoph Hermann Lübbe in seinen Seminaren zu sagen, ist alles, was unter diesem Namen auftritt. Dies gilt, so könnte man hinzufügen, auch für die Filmphilosophie.
Da die Zugehörigkeit der Filmphilosophie zum weiteren Feld der Philosophie damit gesichert ist, lässt sich die weiterführende Frage, was denn genau unter diesem Namen auftritt, unter Rückgriff auf Verfahren klären, die in der Philosophie, wie sie unter diesem Namen als Fach auftritt, gängig sind.
Mit Wittgenstein könnte man sich auf die Kraft des Beispiels stützen und sagen, dass die hier versammelten Texte auf eine jeweils eigene und durchaus programmatische Weise, die nicht ohne Rest unter eine große Oberkategorie subsumiert werden kann, exemplifizieren, was ‚Filmphilosophie‘ ist. Die vier Beiträge wären demnach vier verschiedene Gesten des Zeigens: „Das ist Filmphilosophie. So wird es gemacht.“ Um die Beruhigung im Transzendentalen, die von großen Oberkategorien immer ausgeht, wäre es damit aber vorerst einmal geschehen.
Will man hingegen den alten Ehrgeiz der Philosophie nicht so ohne weiteres preisgeben, den Dingen an den Erscheinungen vorbei auf den Grund und damit nachträglich vorauszugehen, dann lässt sich die Frage nach dem ‚Was‘ der Filmphilosophie auch schulmäßig beantworten: Indem man den Begriff zunächst einmal in historischer und systematischer Perspektive erläutert.

Richard Linklater’s celebrated Before trilogy chronicles the love of Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) who first meet up in Before Sunrise, later reconnect in Before Sunset and finally experience a fall-out in Before Midnight. Not only do these films present storylines and dilemmas that invite philosophical discussion, but philosophical discussion itself is at the very heart of the trilogy.

This book, containing specially commissioned chapters by a roster of international contributors, explores the many philosophical themes that feature so vividly in the interactions between Céline and Jesse, including:

the nature of love, romanticism and marriage
the passage and experience of time
the meaning of life
the art of conversation
the narrative self
gender
death

Including an interview with Julie Delpy in which she discusses her involvement in the films and the importance of studying philosophy.

Der Begriff des Interface kategorisiert die Ausprägungsstufen einer kommunikationsstabilisierenden Schnittstelle als Interaktionsmechanismus, wobei die Interaktion von maschinellen Komponenten (Hardware, Software) sowie die vielfältigen Interaktionen zwischen UserIn und Maschine zur Geltung gebracht werden.

Co může o filmu prozradit filmová věda, disciplína, která jej uchopuje kriticky, historicky i teoreticky? Film se vlivem technologií i diváckých nároků neustále proměňuje a s tím se mění způsoby jeho vnímání, interpretace a zkoumání.


Pulzujícími tématy tohoto oboru jsou filmozofie, neuroestetický přístup k vnímání filmů, ale také studium cinefilie, výrobních a distribučních mechanismů či festivalů. Obor filmových studií tak je prostorem poznání, v němž se potkávají různé sociální i empirické vědy. Návštěvu kina tato hutná a krásná kniha zpestří úvahami o distribučních strategiích či o fungování vlastního vnímání.

Völlig neue Bild- und Erfahrungswelten versprechen die jüngsten Produkte der Medienindustrie ihren Usern. Euphorisch investieren Google, Microsoft und Co. Unsummen in digitale Medientechnologien wie Virtual-Reality-Displays. Jeder Blockbuster muss in 3D gedreht werden. Entwicklungen wie diese verdeutlichen nicht nur den hohen Stellenwert, der sowohl der technologischen Seite als auch den ästhetischen Strategien visueller Medien zukommt. Sie werfen auch eine Reihe von Fragen auf: Wie adressieren multimodale Medienarrangements die Sinne der Rezipienten? Welche Rolle spielen Technologie und Wahrnehmung bei der Modellierung von Bildwirkungen? Um diese Fragen zu beantworten, legt der vorliegende Band den Fokus auf die Analyse medialer Interfaces. Konzentrierte sich die Bewegtbilder-Reihe bislang auf den Film, widmet sich Bild und Interface auch interaktiven Digital- und Computerspielbildern. Dadurch sollen weitere Bausteine einer kritischen Bewegtbildwissenschaft herausgearbeitet werden.

