Film-Philosophy
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Contrapuntal Close-up: The Cinema of John Cassavetes and the Agitation of Sense
No full textAccording to Jean-Luc Nancy the essential condition for the existence of sense is the 'otherness' of our being-together. For John Cassavetes being-together makes sense only there where it escapes sense.It will be shown that in fact that both propositions derive from a qualitative distance at the heart of our being-together. This qualitative distance triggers the circulation of sense and leaves sense always open. It is in this way that being-together responds of sense absolutely (responding to its content – the acquired meanings – and its structure – sense’s referentiality) by foreclosing any absolute sense, maintaining itself as it were as the moving horizon of sense.Â
Of Bastard Man and Evil Woman, or, the Horror of Sex
No full textLars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009) has often been described as a ‘gothic’, if not straightforwardly ‘horror’ movie. While this claim could easily be challenged with regard to strict genre definitions, it is doubtless the case that the film deals very explicitly with fear, first and foremost the female protagonist’s fear of herself, which is placed at the top of the so-called ‘pyramid of fear’ drawn by her therapist/wanna-be-Saviour partner. My opinion is that Antichrist perfectly displays the horrific effects of the direct embodiment, following a true love encounter, of the symbolic positions which Lacan associated with male and female sexuation. If human sexuality relies on the logic for which there is only one mythical man who is truly whole while every real woman is not wholly whole, what happens when He and She (the nameless protagonists of the movie) fully identify with such irreducible asymmetry between the sexes, its fundamental derailment from nature? They short-circuit the material singularity of a specific human animal with the abstract universality of gender. With the same move, they cannot overcome (or sublimate) the realisation that, in the female protagonist’s own words, woman is ‘evil’ – as long as she feels guilty of what man accuses her – and man is a ‘bastard’ – haunted by the phantasm of unifying purity which woman disrupts. Gynocide as male totalizing extermination of universal difference and genital self-mutilation as female reflexive hatred for the supposedly exceptional man mark the sadomasochistic extremes of the scene of the not-two, the frightening ob-scenity (o-skené), or off-representation, of human sexuality
Cristina Vatulescu (2010) Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film and the Secret Police in Soviet Times
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Charm and Strangeness: The Aesthetic and Epistemic Dimensions of Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein
No full textWittgenstein (1993), Derek Jarman’s biopic of the Austrian-born Cambridge philosopher is a fascinating – if perplexing – film. In equal measure aesthetic and didactic, its status is ambiguous, and not only because didacticism in the philosophy of art is often assumed to diminish aesthetic value. Nothing, however, of the film’s aesthetic is depreciated by the intention to instruct. Even if the objective was to teach, the film is also highly aestheticised. Composed of a series of richly theatrical set-pieces, Jarman’s film aspires to a painterly aesthetic.This paper examines the aesthetic and epistemic dimensions of Wittgenstein. The consensus among professional philosophers is that the film, while idiosyncratic and stylised, nevertheless says something important about Wittgenstein’s philosophy. It is as if he has used the project to innovate ways of translating Wittgenstein’s philosophy to aesthetic form. The resultant representational strategies are best understood with reference to the picture theory developed in Wittgenstein’s early philosophy. In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) Wittgenstein characterised the proposition as an articulation of elements that, by virtue of shared logical form, corresponds to the disposition of objects in a possible fact. Under Jarman’s direction, cinematic tableaux are transformed into propositions in the Wittgensteinian sense. In this film, therefore, Jarman has refined his cinematic process into what, following the picture theory, I have called tractarian montage. It is because the philosophy is embedded in the film as a structural component of its form (and not just presented didactically) that Wittgenstein seems oddly right to Wittgensteinian viewers. The aesthetic and epistemic consequences that result from Jarman’s approach are precisely what make the film philosophically interesting – indeed they provide a valuable opportunity to reflect not only on the development of Wittgenstein’s philosophy but also, uniquely, on the relationship between his philosophy and his life
