Film-Philosophy
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Fran Mason (2012) Hollywood's Detective: Crime Series in the 1930s and 1940s from the Whodunnit to Hard-boiled Noir
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Anti-Christ: Tragedy, Farce or Game?
No full textLars von Trier's movies can be seen as a series of iterations in an infinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma. After testing the logic of this game, at the core of which is the dilemma of cooperation or conflict, at the middle level at which an individual confronts a community up till Dogville, he has transposed the game to the level of social systems in Manderlay and the level of the minimal social unit, the couple (or rather, the failed family) in Anti-Christ. The story is the Oedipus myth reversed and fit into the logic of the prisoner's dilemma which is, one could argue, the mathematical model of a Hobbesian world view. In that sense it could be called Von Trier's Anti-Oedipus.Moreover, this is the first film in which Von Trier fully embraces digital technologies. It is as if he as a filmmaker acts like the male protagonist in Anti-Christ, and assumes the role of the Anti-Christ in order to become a Savior, since digital technologies and special effects are aligned with 'evil' in this movie
Cinematic Incorporation: Literature in My Life Without Me
No full textThis essay considers the relationship between literature and film through a reading of Isabel Coixet's film My Life Without Me (2003). The first half of the essay explores how two recent theorisations of the term incorporation allow us to read, on the one hand, the film's relationship to Nanci Kincaid's short story 'Pretending the Bed is a Raft' (1997) in particular and to literature in general and, on the other, the narrative consequences of the protagonist Ann's decision to keep her terminal illness a secret. In the first instance, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin's definition of incorporation in Remediation (2000) helps explain how the film does not adapt the short story upon which it is supposedly based, but in fact only repurposes it. Literary aspects of the film's mise-en-scène, plot and imagery, however, signal My Life Without Me's incorporation of literature. In the second instance, the essay explores how Jacques Derrida's theory of incorporation's role in mourning helps the viewer understand the film's plot development out of Ann's secret. In the second half of the paper, Leo Bersani's idea of impersonal intimacy is developed into a theory of literature. The conclusion posits that impersonal intimacy defines the literary in contrast to cinema's tendency to full disclosure
Films Blancs: Luminosity in the Films of Michael Mann
No full textThis paper is a study of the place of luminosity in the films of Michael Mann and the way in which luminosity is not a tool of illumination but a radiance that signals the bodying forth of appearances. The event of luminosity in Mann's films is an attempt to re-imagine the conventional value structures that create a link between film and indexicality, as if his admiration for the photoreal effects of film belies an insistence that the advenience of an appearance (a central conceptual category I elaborate) is what eventuates when objects ingress between reference and expression, between realism and dream. By using the most advanced high definition digital cameras to film his nightscapes - and his movies more generally - Mann defeats the illuminatory and transcriptual demands of a filmic iconography that rely on the power of light to tether a representation to a thing in the world. In doing so, however, he neither refuses nor rejects the power of representation as such. His picturing of luminous nightscapes in cities, for instance, transubstantiates the objecthood of urban spaces so that the iridescence of the lights makes the city feel at once vivid and unlike any object that might exist in the world. I conclude that Mann's commitment to filming luminosity presents a problem to the dominant methodologies for the analysis of aesthetics and politics that offer a moral theory of the image. Michael Mann's films, finally, offer an alternative to the moral theory of the image: a politics of appearances rooted in the experience of advenience
Black Noir Signifies More Than Just a 'Simple Parallel': A Response to Brian E. Butler
No full textThis is a response to: Brian E. Butler (2010) ‘Blackness is Noir: Flory's Philosophical Investigation of the Black Noir Genre in Film’, a review of Dan Flory (2008) Philosophy, Black Film, Film Noir. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press.http://www.film-philosophy.com/index.php/f-p/article/view/195/19
