Film Theory and Philosophy

By adminEdited Collection

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.