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Philosophy of Film
Edited by Clotilde Torregrossa (University of St. Andrews)
About this topic
| Summary | "Philosophy of Film" is often used to describe a few different kinds of work. Two are most important. We should distinguish between philosophy in or through film, and the philosophy of or about film. When one does philosophy through film, one seeks to either illuminate some philosophical idea or to make progress on some philosophical issue through a discussion of a movie. One might even attribute the philosophical work to the film. We might call this philosophy in film. In contrast, the philosophy of film is the philosophy about film. It asks about the nature of film, our experience of it, how it works its magic on us, and what limitations it might have. The analytic philosophy of film is principally issue driven. One of the issues concerns the philosophical limits of film, whether philosophy in film is possible. This mid-level category is home to both kinds of work, philosophy through film and the philosophy of film. |
| Key works | Carroll's Philosophy of Motion Pictures and Gaut's A Philosophy of Cinematic Art are two leading monographs offering opposing views on a wide range of issue in the analytic philosophy of film. |
| Introductions | Livingston and Plantinga's Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film is by far the best source for survey articles on topics and figures in the area. Thomson-Jones's Aesthetics and Film provides a clear, brief introduction to several important topics in the area. |
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Related
Subcategories
Ontology of Film (85)
Audience Engagement in Film (83 | 22)
Genres of Film (148 | 6)
Philosophy Through Film (289)
Philosophy of Film, Misc (126)
Contents
6249 found
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Material to categorize
- Narrativism and Performativity in Absurda and Darkened Room.Kristina Sekrst - forthcoming - In Andrew M. Winters (ed.), A Critical Companion to David Lynch. Lexington Books.This chapter explores narrativism and performativity in David Lynch's short films Darkened Room and Absurda, focusing on how personal identity is constructed through storytelling. Lynch's films often blur the boundaries of identity, with narrativist theories suggesting that identity is shaped by the stories characters and others tell about themselves. The chapter examines Lynch's use of performative utterances, where speech acts alter reality, and how narrative power is central to identity formation. By analyzing these works, the chapter highlights the unique way (...)$130.00 new (collection) View on Amazon.comRemove from this list Direct downloadExport citation
Bookmark - Film and Theories of Interpersonal Understanding.Mihai Ometiță - 2018 - New Europe College Yearbook 2017:209-236.The paper discusses the issue of interpersonal understanding by comparing ordinary and cinematographic experience. Recent theories of interpersonal understanding turn out to be either inconclusive or insufficient to account for the heterogeneous ways in which we get mental and emotional states of other persons. The paper advances a view of the film medium by drawing on Stanley Cavell, which is reinforced by Wittgenstein’s and Merleau-Ponty’s convergent accounts of cinematographic perception. Against this background, interpersonal understanding turns out to be permeated by (...)
- (1 other version)Le langage cinématographique.Marcel Martin - 1985 - Paris: Cerf.
- (1 other version)Einführung in die Filmphilologie.Klaus Kanzog - 1991 - München: Verlegergemeinschaft Schaudig/Bauer/Ledig. Edited by Kirsten Burghardt, Ludwig Bauer & Michael Schaudig.
- “You and me, same!”: Political Envy in Do The Right Thing.Logan Canada Johnson & Sara Protasi - forthcoming - Film and Philosophy.In this paper we argue that political envy is central to unraveling the racial dynamics in Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing. Building upon Sara Protasi’s taxonomy of envy and, in particular, from her analysis of some DTRT scenes, we conduct a more thorough interrogation of how political emotions, most notably envy, shape race relations in the film. We start by summarizing Protasi’s account of envy and then review two alternative accounts of political emotions. After elucidating what envy is and (...)
- (1 other version)The altering eye: contemporary international cinema.Robert Phillip Kolker - 2009 - Cambridge: Open Book.The Altering Eye covers a 'golden age' of international cinema from the end of WWII through to the New German Cinema of the 1970s. Combining historical, political, and textual analysis, Kolker develops a pattern of cinematic invention and experimentation from neorealism through the modernist interventions of Jean-Luc Godard and Rainer Maria Fassbinder, focusing along the way on such major figures as Luis Buñuel, Joseph Losey, the Brazilian director Glauber Rocha, and the work of major Cuban filmmakers. First published in 1983, (...)Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- (3 other versions)Philosophy through film.Mary M. Litch - 2010 - New York: Routledge.Introduction -- Skepticism -- Relativism -- Personal identity -- Artificial intelligence -- Free will, determinism, and moral responsibility -- Ethics -- Political philosophy -- The problem of evil -- Existentialism.