"Non, il n’y a pas qu’une manière d’analyser les films... Parmi toutes celles qui ont les faveurs des cinéphiles, des critiques et des universitaires, en voici six, qui se répondent et se complètent : historienne, esthétique, culturelle, genrée, cognitive et philosophique. Leur point commun ? Nous faire comprendre comment les films font sens, nous captivent ou nous émeuvent.
De la vue muette au blockbuster, des frères Dardenne à Intouchables en passant par toutes sortes de genres et d’époques, c’est plus d’un siècle de cinéma qui défile en 31 films à travers ces manières différentes d'analyser – donc d’aimer – le cinéma."

ABSTRACT: We will analyse three types of mise-en-scène in documentary as an expression of personality transfigurated into characters. We will name them direct-acting; constructed-acting and self constructed-acting. To those acting expression we find correspond stylistic types of acting in documentary history.

RESUMO: Abordaremos três tipos de encenação, como expressão de personalidades em cena transfiguradas em personagens: 1)a encenação-direta de personalidades públicas (corpos com presença social fixada na mídia; 2)a encenação-direta de personalidades anônimas (o espectador não reconhece o corpo/face/voz figurados); 3)a encenação-direta que remete ao corpo próprio do cineasta (a encenação ancora-se em quem sustenta a tomada como sujeito-da-câmera:seja como imagem privada, seja em situação de per¬formance).

What happens to philosophy and the way we think, which is to say write, once philosophy opens itself to an encounter with film? What happens to our experience of film once we approach it as a philosophically creative medium of communication? In what follows I offer some fragmentary remarks in response to these questions, suggesting that we can find a more robust and meaningful way of understanding Cavell’s claims concerning the kinship between film and philosophy by entertaining the possibility that both stand to be transformed by their mutual engagement. [A shorter version of my Cavellian Meditations: How to Do Things with FIlm and Philosophy]

Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998), written by Andrew Niccol, has been approached from various philosophical perspectives particularly in relation to Cartesian skepticism and the question of the external world, Sartrean existentialism and the affirmation of individual freedom, and some accounts of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. However, despite the aforementioned philosophical approaches, no Neoplatonic interpretation of the film has been offered. In this paper I aim to offer a Plotinian reading of The Truman Show with special reference to Plotinus’ dual-aspect theory of the soul and human freedom. I shall argue that The Truman Show can be interpreted as a discourse on selfhood, self-determination, and individual freedom in self-transcendence.

" The Matrix Trilogy " , which was scripted and directed by Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski, is one of the most important science fiction films. " The problem of reality " , which has been present, in various forms, ever since Plato's " allegory of the cave " , is once again being evaluated in " The Matrix Trilogy " through the medium of cinema. Moreover, there are various opinions regarding exactly what the main natures of human are in " The Matrix Trilogy ". Furthermore, " The Matrix Trilogy " provides a striking view on the relationship between the " basic natures of human " and the " system " in which humans live. The system explored, and the human insights examined in " The Matrix Trilogy " have a distinctly philosophical feel. As such, this article analyses " The Matrix Trilogy " , viewing it as a work of art which presents philosophical problems. Therefore, the dialogues in " The Matrix Trilogy " and the context of the dialogues shall be taken as the basic reference resource for the analysis. This article studies the nature of the understanding of system and human in the " The Matrix Trilogy " , with particular emphasis on analysing the content of dialogues. The article concludes that the basic human characteristics which distinguish " Neo " from other living beings in " The Matrix Trilogy " are " the ability to know " and " the will of change. " Keywords: The Matrix Trilogy, science fiction films, the will of change, the ability to know, the problem of reality, knowledge, system.

