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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. |
Show all references
Related
Subcategories
Ontology of Film (89 | 1)
Audience Engagement in Film (91 | 25)
Genres of Film (155 | 10)
Philosophy Through Film (298)
Philosophy of Film, Misc (133)
Contents
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Material to categorize
- A Schelerian reading of 'My Dinner with Andre': Love, Toleration, and Dialogue.Aleksi Ivanov Gramatikov - 2024 - Filosofisk Supplement 20 (1):14-21.According to Max Ferdinand Scheler, love is a priori a force unto human life. A force whose sake is not dominion but acts as integral ‘movement’. Scheler’s notion of ‘movement’ grounds itself on his interpretation of love as agape. This text endeavours to explore and highlight Scheler’s notion of love, and use the movie ‘My Dinner with Andre’ as fulfilling example and for demonstrative purposes. When the cliché ‘all we need is love’ rings in the ear, it is often mentioned (...)
- Aux marges de l'archivistique: exploitation des archives en cinéma de réemploi.Annaëlle Winand - 2024 - Québec (Québec): Presses de l'Université du Québec.
- Home to Roost: Some Problems for the Nested-Types Theory of Musical Works, Versions, and Authentic Performance.Andrew Kania - 2022 - Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics 59 (2):153-164.Nemesio G. C. Puy argues that the "nested types" ontology of works of Western classical music can solve recent disagreements about such works' authentic performance. I raise several objections to his argument.
- American medium: a new film philosophy.Eyal Peretz - 2025 - Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.In this masterful new work, film critic and philosopher Eyal Peretz forges a new connection between the concept of "America" and the medium of film. Through exemplary close readings of six fundamental American films - John Ford's Young Mr Lincoln and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Steven Spielberg's West Side Story, and Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette, Peretz demonstrates the way the connection between "America" and film is enabled through the development (...)
- (1 other version)Philosophy through film (5th edition).Amy Karofsky - 2025 - New York: Routledge.Philosophy through Film, Fifth Edition uses recently released, well-received movies to explore answers to classic questions in philosophy in an approachable yet philosophically rigorous manner. Author Amy Karofsky uses one or more films in each chapter to examine one longstanding philosophical question and assess some of the best solutions to it that have been offered. The chosen movies are not mere "add-ons" to an otherwise straightforward introductory text; instead, they are fully integrated into the discussion of the issues and the (...)Remove from this listExport citation
Bookmark - Film as argument: the secret to feature film storytelling.Darren Paul Fisher - 2025 - New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.If you've picked up this book, it's most likely that you have an interest in movies over-and-above the typical audience member. Perhaps a screenwriter, producer or director looking to improve your work, always searching for any insight that will result in better cinematic storytelling. If that's the case, then good news: this is the book for you. It asks a deceptively straightforward question. Why do we make feature films? Is it to entertain? To move and audience? To tell a powerful (...)
- Surface, Material Bodies, and the Avant-Garde in Philosophy of Film.Byron Davies - 2025 - October 191:97-118.As surprising as it might seem, a better encounter between analytic philosophy and avant-garde cinema turns on conceptions of the human body and their origins in infancy. The basic ideas emerge from philosopher Richard Wollheim’s writing on painting, though Wollheim himself was not prepared to apply his thought to cinema, and even most analytic philosophers of film who purport to draw on Wollheim have under-appreciated the consequences of his writing on “twofoldness”—let alone his writing on painting and the body—for explorations (...)
- Denken in het donker met Andrej Tarkovski.Rob Van Gerwen (ed.) - 2022 - Leusden: ISVW Uitgevers.Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Bewoonbare beelden: heimwee en nostalgie in Solaris en Nostalghia.Jasper Van de Vijver - 2022 - In Rob Van Gerwen, Denken in het donker met Andrej Tarkovski. Leusden: ISVW Uitgevers. pp. 37–56.
- Bewoonbare beelden: Over heimwee en nostalgie in Andrei Tarkovsky's Solyaris en Nostalghia.Jasper Van de Vijver - 2019 - Sabzian.
- Laurent Guido, Cinéma, mythe et idéologie. Échos de Wagner chez Hans-Jürgen Syberberg et Werner Herzog. [REVIEW]de Courville Stanislas - 2021 - 1895 94:194-199.
