Film-Philosophy
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Introduction: On Stanley Cavell
No full textIntroduction to Special Issue on Stanley Cavell, Film-Philosophy, Vol. 18 (2014)
Left-over Spaces: The Cinema of the Dardenne Brothers
No full textThe object of this study is the presence and the operation of space in the films of the Dardenne brothers. In this paper, we will examine three films - Rosetta, The Child and The Silence of Lorna - and present the argument that they depict an original account of the contemporary European city as a totality (in this case an eastern Belgian steel town). The construction of the characters, their relationships, and the moral implications of their actions are usually the most discussed aspect of the Dardennes' cinema. Instead, we want to shift focus to the city, focusing on its concrete, visceral materiality. The aim of this paper is to chart out the leaden landscape of these films, by tracing the movements of the protagonists in two particular kinds of recurring spaces: the woods that lie next to motorways in Rosetta and The Silence of Lorna, and the motorways that feature prominently in The Child. Even though these spaces are the left-over spaces of the city, cut out and discarded from the inner spaces of the city, they are still heavily inscribed and symbolic sites. Not only do they move the plot forward and are expressive of the characters that inhabit them, they also engage in a sustained, though understated, political critique
Internal Needs, Endoxa and the Truth: An Aristotelian Approach to the Popular Screenplay
No full textRobert McKee, in his widely-esteemed screenwriting manual, Story, speaks of storytelling in general, and the screenplay in particular, as 'the creative demonstration of truth.' But what could it mean to think of the screenplay as a 'demonstration,' that is, as an argument? In this article I explore this question, taking my cue from McKee's own description of screenplay narrative as 'dramatized dialectical debate.' McKee's reference to dialectic suggests a connection to the dialectical inquiries in Aristotle's major treatises, especially the dialectical inquiry into the nature of human happiness found in the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics. I argue for an analogy between this dialectical inquiry in Aristotle's ethics, and the dialectical trajectory of popular screenplays. Such an analogy helps us understand how films do work as kinds of argument, arguments that aim at the truth of what it means for human beings to achieve their good
Shooting for Dead Time in Gus Van Sant's Elephant
No full textIn Elephant, director Gus Van Sant dramatises a massacre at a suburban American high school in order to examine narrative cinema's ethical capacity to respond to that which resists being framed as a meaningful event. In the film, this stubborn stuff is experience shot through with contingency. Van Sant depicts acts of violence that are indiscriminate and, at best, ambiguously motivated, as well as school-day activities that appear coincidental and insignificant. This essay argues that the director aims to screen contingency to mount a critique of conventional narrative film's terror of contingency, its anxious drive to convert all cinematic time to good, signifying use. It also argues that Van Sant complicates or crosses up this aim by constructing a self-reflexive text attuned to the inherent irresponsibility in assuming that radical contingency's dead time could be fully and faithfully animated on screen. While the film camera and a still camera used by a student photographer in the film shoot people with the ostensible aim of capturing contingency in all its otherness, both projects are, at the same time, linked, in complex ways, to the student killers who shoot people with the aim of eliminating all otherness. The film's recognition of its own drive to plot in a deadly fashion thus illustrates Van Sant's profound sensitivity to the challenges of responding responsibly to a time of terror and, more broadly, to the terrors of time
Mimesis Reconsidered: Adorno and Tarkovsky contra Habermas
No full textIn this paper, I offer a reconsideration of the complex concept of mimesis, as it is deployed in the critical theory of Theodor W. Adorno, which, I argue, provides some interesting and original avenues through which we may interpret some of the infinitely engaging if enigmatic films of Andrei Tarkovsky. The paper is divided into two parts. In the first, I explore Adorno's development and usage of the concept of mimesis, as well as the latter's fall into disfavour since Habermas's influential 'communicative turn'. In the second part, I undertake to read some of Tarkovsky's work in an Adornian vein, with the hope of reconfiguring mimesis as a valuable and fruitful concept in understanding the somatic and extra-discursive elements within communication. What I call Tarkovsky's 'mimetic method' can be seen to follow Adorno's epistemological principle of the 'preponderance of the object', while testifying to the mimetic potential of non-discursive communication. In so doing, Tarkovsky's filmic work - with Adorno's critical theory - refutes the purely linguistic/discursive grounds of Habermasian communication. This implicit refutation works on two levels. It enacts forms of mimetic construction, at the first level, and calls forth acts of interpretation and mimetic reception, at the second. I argue that these features are in need of greater attention and elaboration. The works of Adorno and Tarkovsky, in my view, provide useful grounds for challenging and enhancing existing understandings of aesthetic and philosophic communication, by more fully appreciating their interconnectedness and complementarity
The Facts Before Our Eyes: Wittgenstein and the Film Noir Investigator
No full textThis paper discusses the methods of the investigators in film noir. They are different than those employed by the classic detective of mystery and crime fiction, which involve observation, the collection of clues, logical inference, and are generally modeled on the methods of the scientist. I illuminate the methods of the noir investigator by comparing them to those applied by Ludwig Wittgenstein to philosophical problems. Both the noir investigator and Wittgenstein deal with problems that are intractable to the methods of logic and science. Wittgenstein thought that philosophical problems could not be solved using these methods; I show that the problems that typically confront the noir investigator are similarly resistant to them. Wittgenstein and the noir investigator model alternative methods for solving epistemic problems and in doing so remind us of the limits of science and logic
Film Noir as Point de Capiton: Double Indemnity, Structure and Temporality
No full textReading noir and Lacan together can establish a structural corollary between the function of the signifier 'noir' in film criticism and the retroactive function of the point de capiton in Lacan's theory of language. Furthermore, at a narrative level, the function of the point de capiton can also be found in the retroactive constructions of film noir flashbacks. It is therefore possible to say that a retroactive 'noir temporality' is also the temporality of the Symbolic order. This article explores the way in which the signifier 'noir' enables the analysis of a certain type of 1940s Hollywood film, and how a noir film such as Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944) is concerned with the retroactive production of knowledge through narrative structure