ABSTRACTS AND CONTRIBUTORS
THE PHILOSOPHY OF FILM AND FILM AS PHILOSOPHY
Tom McClelland
Abstract
There are two respects in which the medium of film and the discipline of philosophy intersect. First, the philosophy of film asks philosophical questions about the nature of film. Second, the notion of film as philosophy (FAP) proposes that films themselves can contribute to a range of philosophical debates. FAP raises some troubling conceptual problems. How is it possible for film to contribute to philosophical debate? And, if it is possible, why should we turn to film for those contributions rather than to traditional academic sources? I address these problems with a “Socratic Model” of the role of film in philosophical debate. I argue that the representational limitations of motion pictures are compatible with film acting as a “midwife” for philosophical insights in its audience. Furthermore, where a film facilitates insights into the philosophy of film, I argue that it can be better positioned to prompt those realisations than an academic text. I put this model into practice with an account of the philosophical value of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, which invites its audience to consider moral and epistemic issues surrounding the activity of film viewing.
Keywords
Film as philosophy, Voyeurism, Hitchcock, Socrates, Thought-experiments
Tom McClelland is a DPhil student at the University of Sussex. He is currently writing a thesis on the “Hard Problem” of consciousness, which develops a Neo-Russellian account of the metaphysical status of conscious experience. His first paper in the philosophy of film explored the relevance of Being John Malkovich (1999) to the metaphysics of mind. He warmly welcomes any thoughts from those wishing to discuss film and philosophy.
LAYERING IMAGES, THWARTING FABLES:
DELEUZE, RANCIÈRE AND THE ALLEGORIES OF CINEMA
Agustin Zarzosa
Abstract
This essay evaluates Jacques Rancière’s apparently devastating critique of Gilles Deleuze’s film philosophy. In “From One Image to Another,” Rancière offers two arguments about Deleuze’s distinction between the movement-image and the time-image. First, Rancière questions whether this distinction could correspond to the historical distinction between classical and modern cinema. Second, Rancière claims that this distinction remains allegorical to the extent that Deleuze derives it from film fables.
I claim that Rancière’s arguments involve a perspective foreign to Deleuze’s ontology. Rancière’s first argument overlooks that Deleuze evokes history to explain not a development in the natural history of images but our lack of belief in the action-image. Rancière’s second argument relies on the assumption that fable and image entertain a dialectical—rather than an expressive—relationship. In evaluating Rancière’s criticism of Deleuze, I offer an alternative account of these two apparent contradictions in Deleuze’s film philosophy.
Keywords
Film fables, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Rancière, Movement-image, Time-image
Agustin Zarzosa is assistant professor of Cinema Studies at Purchase College, SUNY. He received his Ph.D. in Film and Television at UCLA. His essays have appeared in New Review of Film and Television Studies, Scope, Colloquy and Discourse. His book Captive Affects, Elastic Sufferings: Redefining Melodrama in Film and Television is forthcoming from Lexington Books.
THE TWILIGHT OF THE INDEX
Temenuga Trifonova
Abstract
The “digital turn” has prompted a renewed interest in the relationship between film and photography reflected in a return to questions of indexicality and a rethinking of medium specificity away from the idea of medium as a material or physical support. This paper explores the growing ambivalence surrounding the notion of indexicality as it manifests itself in contemporary “cinematic” photography (Barbara Probst, Uta Barth, and Jeff Wall), which, I argue, imposes a time of reading by means of self-reference that exposes a single moment’s difference from itself (Probst), by means of extending the present moment into a “long now” (Uta), or by means of enlarging the scale of the image and narrativizing it (Wall). “Cinematic” photography seeks to reclaim the cinematic within the photographic from within the twilight of indexicality: rather than putting us in a deep historical relation with time, it self-consciously reflects on indexicality, automatism, and duration.
