Through a discussion of two key American films of the 1940s and 1950s – Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and John Ford's The Searchers (1956) – this article situates the breakdown of classical cinema, or what Gilles Deleuze calls the “crisis of the action-image”, in relation to the critique of whiteness and the family. Focusing on the figure of the “dweller on the threshold” within these two films, the article shows how this individual's deprivation of action is tied (...) to their status simultaneously as protective of and estranged from the white family. Once whiteness and the family become explicit objects of protection, the myth of their naturalness and goodness is rendered problematic, and in these films, the protector themselves must be excluded in order for the myth to function. Drawing on accounts of the invisibility and dehistoricisation entailed in whiteness in the work of Sara Ahmed, Jacques Derrida, Toni Morrison and Frank B. Wilderson III, the article considers how, in these films, the protection of the white family reveals its mythical status as an ideally ahistorical unit of civilisation. The very effort to protect this myth, these films show, amounts to its collapse. These films enact a deconstruction of the oppositions which constitute the civilisational myths that ground whiteness and return such myths to the moment of their historical institution. They reflect on the very process of erasure and forgetting that produces these myths, through a self-conscious interrogation of the cinematic process of the projection of images itself. Drawing on Deleuze's suggestion that modern cinema promises a new mode of belief in the world, the article argues that such a non-mythic belief can only be realised through an unmaking of whiteness, as a form of life which, being premised upon protection and immunity, denies life itself, and our living connection to the world. (shrink)

This article argues that the immediate critical responses to the blockbuster film Barbie (Greta Gerwig, 2023), which diverged along ideological lines, fail to account for the extent to which the film undercuts the very ideological divisions that sustain them. Rather than or in addition to presenting a left-wing or right-wing critique of contemporary gender roles, the film positions this contest within the vexed relationship between the ideal and the real. This metaphysical quandary is what propels the protagonists on a Buddhist-inspired (...) quest for authentic selfhood, a selfhood characterized by both the effacement of the discrete self (the Buddhist concept of anatman) and the eclipse of monumentalized cultural and commercial idols, like Barbie, that organize and disseminate ideology. (shrink)

Analysing Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013), this article provides an overview of the importation of suture theory from psychoanalysis into film theory and Žižek’s revisiting of this theory, then bringing about a rapprochement between the concepts of suture and Malabou’s destructive plasticity, as expounded in her work The New Wounded. The forms of wounded subjectivity we find there are unable to stitch themselves into the illusory narratives needed to enable them to access a fixed sense of individual or shared (...) identity and enclose them in a subjectivity separated off from all else around. Here, on the contrary, alterity, the alien, is situated within. It is such a form of subjectivity, I argue, that we find in Glazer’s Under the Skin where this narrative plays out not only diegetically, as we witness the alien that has sutured itself inside a human envelope attempt and fail to articulate itself to an external narrative that remains inaccessible to it, but infratextually also. Indeed, ultimately this article suggests that Under the Skin can be read as a commentary on the viewing subject required by (and forms of subjectivity produced by) post-cinematic media forms that at first seem to operate according to a different logic to the cinematic syntax of classical cinema, but which may in fact require us to reconsider some of our assumptions with regard to all forms of cinematic subjectivity produced in the relations between spectator and screen. (shrink)

This article contends that, despite the naturalization of hypermediacy in everyday life, a tension persists between the proliferation of digital media and human phenomenal experience. Everyday phenomenal experience, in its delineation of a unified spatial field populated with bounded physical objects, exists in palpable tension with the subperceptual digital networks and data flows that underpin contemporary society and are indexed by aesthetics of hypermediacy. I contend that cinema, which simultaneously appeals to phenomenal experience and has itself become permeated by hypermediacy (...) and the related aesthetic tendency of post-continuity, is a key site for expressing this larger cultural tension. Furthermore, I propose that what I am calling the action mode – action cinema’s anxious articulation of the physical body’s limits and capacities – is ideally suited to making this tension not only seen but felt. The film Mile 22 (Peter Berg, 2018), by combining the action mode with an aesthetic and thematic exploration of extreme hypermediacy, exemplifies the action mode’s potential in this way. (shrink)