- Acciones políticas del arte.Sara Fernández Gómez & Carlos Vanegas Zubiría (eds.) - 2024 - Medellín, Colombia: Universidad de Antioquia.Con la frecuencia con que en la actualidad se dice que arte es o puede ser cualquier cosa, también puede decirse hoy que el arte debe ser político. Esa es al menos la impresión que da el auge reciente de las diversas prácticas en el arte: estéticas expandidas, de lo cotidiano, relacionales o imbricadas, los situacionismos, los colonialismos, entre otras. Todas ellas se presentan como teorías programáticas en favor del primado del mensaje político y social sobre el arte, y del (...)
- (1 other version)Cinematically speaking: the orality-literacy paradigm for visual narrative.Sheila J. Nayar - 2014 - Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, Inc./SAGE Publications."First published by Hampton Press, Inc. in 2010. This edition published in 2014..."--Title page verso.
- (1 other version)The intervals of cinema.Jacques Ranciere - 2014 - New York: Verso. Edited by John Howe.Cinema, like language, can be said to exist as a system of differences. In his latest book, acclaimed philosopher Jacques Rancière looks at cinematic art in comparison to its corollary forms in literature and theatre. From literature, he argues, cinema takes its narrative conventions, while at the same time effacing literature’s images and philosophy; and film rejects theatre, while also fulfilling theatre’s dream. Built on these contradictions, the cinema is the real, material space in which one is moved by the (...)
- The end of cinema?: a medium in crisis in the digital age.André Gaudreault - 2015 - New York: Columbia University Press. Edited by Philippe Marion & Tim Barnard.Introduction: The end of cinema? -- Cinema is not what it used to be -- Digitalizing cinema from top to bottom -- A brief phenomenology of 'digitalized' cinema -- From shooting to filming: the Aufhebung effect -- A medium is always born twice -- New variants of the moving image -- 'Animage' and the new visual culture -- Conclusion: A medium in crisis in the digital age.
- Burū firumu no tetsugaku: "mite wa ikenai eiga" o miru.Takashi Yoshikawa - 2023 - Tōkyō: NHK Shuppan.Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- L'essai au cinéma, de Chaplin à Godard.Bamchade Pourvali - 2023 - [Grâne]: Créaphis éditions.Comment définir l'essai au cinéma? Reprenant l'héritage des avant-gardes des années 1920, à travers notamment les œuvres de Dziga Vertov, Jean Epstein ou Jean Vigo, l'essai filmique s'inscrit dans le cinéma moderne qui se définit au moment de la deuxième guerre mondiale avec Le Dictateur (1940) de Charlie Chaplin. Cette évolution se caractérise par un retour au documentaire et de nouvelles relations entre l'image et le son. On assiste alors dans le cinéma hollywoodien, avec Citizen Kane (1941) d'Orson Welles et, (...)
- al-Tanwīr wa-al-ʻadamīyah: sīnimā.ʻAzīz Ḥaddādī - 2023 - ʻAmmān: Khuṭūṭ wa-Ẓilāl lil-Nashr wa-al-Tawzīʻ.Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- The cinema of the real.Hyon Joo Yoo - 2024 - Albany: State University of New York Press.Alters the landscape of Lacanian film theory by revealing an "emancipatory drive" in transnational cinema.
- Negative life: the cinema of extinction.Steven Swarbrick & Jean-Thomas Tremblay - 2024 - Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Edited by Jean-Thomas Tremblay.How films help us understand the inevitable death of Earth and humanity.
- Edge of the screen.Murray Pomerance - 2024 - New York: Bloomsbury Academic.This book is a series of seventeen mediations that revolve around the notion of the viewer's placement at the edge of the screen to reconsider what it is that we watch when we watch a film, what happens to us, and how we make sense of and appreciate it. This book analyzes several films, including 2001: A Space Odyssey, Memento, Zabriskie Point, An American in Paris, Planet of the Apes (1968), Superman (1978), Possessed, The Jungle Book (1942), The Spy Who (...)
- Cet obscur objet du désir-cinéma: concept majeur, concept mineur.Joachim Daniel Dupuis - 2024 - Paris: L'Harmattan.Il est présent dans toutes les images d'un film, parfois même dans les sons. C'est un ingrédient indispensable du scénario. Il définit la singularité de l'histoire d'un film. Il porte notre désir du film, pendant et bien après son visionnage. Cet obscur objet du désir-cinéma, pensé le plus souvent par le scénariste, oriente le travail du réalisateur. John Truby, scénariste réputé, le nomme 'concept' (high concept). Pourtant, jamais le scénariste n'explique comment le concept d'un film vient à son esprit. L'inspiration (...)