Keywords
Cinematic, Indexicality, Medium specificity, Photography, Time
Temenuga Trifonova is Assistant Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at York University, Toronto. She is the author of European Film Theory (Routledge, 2008) and The Image in French Philosophy (Rodopi, 2007). Her articles have appeared (or are forthcoming) in CTheory, Studies in European Cinema, Studies in Eastern European Cinema, Cineaste, Film and Philosophy, CineAction, Rivista di Estetica, Space and Culture, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory, Quarterly Journal of Film and Video, Scope, Kinema, Postmodern Culture, Senses of Cinema, among other, and in several edited collections.
SEMIOTIC IMAGES
Flore Chevaillier
Abstract
Julia Kristeva’s work on cinema has generated inquiries focusing on the figures of the Abject and feminine bodies. Yet, these inquiries do not emphasize Kristeva’s conception of the Semiotic as a part of filmic signifying processes, and thus narrow the Kristevan field of studies in film. In this essay, I undertake her Semiotic model in relation to an avant-garde film, Calendar (1993) by Atom Egoyan, and a traditional Hollywood movie, Jurassic Park (1993) by Steven Spielberg, to expand Kristevan interpretations of film. Both films ask questions about aesthetic contemplation and about the consumption of images, thereby commenting on the nature of the viewer’s role while featuring semiotic moments. In Egoyan and Spielberg’s works, the Semiotic reaffirms some of the symbolic messages, but also disrupts their order, which allows critics to address matters of pleasure and commodification in more complete and complex ways.
Keywords
Atom Egoyan, Julia Kristeva, Semiotic, Steven Spielberg
Flore Chevaillier teaches writing and literature at Central State University. Her research projects have focused on French theory and contemporary American culture and fiction. She is currently at work on a book project entitled The Body of Writing, which examines readers’ experience of sensuality in their engagement with the language of fiction. She is also working on a collection of interviews with formally innovative American novelists. Her essays have appeared in Journal of Modern Literature, Critique, Literature Compass, and European Journal of American Studies.
“BIOPOLITICS ON SCREEN”:
AERNOUT MIK’S MOVING-IMAGE INSTALLATIONS
Gabriella Calchi-Novati
Abstract
In this paper I propose that the moving-image installations Vacuum Room (2005), Scapegoats (2006), Training Ground (2006), and the most recent Shifting Sitting (2011), produced by Dutch artist Aernout Mik, are performative instances of current biopolitical concerns. These video installations represent what is supposed, and, more crucially, is always expected to be unrepresentable, namely what Zygmunt Bauman calls “constant uncertainty”, which can be considered one of the by-products of biopolitics. It is because of this uncertainty that we feel hopeless in relation to the political status quo and we are made believe, as Bauman contends, “that everything can happen but nothing can be done”. I argue that these works, when considered “as-philosophy”, or “philosophy-in-motion”, function as a series of conceptual paradigms that illustrate the main thesis of this paper, namely, that these very same installations, seen through Giorgio Agamben’s philosophical lens, are in fact biopolitics on screen.
Keywords
Giorgio Agamben, Biopolitics, Aernout Mik, Performativity, Video installation
Gabriella Calchi-Novati received a BA magna cum laude in Letters and Philosophy and an MA with honours in Public Relations and Corporate Communication from Universita' Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, Italy. She also received an MPhil in Irish Drama and Film from the Drama Department, Trinity College Dublin, where she is completing her doctoral research, and where she also lectures in Performance Studies and Critical Theory. While her work on contemporary theatre has been published in international journals such as Theatre Research International and About Performance; her more recent work, investigating the interconnections between biopolitics and performance, has appeared in academic publications such as Performance Research and Performance Paradigm; as well as in edited collections.
PARA UMA TEORIA DO CLICHÉ
Leonor Areal
Abstract
We call cliché an image whose shape is repeated and therefore becomes recognizable. Films live upon clichés and create clichés — simple images that are easily retained. Clichés are essential forms of perception and cognition, like gestalt. The cliché is a mixture of an image, an idea and an emotion.
The aim of this essay is to research and define what is a cliché and also to demonstrate its importance inside the process of film semiotics. Could we say that a cliché is a visual sign? This theory presents the hypothesis that — for cognition reasons — cliché is the embryo of a cultural sign, which could be developed inside a semiotic theory of film.