Animatic apparatus; history of animism; history of mechanism; animation; animatic automaton; animatic; automaton; robot; cyborg; vital machine; cinema; anima; plasmaticness; simulacrum; lifedeath; the living dead; the uncanny; simulation; representation; the Death Drive; the evil demon; the crypt, the haunted house, of cinema; cinema studies; animation studies; theory of animation; Film Studies; film theory; film philosophy; philosophy; humanities; J. David Bolter; Ctesibius, Hero of Alexandria, and Philo of Byzantium; Jacques de Vaucanson; Pierre Jacquet-Droz; Frederik L. Schodt; Mary Shelley; Frankenstein; René Descartes; La Mettrie; Donald Crafton; David F. Channell; Sergei Eisenstein; Roland Barthes; Jacques Derrida; Sigmund Freud; Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe; the Mystic Writing Pad; Thierry Kuntzel; Sigvard Strandh; Gilles Deleuze; Jean Baudrillard; Philip Brophy; Franz Kafka; Plato; Jean-Pierre Vernant; Tom Gunning; C.W. Ceram; Villiers de l’Isle-Adam; L’Eve future; Blade Runner

The Seventh Seal (NC) with Post-Screening Talk

Sunday 18 March at 6.15pm

97 mins – Sweden 1957 – Subtitles – Dir: Ingmar Bergman
Starring: Gunnar Björnstrand, Bengt Ekerot and Nils Poppe

This allegorical drama – centred on a medieval knight who challenges Death to a game of chess in order to postpone his demise – remains fascinating as a study of faith in crisis.

**Special Announcement**

This screening of The Seventh Seal will be followed by a talk entitled

'Ingmar Bergman & The Human Condition: A Discussion on Film and Philosophy'

by Juliana de Albuquerque.

Juliana de Albuquerque has been a student of Ingmar Bergman’s cinema for many years. In 2014 she was awarded a creative residence at The Bergman Estate on Fårö Island, the location where Bergman shot Persona (1966) and lived for the last forty years of his life.

Juliana is currently working on a doctorate in German Literature & Philosophy at University College Cork.

This winter she has also been teaching an adult education course on Existentialism.

In her talk at the Triskel Arts Centre, Juliana will discuss Bergman’s work in connection with philosophy. She will also talk about the time she spent at The Bergman Estate, and how that contributed to her understanding of Bergman's oeuvre.

Read more about Juliana at https://ucc-ie.academia.edu/julianadealbuquerque, or visit her Twitter profile https://twitter.com/the_stardust.

This volume re-evaluates theories of genre and spectatorship in light of a critic-defined tendency in recent art cinema, coined ‘extreme cinema’. In Genre Trouble and Extreme Cinema, Bordun argues that the films of Mexican director Carlos Reygadas and French director Catherine Breillat expand generic classifications. Bordun contends that their films make it apparent that genre is not established prior to the viewing of a work but is recollected and assembled by spectators in ways that matter for them in both personal and experiential terms. The author deploys contemporary film theories on the senses, both phenomenological and affect theory, and partakes in close readings of the films’ forms and narratives. The book thus adds to the present literature on extreme cinema and film theory, yet sets itself apart by fully deploying genre theory alongside the methodological and stylistic approaches of Stanley Cavell, Vivian Sobchack, Laura U. Marks, and Eugenie Brinkema.

Husserl’s phenomenology proposes a method through which a structural analysis of experience is performed, questioning how reality appears to consciousness. What cinema attempts is precisely to recreate human experiences, visually expressing the relation we entertain with our reality. If we take films to be an expression of experience (of the filmmaker) through experience (of the spectator), then phenomenology becomes a particularly suitable perspective for understanding cinema, for it enables the understanding of how a film, as an expression of life, is grasped by consciousness, creating a specific type of experience for the viewer. Consequently, a Husserlian approach allows us to grasp the universality of filmic experience: it is always and for every possible film a matter of a consciousness engaged in an act of apprehension of an object with a specific form and content. How is this relationship constituted? The aim of this chapter is to propose an answer to this question from a Husserlian perspective, by means of close analysis of two acts of our consciousness that make our access to films possible in the first place: perception and imagination.

