Film-Philosophy
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Timothy Corrigan, ed. (2012) Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader. 2nd Edition
No full textHsiu-Chuang Deppman (2010) Adapted for the Screen: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Fiction and Film
No full textI'm Glad I'm Not Me: Subjective Dissolution, Schizoanalysis and Post-Structuralist Ethics in the Films of Todd Haynes
No full textThis article reads a selection of films by Todd Haynes - Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), Velvet Goldmine (1998) and I'm Not There (2007) - through the post-structuralist lens of Deleuzian theorising about the self as a networked singularity rather than an essential subject. The overall aim of the piece is to consider Haynes' films as artefacts that require the participatory audience to be involved in their making. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of the schizo is addressed to investigate how a schizo consciousness can be opened by the Event of viewing art that uses incommensurable extremes of meta-textual referentiality. Further to this productive opening, I examine how such post-structuralist ontology can necessitate ethical concern. I conclude that Todd Haynes' film-making is specifically schizoanalytical in that it opens instances wherein the non-essential non-subject can encounter the vertigo of falling away from representation. I contend that this experience and the post-structuralist world view conveyed through it, is radically ethical because it resists the annihilation of possibility that is inherent to essentialism
Throne of Blood and the Metaphysics of Tragedy
No full textThe aim of this paper is to explore the metaphysical foundations of Throne of Blood, Kurosawa's reworking of Shakespeare's Macbeth. Using Hegel's theory of tragedy, I develop the distinction between Greek and modern tragedy, with their differing bases in ethical and subjective freedom. I then show that Noh drama also includes a very different metaphysical account, stemming from its theoretical roots in Buddhism. I then use these three differing accounts (Greek, modern and Noh drama) to explore the effect of Kurosawa's use Noh aesthetics in Throne of Blood on the metaphysical ground of the film itself
Khatereh Sheibani (2011) The Poetics of Iranian Cinema: Aesthetics and Modernity After the Revolution
No full textHomeopathic Repetition and Memories of Underdevelopment: The Dialectic of Subjective Experience and Objective Historical Forces
No full textThis paper offers a reading of Guttierez Alea's film Memories of Underdevelopment (Memorias del Subdesarrollos, 1968) using Jameson's notion of the 'homeopathic neutralization' of repetition through its very usage in the modernist work of art to assuage the alienation of industrial society. Before the reading of the film begins, however, I explore the motif of repetition in the work of a handful of the most important thinkers of the newly industrial society. I mobilize their insights on different levels of being: sociological, biological, psychological, and aesthetic, in order to understand how Alea uses repetition of form and content to construct the film's protagonist as a metaphor for the counter-revolution. I conclude with thoughts about the heterogeneity of communist states, and the dialectical relationship between high culture and popular culture. I propose that this relationship is better seen as a continuum with two extreme poles, rather than as a binary switch
Nietzsche and Bad Conscience on Mosquito Coast
No full textConscience plays a crucial role in identifying, applying, and initiating actions chosen as right or wrong. In this paper, we pursue an answer to the question, Can bad conscience, as Nietzsche defines it, be overcome to form the ground for the creation of good conscience? Nietzsche identifies Christianity as the source of that which has to be overcome to help re-define human existence--overcoming self-destructive, bad conscience. To understand whether someone could (or even should) overcome and redefine his or her existence, that is create good conscience like Nietzsche's Ubermensch, it is useful to consider the struggles of Allie Fox, the hero in Peter Weir's movie Mosquito Coast (1986)
Shawn C. Bean (2008) The First Hollywood: Florida and the Golden Age of Silent Filmmaking
No full textThe Closure of the 'Gold Window': From 'Camera-Eye' to 'Brain-Screen'
No full textThis essay explores the correspondence between cinema and money through an investigation of what I call the 'financialization of the image.' Drawing from the tradition of psychoanalytic film criticism and the cinematic ontology of Gilles Deleuze, it argues that the 'camera-eye' and the 'brain-screen' are distinct modes of organizing cinematic perception in capital. Furthermore, it argues that Gilles Deleuze's understanding of the brain-screen is the most adequate mode of thinking of the organization of subjective vision within control societies and the financialization of life itself
The Philosophical Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes: The Silent Films of Stan Brakhage
No full textThe qualities of great works of art, their profundity, their insight into the human condition, are epitomised in Brakhage's films, which are, I argue, from the beginning related to and inseparable from a philosophical attitude toward existence. His films emerge out of an authentic 'existential' mode of attunement, a mind-set wherein the potential for human transcendence is framed and filmed within its intractable relationship to death, the most extreme possibility of non-existence. Brakhage not only views existence in a philosophical manner, beyond this, he engages in philosophical inquiry in a fundamental way through the medium of film. The films arise from and respond to what Karl Jaspers views as the ultimate source of philosophy, namely, 'the will to authentic communication,' which embraces 'wonder leading to knowledge, doubt leading to certainty, forsakenness leading to the self.' This amounts to the philosophical struggle to arrive at a sense of metaphysical coherence and existential familiarity, i.e., the precarious undertsanding of belonging to the world in communion with others. This essay seeks to elucidate and detail, through a series of interpretive gestures, the philosophical themes present to Brakhage's silent films by way of a reading that emerges from the phenomenological-ontological tradition in philosophy. In doing so, I hope to interpret Brakhage's filmic art as conveying a legitimate source of human understanding, which contributes to our interpreting and discoursing about the world and our lives in new and revelatory ways