Keywords
Cliché, Cinema, Gestalt, Semiotics, Stylistics
Leonor Areal was awarded a PhD in Communication Sciences, specializing in Film, in 2009 by the New University of Lisbon, with a thesis entitled Um País Imaginado: Ficções do Real no Cinema Português, already published by Edições 70. She has directed various documentaries, including Fora da Lei (2006), prizewinner at doclisboa. She teaches at the School of Fine Art and Design of the Polytechnic Institute of Leiria. At the moment, she is developing a post-doctoral research project on censorship in Portuguese cinema.
TÉCNICAS CINEMATOGRÁFICAS E ACTOS MENTAIS:
THE PHOTOPLAY DE HUGO MÜNSTERBERG
Teresa Pedro
Abstract
This paper analyses Münsterberg’s The Photoplay in the light of the relation between mind and film, aiming to clarify the parallel between mental acts and cinematographic techniques such as it is drawn by the author. It criticises the interpretation of this relation as an “analogy”, stressing that the term used by Münsterberg to characterize this relation is not “analogy”, but “objectivation”. In this context, it is argued that in determining what the “objectivation” of mental processes in cinematographic techniques in The Photoplay means, the principal aim of the book should be remembered: the defense of the aesthetic character of film. In conclusion, Münsterberg’s goal is not, as suggested by Noël Carroll, to elucidate the function of cinematographic techniques through an analogy with mental processes, but to show that the distinctive aesthetics of film relies on the production of the perception of a world structured by mental acts.
Keywords
Aesthetics, Analogy, Mind, Objectivation, Perception
Teresa Pedro was awarded a PhD in Philosophy by the Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV). She is now a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for Philosophy of Language of the New University of Lisbon and at the Center for Knowledge Research of the Berlin Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on German idealism, G. W. F. Hegel, F. W. J. Schelling, and at the moment on the cinematographic perception of space and time.
OTHER CONTRIBUTORS
Iván Villarmea Álvarez has one BA in Journalism and another one in Contemporary History from the University of Santiago de Compostela, where he was also awarded an MA in Art History with a dissertation on Pedro Costa’s cinema. He now teaches at the University of Zaragosa, where is part of the research group Cinema, Culture and Society, and is writing a doctoral thesis on documentary cinema. He has collaborated with several Galician publications as film critic and is a member of the Association of Moving Image Researchers (AIM) and of the European Network of Cinema Studies (NECS).
Mauro Carbone is Full Professor of Aesthetics at Université “Jean Moulin”- Lyon 3 e co-director of the journal Chiasmi International: Publication trilingue autour de la pensée de Merleau-Ponty. Among his more recent publications are Proust et les idées sensibles (Vrin, 2008) and La chair des images : Merleau-Ponty entre peinture et cinéma (Vrin, 2011).
Paulo Cunha is a researcher at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of the Twentieth Century of the University of Coimbra. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Coimbra with a thesis on New Portuguese Cinema (1949-1980). Currently, he works as a researcher in the Cinema and Audiovisual Program of Guimarães 2012 - European Cultural Capital. He is a founding member and director of the Association of Moving Image Researchers (AIM) and is the film programmer of Bacalhau Cinema Clube.
Susana Nascimento Duarte is a doctoral candidate in Communication Sciences, specializing in Film, at the New University of Lisbon. Her PhD thesis is titled The Figural in Cinema: Articulations and Disjunctions of the Seeable and the Sayable. She is also a researcher and a doctoral fellow of the Institute for Philosophy of Language, associated to the project Film and Philosophy: Mapping an Encounter. She collaborates with the magazine Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image as Interviews Editor. She is Assistant professor at the School of Fine Art and Design of the Polytechnic Institute of Leiria since 2001, where she teaches Picture Theory, Audiovisual Analysis and Introduction to Video.
William Brown is a Lecturer in Film at Roehampton University. He has published articles and chapters on a number of topics. He has forthcoming essays on cognitive neuropsychology and various aspects of film, including editing, colour and acting. He is the co-editor of Deleuze and Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2011). And he is the author of Supercinema: Film and the Digital Age (forthcoming with Berghahn).