- Silence(s) dans le cinéma contemporain: historie et esthétique.Louis Daubresse - 2024 - Villeneuve d'Ascq, France: Presses universitaires du Septentrion.Comment le silence agit-il au cinéma? Qu'est-ce qui permet d'identifier ce phénomène? Implique-t-il la disparition intégrale de la matière sonore ou seulement sa minimalisation à l'intérieur d'un film? Son intervention, ponctuelle ou durable, tend à engager une raréfaction, voire une suppression, des paroles et de la musique, mais pas forcément de tout bruit. Des lieux particulièrement silencieux, ainsi que le mutisme ou la surdité d'un personnage, sont également propices à l'instauration de telles situations audiovisuelles. Cet ouvrage analyse, à travers une (...)
- The morph-image: the subjunctive synthesis of time.Steen Ledet Christiansen - 2024 - Lanham: Lexington Books.This book elucidates the ways post-cinema engages with potential futures, arguing that the morph is the crucial figure to understand both how the future is constrained and how hope for the future might be produced. The author draws on Deleuzian and Whiteheadian insights to argue for a new model of digital cinema.
- Intermedialities: political theory and cinematic experience.Davide Panagia - 2024 - Evanston: Northwestern University Press.Understanding democracy through film philosophy and political theory.
- One with the force: 18 universal truths in Star Wars.Krista Noble - 2024 - Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.This book provides an intimate portrait of eighteen universal truths in Star Wars--principles that are "true for all time, all places and all people." Readers will see that the philosophy of the Jedi doesn't only apply "in a galaxy far, far away"; it is also highly relevant to everyday living.
- (1 other version)Capitalism with a Human Face: Neoliberal Ideology in Neill Blomkamp's District 9.Stephen Trinder - 2019 - Film-Philosophy 23 (1):1-16.This article analyses Neill Blomkamp's Academy Award-winning District 9 (2009) to investigate the extent to which popular cinema might support neoliberal ideological positions. It draws upon Slavoj Žižek's psychoanalytic theory of ideology to explore how far anti-capitalist and anti-colonial tendencies in the film should be regarded as an “unconscious fantasy” (1989, p.30) that works towards reinforcing key aspects of neoliberalism. Through an exploration of private military contractor Multinational United (MNU), lead protagonist Wikus van de Merwe (Sharlto Copley), and the film's (...)
- Cinema and surveillance: the asymmetric gaze.Martin Blumenthal-Barby - 2024 - New York: Routledge.Cinema and Surveillance: The Asymmetric Gaze shows how key modern filmmakers challenge and disturb the relation between film and surveillance, medium and message. Assembling readings of films by Harun Farocki, Michael Haneke, and Fritz Lang, the book considers surveillance in such different domains as urban life, religious doctrine, and law enforcement. With surveillance present in the modern world as both a technological phenomenon and a social practice, the author shows how cinema, as a visual medium, presents highly sophisticated analyses of (...)
- British masculinity in transatlantic cinema: Ronald Colman and Basil Rathbone.Carolyn Owen-King - 2025 - New York: Bloomsbury Academic.Through exploring transatlantic film history, this book uncovers the ways in which these men were presented in media and on screen, arguing that they carry with them, even in films made at the height of censorship, an appealing and attractive queerness. Owen-King expands on Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick's theory of homosocial/homosexual continuum and offer readings of film texts that use her theories to survey gender and sexual identities within Hollywood's Golden Era.
- Cinematic cartography: scale, analysis, topography.Chris Lukinbeal - 2025 - New York: Routledge.This book uniquely bridges the conceptual gap between the history of geographic, cartographic thought and film theory with the technological and cultural shifts that shaped the emergence of cameras and cinema. This volume is essential reading for students, scholars and academics of cinematography, human, cultural and social geography, cartography and media studies, as well as those with an interest in these areas more generally.
- Curing Hitchcock’s Vertigo: A Second Dance with Rancière.Joshua M. Hall - forthcoming - Tábano. Translated by Leandro Cuellar.Building on my previous exploration of the role of dance in the contemporary French political philosopher Jacques Rancière’s Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, first published in French in 2011, the present essay turns to another book originally published in the same year, The Intervals of Cinema. Having previously established that the core of Rancière’s philosophical method is an analysis of philosophical homonyms into figurative dancing conceptual partners, I begin by applying that method to the first chapter of (...)