- (1 other version)Cine, 100 años de filosofía: una introducción a la filosofía a través del análisis de películas.Julio Cabrera - 1999 - Barcelona: Gedisa Editorial.Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Cinema after Deleuze.Richard Rushton - 2012 - New York: Continuum.What questions does Deleuze's philosophy of cinema answer? -- The movement-image (I): Griffith, Eisenstein, Gance, Lang -- The movement-image (II): Ford and Kazan -- The movement-image (III): Hawks and Hitchcock -- The time-image (I): Italian neorealism and after -- The time-image (II): Ophüls and Fellini -- The time-image (III): Welles and Resnais -- Thought and cinema -- Cinema after Deleuze (I): the persistence of the movement-image -- Cinema after Deleuze (II): recent elements of the time-image.
- Cuerpo, sexo y cultura : disidencias de género a través del cine.Piedad Lucía Bolívar Goez, Daniel Ignacio Garzón Luna, María Camila Balcer Ángel, Sara Carolina Martínez Román, Daniela Natalia Polo Rivas & Sandra Liliana Rocha Gutiérrez - 2019 - In Pinto Bustamante, Boris Julián, Gómez Córdoba & Ana Isabel, Conflictos, dilemas y paradojas: cine y bioética en el inicio de la vida. Bogotá, D.C.: Editorial Universidad del Rosario.
- Genes, datos y replicantes : cine y bioética en la era genómica.Ana Isabel Gómez Córdoba, Henry Mauricio Chaparro Solano, Boris Julián Pinto Bustamante, Anamaría Reinoso & Laura Vanesa Ríos Samper - 2019 - In Pinto Bustamante, Boris Julián, Gómez Córdoba & Ana Isabel, Conflictos, dilemas y paradojas: cine y bioética en el inicio de la vida. Bogotá, D.C.: Editorial Universidad del Rosario.
- La clonación reproductiva : más allá de Frankenstein y el club de los clones.Boris Julián Pinto Bustamante, Andrea Donoso Samper, Estefanía Zapata, Isabella Vargas Parada, Laura Bibiana Pin̋eros Hernández, Luis Octavio Tierradentro García & Laura Sofía Nasiff - 2019 - In Pinto Bustamante, Boris Julián, Gómez Córdoba & Ana Isabel, Conflictos, dilemas y paradojas: cine y bioética en el inicio de la vida. Bogotá, D.C.: Editorial Universidad del Rosario.
- Técnicas de procreación humana asistida : una mirada desde el bioderecho, la bioética y el cine.Diana Rocío Bernal Camargo, Julian López Rippe & Juan Camilo Llano - 2019 - In Pinto Bustamante, Boris Julián, Gómez Córdoba & Ana Isabel, Conflictos, dilemas y paradojas: cine y bioética en el inicio de la vida. Bogotá, D.C.: Editorial Universidad del Rosario.
- Quién hizo estas reglas? Interrupción del embarazo y objeción de conciencia.Diana Alejandra Alfonso Ayala, Daniela Carrillo Pedrosa & Lina Marcela Dorado Delgado - 2019 - In Pinto Bustamante, Boris Julián, Gómez Córdoba & Ana Isabel, Conflictos, dilemas y paradojas: cine y bioética en el inicio de la vida. Bogotá, D.C.: Editorial Universidad del Rosario.
- De los dogmatismos a la deliberación : una perspectiva para el análisis de conflictos bioéticos en la práctica clínica.Eduardo Díaz Amado, Natalia Pedraza Jiménez, Juan Diego Navarro Sánchez & Santiago A. Sánchez Villalobos - 2019 - In Pinto Bustamante, Boris Julián, Gómez Córdoba & Ana Isabel, Conflictos, dilemas y paradojas: cine y bioética en el inicio de la vida. Bogotá, D.C.: Editorial Universidad del Rosario.
