This article explores mainstream audience reactions concerning race and how they intersect with late 1950s Westerns known as the Ranown cycle. Synthesizing ideas from critical philosophy of race, philosophy of film, cognitive film theory, and philosophy of emotion, I analyze how these films elicit racialized reactions of sociomoral disgust toward Native American characters. Because such responses are not ordinarily processed through higher-level forms of cognition, I argue that these embodied, affective, implicit reactions are key to understanding how films like those (...) in the Ranown cycle convey feelings, perspectives, and ideas concerning race, with important implications for ideology as well as philosophizing about film. (shrink)

This paper explores a philosophical argument about the use of natural light in films. I argue that directors use sunlight as a visual metaphor to induce a sublime experience from the viewer to elevate the narrative. While it is more efficient in terms of time management and finances to use electric lights, sunlight creates a successful emotional effect on the viewer placing them in contemplation of the relationship between humanity, nature, and humility. Essentially, I am concerned with what it is (...) that the capturing of sunlight accomplishes in these works of art that a light bulb can’t. In this paper, I consider how natural light is used to guide the viewer’s eye and how natural light makes us feel. I believe motion pictures are the perfect artistic medium to explore our emotional understanding of the sun as it not only captures objects in motion in the light of the sun it also captures the sun itself in motion. My intention is to provide a better understanding of the powerful psychological effect that the use of sunlight has on the viewer of a film. (shrink)

It has been argued that an adequate feminist response to sexist pornography demands not just efforts to eradicate sexist beliefs, but also aesthetic counter-intervention at the level of taste. This view motivates support for feminist pornography. This paper takes the feminist pornography suggestion seriously by unpacking difficulties for the project. I begin by spelling out two views about what makes feminist pornography feminist: the ‘content view,’ and the ‘context view,’ and discuss what I take to be existing arguments for the (...) latter. I then present two objections to the context view: the first focuses on how we characteristically interact with pornography (as a masturbatory aid), the second challenges the value of authenticity upon which much feminist pornography rests. If these arguments are correct, then there are serious flaws with feminist pornography as it is commonly conceived. I close with a brief suggestion of an alternative approach rooted in feminist solidarity. (shrink)

The cinema of Martin Scorsese has been analysed in connection with a wide range of themes and issues. In this paper, through a film-philosophical analysis, we aim to demonstrate how his filmography produces storyworlds pervaded by a tension similar to the one Søren Kierkegaard expressed in his existentialist writings. Indeed, one of the tenets of film-philosophy is that audio-visual media generate, in an affective and experiential manner, complex moral and ethical systems and existential viewpoints with which viewers interact in a (...) direct and creative way. Empathising with the self-sacrifice of the unlikely martyr played by Jake LaMotta or feeling the collapsing certainties of a missionary in seventeenth-century Japan are thus occasions to encounter particular conceptual personae. These characters embody specific iterations of Kierkegaardian knights of faith: existentialist figures whose doom takes in ambiguous film ecologies where the desire for wholesomeness constantly clashes with mortality and finitude. (shrink)

This article explores a distinctive representational strategy used in stop-motion animation: the object substitution. Using as its central example a children’s TV episode in which brushes stand in for dogs, it explains how this strategy produces a complex relationship between depiction and representation. The analysis highlights the pragmatic underpinnings of various theories of pictorial and cinematic representation, arguing that, in a substitution, depicted elements constitute explicatures and represented ones implicatures. Connecting this strategy to humans’ capacity for pareidolia (seeing things in (...) other things), it contends that an object substitution achieves its effects—and reconciles its marked incongruities—by prompting viewers to pleasurably reverse-engineer the far-fetched projective imagining that motivated its use. This process, which is a form of conceptual blending, is based on relations that are neither straightforwardly iconic nor purely arbitrary. (shrink)

In her essay “The Idea of Perfection,” Iris Murdoch argues that sustained attention directed towards another can result in a person’s moral improvement by getting them to have a more accurate view of the other. In this essay, I argue that the award-winning film My Octopus Teacher illustrates Murdoch’s view and corrects some of its shortcomings. It illustrates Murdoch’s claim by showing how one of the filmmaker’s sustained attention directed at an octopus results not only in an alternation in the (...) filmmaker’s view of the cephalopod but also transforms his life by making him more open to others. Because the central relationship in the film is one between a human being and a cephalopod, the film also corrects the anthropocentric bias in Murdoch’s account by showing that a human being can have a transformative relationship with a creature as alien appearing as an octopus. (shrink)