Terrence Malick’s 2019 film A Hidden Life explores the ethical and political problem of refusal as an act and utterance of “not doing” violence and injustice that is expected. The film offers a nuanced and poetic depiction of Austrian peasant Franz Jägerstätter (1907–1943), who refused to give an oath of loyalty to Hitler ( Führereid), and was subsequently imprisoned and executed under the Nazi laws criminalizing conscientious objection as an “offence of sedition.” We argue that Malick complicates the question of (...) what it means to rise in defiance against power by locating Jägerstätter’s refusal not in religious dogma or a position of righteousness, but depicting it as a lived experience infused with affect, hesitation and doubt. We analyze the ethics and politics of refusal in A Hidden Life, focusing on the ways in which Malick depicts the possibility of leading an ethical life in an authoritarian state. This possibility concerns, first, the question of what alternatives emerge from the negative gestures of noncompliance, withdrawal or refusal and the question of enduring and, second, undergoing suffering, rather than imposing it on others. Situating our reading of Malick’s film in a philosophical dialogue with Michel Foucault’s writings on revolt and with Hannah Arendt’s reflections on responsibility in a dictatorship, we argue that Malick’s philosophy of refusal encompasses both the negative registers of refusal and articulates its affirmative, relational and testimonial dimensions in relation to history. This is because Malick's Jägerstätter undertook a very specific act of refusal – that of refusing to “make others suffer” (and chose instead to suffer himself). We conclude by drawing attention to three key presences in the film; nature, children and the wife, Fani, who turn the negative power of refusal into an affirmative gesture of companionship, co-presence and witnessing. (shrink)

This article illuminates the open ending of Christopher Nolan's film Inception (2010) in light of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy. Drawing particularly on Nietzsche's notions of ascetic ideals and honest illusions, the article contends that Cobb's refusal to look at the spinning top can be seen not necessarily as his renunciation of autonomy but as his new attempt to affirm his existence and create meanings. Mal's tragic death has turned Cobb into an ascetic idealist who paradoxically resorts to self-torture to alleviate his (...) pain and suffering. Only when he sees the destructive power of his sense of guilt about Mal does he come to realize that what he really needs is not exactly the ability to distinguish the dream world from reality per se but the ability to make things seem and feel real – that is, in Nietzsche's words, honest illusions. Faced with the challenge to regain the capability to see and appreciate illusions as illusions without deceiving himself into believing that they are real, Cobb takes “a leap of faith” with Saito into the world to which he wishes to belong and finally embraces the moment of seeing his children's faces, which, fortunately for him, seem real – that is, “good” – enough. (shrink)

Since his debut feature The Return (2003), Andrey Zvyagintsev's films have drawn focus from film critics and theorists seeking to investigate a contextual analysis or the director's religious allusions. Hailed as the New Tarkovsky by some, a western-centric perspective has placed Zvyagintsev within the Russian canon from which he originates. However, in doing so, there has been a tendency to overlook a form and aesthetic that seeks to avoid these categorisations. By attempting to engage with his films independently from these (...) frameworks and from a purely humanist perspective of subjectivity, the depth of Zvyagintsev's cinema comes to the surface. We find that the metaphysical reflections of Zvyagintsev's films relate not only to the cinema and its artificial worlds, but also to the position of the human in the real world. Independent of a prior historical or religious perspective, this metaphysical relationship to Zvyagintsev's films focuses on the human and the human consciousness. This article will engage with Zvyagintsev's first two features, The Return (2003) and The Banishment (2007), considering metaphysical aphorisms of one of Zvyagintsev's constant reference points, Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili. This will allow us the opportunity to rethink the relations between cinematic form, the human and the consciousness. (shrink)

Despite striking parallels between their philosophies and artistic work, there have been no prior dedicated studies of the reinforcing ideas of Siegfried Kracauer and Andrei Tarkovsky. I contend with other interpreters that Kracauer’s philosophy of film is best understood as a form of revelationism, with strong sociological and ontological theses about the nature of modern psychological life and the medium specificity of film. Essentially, Kracauer felt that certain films which adhere to what he called “truly cinematic” content by depicting the (...) naturalistic “flow of life” have the potential to awaken in viewers a psychological reconnection to the concrete material world, in contrast to the experience of abstraction characteristic of modernity. Having presented Kracauer’s philosophy, I outline strong convergences in the philosophy and aesthetics of Tarkovsky, and illustrate these parallels through close analysis of Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker. In the third section of this article, I further explore the converging revelationist philosophies of Kracauer–Tarkovsky by confronting them with critiques which were levied by Theodor Adorno (against Kracauer) and Fredric Jameson (against Tarkovsky). The reconstructed debate between these four critic/practitioners touches on central issues for film criticism, including methodological approaches of ontology versus dialectics and the question of how to represent utopic impulses in cinema. (shrink)