- Conflictos, dilemas y paradojas: cine y bioética en el inicio de la vida.Pinto Bustamante, Boris Julián, Gómez Córdoba & Ana Isabel (eds.) - 2019 - Bogotá, D.C.: Editorial Universidad del Rosario.The topics addressed in this work deal with the bioethical and legal conflicts in scenarios such as the termination of pregnancy, assisted reproductive technologies, technical developments in the genomic era, the reproductive cloning of human beings, divergences of sexual development and transsexualism, and a proposal for the analysis of ethical conflics in clinical practice. The joint work of students and professors has lead to identifying a set of issues that address both medical elements and cultural, moral, and legal variables in (...)
- Representations of Catholicism in Contemporary Spanish Anarchist-themed Film (1995–2011).Pedro García-Guirao - 2018 - In M. Christoyannopoulos & A. Adams, Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume II.This essay explores the portrayal of Catholicism in eight Spanish anarchist-themed films. The first part discusses negative representations of the Catholic religion rehearsed in these films, set as they are mainly in the context of the Spanish Civil War. Among those representations are: the political and economic purpose of the Catholic Church’s control of education in Spain; the breaking of the religious vows of poverty and chastity, and the recourse to praising the vow of obedience when under scrutiny; and the (...)
- Cinema e nuove visioni: tra schermi e societ à multimediale.Sandra Telve - 2021 - [Dueville]: Ronzani numeri.Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Quando il cinema era giovane: i fantasmi dell'opera, i fantasmi all'opera.Sergio Arecco - 2021 - Pistoia: Petite plaisance.
- Be more Obi-Wan.Kelly Knox - 2022 - New York, N.Y.: Dorling Kindersley.A fun, pocket-size book packed with inspiration from the galaxy's most cool and composed Jedi Master. Stay true to yourself with confidence and class. Is your new home more hive of villainy than sandy beach resort? Friends not the chosen ones you thought they were? Don't throw a tantrum - keep it classy and ask yourself, "What would Obi-Wan do?" Glide elegantly through anything life throws at you with pearls of wisdom from Obi-Wan Kenobi and fellow sages. Learn how to (...)Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- As deep as it gets: movies and metaphysics.Randall E. Auxier - 2022 - Chicago: Open Universe.About the author -- Note to the reader -- From the Alamo Draft House to the livingroom couch (or there and back again) -- Part I: Rated G: General Audiences -- 1. I know something you don't know: The Princess Bride -- 2. Lions and tigers and bears: scary stuff in the Wizard of Oz -- 3. The monster and the mensch: a child's eye view of Super 8 -- 4. Chef, Socrates, and the sage of love: finding love in (...)
- The Dweller on the Threshold: Whiteness, the Family and the End of Classical Cinema.Conall Cash - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (1):169-198.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 (...)
- Dwelling in the Abyss: Society in Werner Herzog and Martin Heidegger.Haotian Wu - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (1):144-168.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 (...)
- The Action Mode: Mile 22 and the Tension of Hypermediated Embodiment.Jonah Jeng - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (1):119-143.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 (...)
- Cinematic Mythmaking in Andrey Zvyagintsev's The Return and The Banishment.Louis Samuel Mealing - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (1):94-118.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 (...)
- Plastic Surgery: Under the Skin, Suture, Destructive Plasticity and Post-Cinematic Ontologies.Greg Hainge - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (1):264-282.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 (...)
- From Ascetic Ideals to Honest Illusions: A Nietzschean Interpretation of Inception.Yonghwa Lee & Kyoung-Min Han - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (1):244-263.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 (...)
- Eternity Descending into Time: Badiou and the Cinematic Temporality of Love.Lu Zeng - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (1):221-243.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 (...)
- Speculative Transitions: Hegel, John Huston’s Moby Dick and the Dissolve.Joshua Harold Wiebe - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (1):199-220.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 (...)
- Jenna Ng (2021). The Post-Screen through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie.Shaopeng Chen - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (1):296-299.
- Victor Fan (2022). Cinema Illuminating Reality: Media Philosophy through Buddhism.William Brown - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (1):292-295.
- Jean Ma (2022). At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators.Juan Camilo Velásquez - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (1):288-291.
- Julian Hanich & Martin P. Rossouw (Eds.) (2023). What Is Film Good For? On the Values of Spectatorship.Francesco Sticchi - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (1):283-287.
