Category: publications

Edited Collection

Film Theory and Philosophy

Film Theory and Philosophy

Edited with Richard Allen

Published by Oxford Clarendon Press, 1997 

Abstract

The collection brings together a wide range of contributors, including both philosophers and film scholars. All of them address the question of whether philosophy can take the form of, or be articulated through, film. A new text for the growing field of philosophy of film, engaging with a variety of questions concerning the relationship between film and art, aesthetics and philosophy. Explores a wide variety of forms and periods of film, such as the avant-garde, continental film and popular American cinema, to present diverse answers to this question. Draws on a range of films, from the works of Hitchcock to Mission: Impossible and Being John Malkovich.

I. The very idea of film as philosophy

Theses on cinema as philosophy /​ Paisley Livingston
Beyond Mere illustration : how films can be philosophy /​ Thomas E. Wartenberg
Film art, argument, and ambiguity /​ Murray Smith

II. Popular American film : entertainment and enlightenment

Hitchcock and Cavell /​ Richard Allen
The paradox of the unknown lover : a reading of Letter from an unknown woman /​ Lester H. Hunt
Spike Lee and the sympathetic racist /​ Dan Flory
Transparency and twist in narrative fiction film /​ George Wilson
The impersonation of personality : film as philosophy in Mission : impossible /​ Stephen Mulhall
On being philosophical and Being John Malkovich /​ Daniel Shaw
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind and the morality of memory /​ Christopher Grau

III. Continental philosophy, continental film

Sartre, the philosophy of nothingness, and the modern melodrama /​ Andras Balint Kovacs
Cinema and subjectivity in Krzysztof Kieslowski /​ Paul C. Santilli
Is sex comedy or tragedy? : directing desire and female auteurship in the cinema of Catherine Breillat /​ Katherine Ince
Apperception on display : structural films and philosophy /​ Jinhee Choi
Philosophizing through the moving image : the case of Serene velocity /​ Noel Carroll
The substance of cinema /​ Trevor Ponech
The world rewound : Peter Forgacs's Wittgenstein Tractatus /​ Whitney Davis.

Monograph, publications

Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema

Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema.

2nd Edition, Oxford University Press, 2022 (1st Edition, 1995)

Abstract

Thrillers, weepies, horror movies, and melodramas evoke characteristic kinds of emotional response, yet emotion is not much examined by film or literary theory. Engaging Characters discusses emotional responses to films, integrating them into a theory of engagement (`identification') with characters in cinematic and literary fictions. Films and filmmakers discussed include The Accused; Hitchcock (including detailed analyses of The Man Who Knew Too Much and Saboteur); Godard; Ruiz; Bunuel's That Obscure Object of Desire; Dovzhenko's Arsenal; Preminger's Daisy Kenyon; Bresson's L'Argent; Eisenstein's Strike; and Melville's Le Doulos.

Monograph

Trainspotting

Trainspotting (BFI Film Classics)

2nd Edition, Bloomsbury/British Film Institute, 2021 (1st Edition 2002)

Abstract

In 1996 "Trainspotting" was the biggest thing in British culture. Brilliantly and aggressively marketed it crossed into the mainstream despite being a black comedy set against the backdrop of heroin addiction in Edinburgh. Produced by Andrew MacDonald, scripted by John Hodge and directed by Danny Boyle, the team behind "Shallow Grave" (1994), "Trainspotting" was an adaptation of Irvine Welsh's barbed novel of the same title. The film is crucial for understanding British culture in the context of devolution and the rise of "Cool Britannia". Murray Smith unpicks the processes that led to the film's enormous success. He isolates various factors - the film's eclectic soundtrack, its depiction of Scottish identity, its attitude to deprivation, drugs and violence, its traffic with American cultural forms, its synthesis of realist and fantastic elements, and its complicated relationship to "heritage" - that make "Trainspotting" such a vivid document of its time.

Monograph, publications

Film, Art, and the Third Culture

Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film

Published with Oxford University Press, 2017

Abstract

In the mid-1950s C.P. Snow began his campaign against the 'two cultures' - the debilitating divide, as he saw it, between traditional 'literary intellectual' culture, and the culture of the sciences, urging in its place a 'third culture' which would draw upon and integrate the resources of disciplines spanning the natural and social sciences, the arts and the humanities. Murray Smith argues that, with the ever-increasing influence of evolutionary theory and neuroscience, and the pervasive presence of digital technologies, Snow's challenge is more relevant than ever.

Working out how the 'scientific' and everyday images of the world 'hang' together is no simple matter. In Film, Art, and the Third Culture, Smith explores this question in relation to the art, technology, and science of film in particular, and to the world of the arts and aesthetic activity more generally. In the first part of his book, Smith explores the general strategies and principles necessary to build a 'third cultural' or naturalized approach to film and art - one that roots itself in an appreciation of scientific knowledge and method. Smith then goes on to focus on the role of emotion in film and the other arts, as an extended experiment in the 'third cultural' integration of ideas on emotion spanning the arts, humanities and sciences. While acknowledging that not all of the questions we ask are scientific in nature, Smith contends that we cannot disregard the insights wrought by taking a naturalized approach to the aesthetics of film and the other arts.

Katherine Thomson‐Jones

Published in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 76, Issue 3.

"Murray Smith's new book offers an elaboration and defense of scientifically informed theorizing about the arts and in particular film. Interestingly, this is also a defense of philosophical naturalism applied to humanistic film theory. Smith is ideally placed to provide such a defense, since he has an insider's knowledge and understanding of both the world of film theory and the world of philosophy. Any review of Smith's book is likely to be written by someone less ideally placed, a citizen in only one of these worlds and a mere tourist in the other. That this particular review is written by a philosopher is important to note. As a philosopher, and specifically as a philosophical aesthetician, I propose that Smith's book has to convince me of far less than if I were, say, a psychoanalytic film theorist. As Smith points out at the beginning of the book, naturalism is the long‐dominant methodology in philosophy in general, although he also claims naturalism has only recently risen to prominence in philosophical aesthetics. By contrast, naturalism is “virtually unknown in art and film theory” (p. 21). This raises an intriguing question about the intended audience for the book. If you ask the author (as I have done), he will insist that he wrote Film, Art, and the Third Culture for aestheticians. But there is fairly strong evidence in the book to suggest that the target audience is the film theorist and not the philosopher. On the one hand, the diverse methods of film theory are not described and analyzed in the book, only some of the basic assumptions underlying those methods. Smith cannot assume that philosophers know what film theorists do, but he can assume film theorists’ familiarity with their own practices, such that he does not need to point out to the film‐theory audience that their existing practices diverge from those of naturalism. On the other hand, Smith provides exegesis of philosophical problems and views and is careful to link his ideas with key figures in the history of philosophy or within contemporary debates. This feels like important contextualizing work for readers outside philosophy."