- Sensitive Aesthetics of Jean-Luc Nancy and Moving Images.Kamil Lipiński & Zsolt Gyenge (eds.) - forthcoming - Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Subjectivity in Film: Mine, Yours, and No One’s.Sara Aronowitz & Grace Helton - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11.A classic and fraught question in the philosophy of film is this: when you watch a film, do you experience yourself in the world of the film, observing the scenes? In this paper, we argue that this subject of film experience is sometimes a mere impersonal viewpoint, sometimes a first-personal but unindexed subject, and sometimes a particular, indexed subject such as the viewer herself or a character in the film. We first argue for subject pluralism: there is no single answer (...)
- The Unconscious with Bond and Lacan: Definition by Deviation.Rafael Holmberg - 2023 - Bright Lights Film Journal.This article argues that the paradox of James Bond’s character (that he accords with the idea he represents precisely by deviating from it) is central to a Lacanian understanding of the unconscious (which is considered as a form of disjunctive synthesis – a logical operation that allows conflicting realities to coexist). The Lacanian unconscious is the site on which the possibility for a paradoxical character like James Bond can be framed. This requires a review of both various Bond moments and (...)
- Chiara Quaranta (2023). Iconoclasm in European Cinema: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Image Destruction.Francesco Sticchi - 2024 - Film-Philosophy 28 (2):395-399.
- Home Movies as Reliquaries of Memory: A Phenomenological Perspective.Lourdes Esqueda Verano - 2024 - Film-Philosophy 28 (2):350-374.If film immortalises the ephemeral and presentifies the past, this is especially true of home movies, whose content is not the result of a narrative composition or an invention of fiction, but the product of fragments of reality. These three categories – fiction, documentary, and the home movie – have been analysed by Jean-Pierre Meunier and Vivian Sobchack, with an emphasis on the effect that each film mode can have on the spectator, eliciting a particular emotional and cognitive response. But (...)
- Nietzschean Themes in Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse.Paolo Stellino - 2024 - Film-Philosophy 28 (2):226-247.Béla Tarr's last feature film The Turin Horse (2011) begins with a prologue that narrates Friedrich Nietzsche's mental breakdown in Turin in 1889, which was allegedly prompted by his witnessing a cab driver brutally whipping his horse. Nietzsche's name is not mentioned again in the film, and the viewer is left wondering what connection, if any, exists between the Nietzsche story and the film's narrative. Scholars often refer to one or another aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy when analysing Tarr's film. Yet, (...)
- Daniel Mourenza (2020). Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Film.Hyojin Yoon - 2024 - Film-Philosophy 28 (2):405-408.
- Even the Sea is Broken: Return and Loss in Razan AlSalah’s Video Works.Samira Makki - 2024 - Film-Philosophy 28 (2):248-268.This article probes the ways in which returning to Palestine is imagined in Razan AlSalah’s two video works Your Father Was Born 100 Years Old, and So Was the Nakba (2018) and Canada Park (2020). In foregrounding the refusal of configurations substantiated by state concessions and normalisation treaties, the article treats loss as central to the manifold rehearsals of return. In AlSalah’s work, loss is understood not as becoming less, but rather as a proposition for becoming otherwise. Here, the practice (...)
- Every Wholly Other: Postsecular Pluralism in Isabel Rocamora's Faith.Mark Cauchi - 2024 - Film-Philosophy 28 (2):269-293.In this article, I undertake a close reading of Isabel Rocamora's 2015 film installation Faith, which shows, on three separate screens, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim men simultaneously performing their morning prayers in three distinct, historically significant sites in the Judean desert. Setting the cinematic and installation properties of the work into dialogue with a number of philosophers (Levinas, Derrida, Cavell), film theorists (Bazin, Deleuze, Chion), and art theorists (Fried, Elkins), I argue that it adopts a postsecular approach to religious pluralism. (...)
- David Martin-Jones (2022). Columbo: Paying Attention 24/7.Timna Rauch - 2024 - Film-Philosophy 28 (2):400-404.
- When the Wind Is Gently Rustling: Film and the Aesthetics of Natural Beauty.Julian Hanich - 2024 - Film-Philosophy 28 (2):153-180.While experiencing natural beauty is a key appeal of the cinema and other moving-image media, academic film scholarship has rarely paid attention to it. In this article I will use the widespread motif of the gently rustling wind as a pars pro toto to make some general remarks about the experience of natural beauty in film. I will first note the firm place of the motif of the rustling wind in film theoretical debates from the late 19th century until today. (...)
- Chelsea Birks (2021). Limit Cinema: Transgression and the Nonhuman in Contemporary Global Film. Augustin - 2024 - Film-Philosophy 28 (2):409-412.