- The Ethics of Refusal in Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life.Marguerite La Caze & Magdalena Zolkos - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (1):72-93.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 (...)
- Kracauer and Tarkovsky’s Cinema of Redemptive Estrangement.Daniel Sullivan - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (1):46-71.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 (...)
- Existential and Phenomenological Horror in Les Diaboliques.Daniel Tilsley - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (1):23-45.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 (...)
- Self-Effacing Barbie: The Ideal, the Real and the Quest for Authentic Selfhood.John Michael Corrigan & Justin Prystash - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (1):1-22.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 (...)
- Redemption in Oblivion — Psychopathology of Charlie Chaplin.Morteza Shahram - manuscriptThe character of Charlie Chaplin in his movies is the personification of forgetfulness but not forgiveness ------ Someone who is not susceptible to bad conscience: (Nietzsche: the sting of conscience teaches one to sting). He carries no guilt, no regret, and is a mechanism of historical forgetfulness (like a happy beast which grazes free from past and future) ------ He undergoes misfortunes and occasional fortunes and comes out the same mechanism of historical forgetfulness he used to be ------ He is (...)
- A filmelmélet változásai.Károly Nemes - 1981 - Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Editor's Introduction.Laura T. Di Summa - 2025 - Film and Philosophy 29:3-6.
- Crisis of the Pseudoreal.Shaler Keenum - 2025 - Film and Philosophy 29:1-21.This article discusses the history of film ontology and advocates to shift from traditional film interpretations to understanding all images as pseudoreal. Historically, film and images have been understood with an inherent connection to pro-filmic reality: the captured image represented what was in front of the camera at some point in time. While theories of how to retain a sense of film realism have evolved as the processes for capturing and altering images have improved, a proclivity towards the real has (...)
- A Biosemantic Type of Anti-intentionalist Film Analysis.Joseph McKenna - 2025 - Film and Philosophy 29:107-124.The Ontological Question seems to be the main source of controversy in the Anti-intentionalism versus Intentionalism debate. The Ontological Question asks what determines the meaning of an artwork? Intentionalists argue that the intention of the artist determines the meaning of the artwork, while Anti-intentionalists argue that the artwork alone determines its own meaning. In this article I answer this question as it relates to film analysis. I propose a Biosemantic variety of film analysis, rooted in semantic externalist philosophy of language. (...)
- Wings of Desire and the Joys of Finitude.Joseph Kupfer - 2025 - Film and Philosophy 29:75-92.The film Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1987) begins to answer the startling question, “How could being human be superior to enjoying an angelic existence?” The film’s elevation of ordinary humanity is so persuasive that a few angels forego eternity, “take the plunge,” and become mortals. The first layer of human attraction is found in the uncomplicated pleasures of physical embodiment. To the enjoyment of bodily sensations such as warming our hands on a chilly day, the film adds the ecstasy (...)
- Inside/Outside.Glória Nogueira - 2025 - Film and Philosophy 29:23-44.In this article, I explore the ways in which the humor and narrative arc of Bo Burnham’s comedy special Inside (2021) reflects the existential attitude of today’s chronically-online youth, which I describe as dominated by online aestheticism. First, a Kierkegaardian reading will be offered of Bo’s character as he struggles between pursuing an aesthetic or ethical life-view, watching his own eventual downfall into despair from within. The impact of the film upon its audience, who watches the film from without, will (...)
- Shannon Sullivan’s White Privilege and Antisemitism in James Gray’s Armageddon Time.Seth Vannatta - 2025 - Film and Philosophy 29:61-74.This paper investigates Shannon Sullivan’s concept of white privilege through the lens of James Gray’s 2022 film, Armageddon Time. Sullivan investigates the concept of white racial privilege and the problem with middle-class, white anti-racism. In Armageddon Time, the Graff family, “good white people”, progressives with anti-racist intentions, actually strive to achieve the white privilege Sullivan analyzes. The dynamics of white privilege in the film are more complex because the family is Jewish. I argue that antisemitism provides a problem for Sullivan’s (...)
- You and me, same!Logan Canada-Johnson & Sara Protasi - 2025 - Film and Philosophy 29:45-60.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 (...)
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