This article will show how, through an expressionist style that references Gothic and noir cinema, Les Diaboliques (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955) mediates concepts found in contemporary post-war French existentialism, in particular the phenomenology of horror of Sartre, with whom the director had a personal association. It will examine how the experience of horror is presented as a conscious apprehension of the world as irrational and no longer conforming to deterministic and conventional order. Les Diaboliques asserts that horror results from a distorted (...) perception that has imbued the world with those qualities, and in this case, perception has been manipulated by the sadistic Other. The article will link this portrayal of horror to Les Diaboliques’ well-established influence on the development of the dominant 1960s and 1970s paranoid-psychological horror film and key figures like Alfred Hitchcock and William Castle, suggesting the ontological source of horror in these films as existential phenomenological in nature as opposed to exclusively being the result of psychosexual and familial repression, as is commonly posited by critics. (shrink)

This article draws out a potential encounter between Hegel and film studies. Following a line of thought instantiated by Theodor Adorno, it constructs a method of reading Hegel through cinematic formal analysis. In particular, the article argues that the speculative proposition should be thought through the structure of the dissolve. The speculative proposition is a sentence whose subject and predicate rest in uneasy relation to one another, and which is not a proposition of simple identity. Making use of a famous (...) example from The Phenomenology of Spirit, the article elaborates the confused position of the speculative proposition and demonstrates the necessity of explanatory tools that approach the matter obliquely. In the process of making this argument, other attempts to put dialectics and montage together (notably, Eisenstein’s) are situated in relation to the instructional potential of the dissolve. Close reading of a particular dissolve taken from Moby Dick (John Huston, 1956) demonstrates the isomorphism between the mechanism of Hegelian dialectic and this particular unit of film form. The article concludes by returning to a particular speculative proposition in light of the insights gleaned from formal analysis. (shrink)

This article articulates a dialogue between Werner Herzog’s films and Martin Heidegger’s philosophy to illuminate human dwelling. In the light of Heidegger’s ideas of dwelling, thrownness, they-self, authenticity, abyss and being-towards-death, I look into the abyss of society as represented by Herzog, considering dwelling with humans in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) and Into the Abyss (2011) as dwelling through language and dwelling in proximity to death. This article’s primary purpose is to redress society’s overly negative connotation as monstrous (...) and unhomely in Herzog and, against the predominant critical interpretations and Herzog’s self-commentary, discover the homely therein. Specifically, this film-philosophy dialogue will shed important light on both Herzog and Heidegger. Heidegger’s philosophical thought enables a creative and insightful reading of overlooked yet significant aesthetic forms in Herzog’s films: the motif of tears in Kaspar Hauser and the jump cuts and close-ups in Abyss. Meanwhile, Herzog’s films work out Heidegger’s paradoxical and etymological wordplay of the abyss that also grounds. Not only do the films affectively effectuate and interrogate the terror and promise of human dwelling in artistic terms, but Abyss also breaks the Heideggerian category of mortality and gestures towards Hannah Arendt’s idea of natality. (shrink)

This article brings Alain Badiou’s philosophy of love and truth into the consideration of the cinematic real. It argues that love has been overlooked in the discourse of the cinematic real and that love should be recuperated in and for cinema so that a version of the cinematic real informed by Badiou’s philosophy can emerge. Differing from the Althusserian–Lacanian concept of the real or reality, Badiou’s version of the cinematic real is infused with intensity and contingency; it accommodates love and (...) endorses cinephilia. For Badiou, the temporality of love and any truth-procedure is one of eternity descending into time, which can roughly be understood as an affective experience of sensing the presence of eternity in fleeting moments. Specifically, this article explores how Badiou’s truth manifests in cinema through a temporality of love using examples from Mauvais Sang (Leos Carax, 1986) and In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar Wai, 2000). (shrink)