- Anima(l) Moralia, or Righteous Anger: Agnieszka Holland’s Spoor.Elżbieta Ostrowska - 2024 - Film-Philosophy 28 (2):202-225.Agnieszka Holland’s Spoor (Pokot, 2017), an adaptation of Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead (2009), tells the story of an old woman, Janina Duszejko (Agnieszka Mandat), who advocates for animal rights and uses every measure to fight the local hunting culture. Due to the centrality of the relationship between human beings and the world of nature, Holland’s film refers to the recent debates aimed at de-centralizing the human subject. This article will argue, however, that (...)
- Blue Boys: Maurice Pialat, Nicolas Poussin and the Work of Art.David A. Gerstner - 2024 - Film-Philosophy 28 (2):322-349.Maurice Pialat (1925–2003) in his Libération article “Éloge de Poussin” (1987) tells us that cinema has made no progress since the Lumière brothers’ first projected images. Provocatively, he informs his readers that only painting has progressed and, as such, remains the far more innovative art form. For all the pointed remarks directed with some force towards French film critics and filmmakers, Pialat’s short notes in Libé offer us something more. It is one of the few opportunities to consider the auteur’s (...)
- New Materialist Freedom in Chloé Zhao's Nomadland.Randy Laist - 2024 - Film-Philosophy 28 (2):181-201.In Chloé Zhao's 2020 film Nomadland, Fern's commitment to eschewing a geolocalizable “home” uproots her from conventional patterns of domesticity and transforms her into an inhabitant of planet earth as a whole, enabling a new way of thinking about identity, environment, and the nature of human freedom. The kind of freedom that Fern's narrative evokes stands in deliberate contrast to the masculinized, heroic style of freedom that American films have done so much to promulgate. In contrast to this conventional representation (...)
- The Filter and the Viewer: On Audience Discretion in Film Noir.Steven G. Smith - 2024 - Film-Philosophy 28 (2):375-394.To the French critics who originally labelled certain films noir it seemed that a class of Hollywood products had gone darker during the war years – as though a dark filter had been placed over the lens. Films were not designed or marketed as noir, and retrospectively noir's status as a genre is still unsettled. Yet there is widespread interest today in experiencing diverse films as noir, and even in using a Noir Filter in Instagram and video games. Pursuing the (...)
- Inauthenticity as a Disruption of Neoliberal Resilience Discourse in Brady Corbet's Vox Lux.Alice Pember - 2024 - Film-Philosophy 28 (2):294-321.Brady Corbet's Vox Lux (2018) depicts school shooting survivor Celeste's transformation into a singing superstar, connecting the trauma of a terrorist attack to the phenomenon of musical celebrity. In so doing, the film narrativises the relationship between the pop singer and neoliberal resilience discourse that has been explored by music philosopher Robin James. Mobilising Jacques Rancière's definition of political art, this article suggests that, rather than endorsing the resilience that it depicts, the film formally critiques the neoliberal function of pop (...)
- Why not realize your world?William Rothman Interviewed by Jeffrey Crouse - 2019 - In William Rothman (ed.), Tuitions and intuitions: essays at the intersection of film criticism and philosophy. Albany: SUNY Press.
- Metaphysics and the moving image: "paradise exposed".Trevor Mowchun - 2023 - Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Examines the work of transcendental filmmakers such as Bela Tarr and Terence Malick using a metaphysical framework.
- The eye of the cinematograph: Levinas and realisms of the body.Keyvan Manafi - 2023 - Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Explores the encounter between Emmanuel Levinas' ethical thought and aesthetic realisms of the body.
- Kono jiyūna sekai to watashitachi no kaeru basho.Shintarō Kōno - 2023 - Tōkyō-to Chiyoda-ku: Seidosha.感情の取り締まり(ポリシング)、トランス排除、宗教右派からポストトゥルースまで。透徹した思考に貫かれた論考群。.
- Biopolitical ethics in global cinema.Seung-Hoon Jeong - 2023 - New York, NY: Oxford University Press.This book is a critical attempt to approach world cinema in a new global frame that updates the national frame of territorial cinemas and the transnational frame of their interplay. The global frame implies the reintegration of border-crossing forces onto the postpolitical plane of troubled globalization with two ethical facets: the soft ethical inclusion of differences in multicultural, neoliberal systems and their hard ethical symptoms of fundamentalist exclusion and terror. Reflecting both, global cinema is formulated as staging crucial challenges that (...)
- al-Sīnimā wa-al-maʻná al-mītāfīzīqī lil-ṣūrah.ʻAzīz Ḥaddādī - 2023 - al-Qāhirah: Dār Ruʼyah lil-Nashr wa-al-Tawzīʻ.
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