Drawing from Alain Badiou's concept of inaesthetics, which proposes that art conditions philosophical thought, this essay offers an inaesthetic reading of The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros (2005) and suggests that it is a film that offers enabling possibilities in the thinking of love by providing the spectator with a different experience of cinematic attention in the visual field. The author suggests that the film raises the philosophical question " What is love? " and attempts to answer the very question it poses through punctual encounters, which are moments of cinematic interruption—described by Roland Barthes as " what I add. .. and what nonetheless is already there " (A Lover's Discourse 55)—that may offer opportunities for philosophical speculation. This essay further argues that those punctual moments initiate a new form of attention that is not sustained by " visual pleasure, " as theorized by Laura Mulvey, but by the " movement of thought " (Badiou, Cinema 17). The film uses that mode of attention as a way to think about love while also suggesting that love itself is a form of attention.

John Sayles is one of America’s most successful independent filmmakers, whose works include Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980), City of Hope (1991), and Lone Star (1996). This article examines Sayles’ portrait of place in Sunshine State (2002), a film set in Plantation Island, Florida, where large-scale corporate development is transforming two communities—one black, the other white—into upscale winter resorts. Sayles’ film probes the place experience of some sixteen vividly drawn characters and illuminates how the same physical place, for different individuals and groups, can evoke a broad spectrum of situations, meanings, and potential futures. One of Sayles’ conclusions is that people cannot escape the place in which they find themselves. They can, however, learn from that place and thereby decide whether and in what ways they will offer that place commitment or not.

Automata (2014), is a dystopian film that reveals postmodern tendencies around the materialization and conceptualization of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s  philosophical notions like territority, deterritorialization, reterritorialization. Deterritorialization becomes the key element of the film as it describes displacement, emplacement and replacement of human and automata in both geographical and individual aspects. Humans emigrate from radioactive places to narrow zones, also from human to automaton which becomes more human than human. On the other hand automata move over inversely from narrow zones to radioactive places, from slavery to freedom and from automata to human.
This paper discusses the future design of Automata, in which human beings and automata, the innate and design reciprocate roles, focusing on its content built by many deterritorializations and reterritorializations between biological, geographical, intellectual and ideological territories. It explores the film as a cultural text revealing a postmodern discourse through its transitions between territories and searches the meaning of this transition as a postmodern fact both in positive and negative aspects. It searches viability and importance of these notions in a postmodern reality and analyzes how Automata uses them through its content.

Benim konusmam temelde iki parcaya ayrilabilir. Ilk olarak, sinematik felsefe dedigimiz felsefenin nasil bir sey oldugunu tartisacagim. Ikinci olarak ise, sinematik felsefede Ingmar Bergman nerede duruyor meselesine yanit vermeye calisacagim. Bazi yonetmenler vardir ki dunyaya dair tasarimlari vardir, dunyaya dair yasam anlayislari vardir. Bazi yonetmenler ciddi okumalar, ciddi tartismalar yaparlar, ciddi bir entelektuel birikimleri bulunur. Bunlar kendi entelektuel birikimlerini kompozisyonlarina tasirlar. Bergman, bunlardan birisidir. Bergman, psikanalizme filmleriyle karsi cikmis, motivasyon kaynaklarinin cogul ve cok boyutlu oldugunu, arzunun tum evrene yayildigini sinematik imajlariyla gostermistir. Ancak bu yonetmen, imajlariyla pozitif ve negatif arzular ayrimini yapmis ve pozitiften yana tavir takinmistir.

A reading of the film Moonstruck (1987) is presented in two movements. The first aligns Moonstruck with certain Hollywood film comedies of the 1930s and 40s, those Stanley Cavell calls comedies of remarriage. The second turns to some aspects of Emerson's writing – in particular his interest in our relation to human greatness, and his coinciding interest in our relation to the words of a text – and shows how Moonstruck inherits these Emersonian, essentially philosophical interests.