Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Avant-Garde Films as Philosophy

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures

  • 2349 Accesses

Abstract

The robust connections between philosophy and avant-garde cinema are investigated, and four strong senses in which avant-garde films can be “philosophical” are clarified: as illustrating philosophy, as originating philosophy, as enacting philosophy, and as occasioning philosophical reflection. While avant-garde cinema may only rarely, if ever, be able to create innovative philosophy, it excels at producing rich, philosophically informed perceptual experiences for viewers. Moreover, unlike works of verbal philosophy, which are evaluated in terms of their truth value and whose significance is primarily epistemic, avant-garde films like other avant-garde artworks are admired mainly for their artistic inventions, and the chapter highlights through a range of examples how avant-garde filmmakers have employed imaginative and often novel techniques to communicate philosophical meaning and generate philosophical ideas.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 189.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 249.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 249.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    Murray Smith, “Film, Philosophy, and the Varieties of Aesthetic Value,” in Current Controversies in the Philosophy of Film, ed. Katherine Thomas-Jones (New York: Routledge, 2016), 185.

  2. 2.

    Dalia Judovitz, for example, thinks that the film “challenges the definition of both traditional and abstract cinematic image [sic]” (“Anemic Vision in Duchamp: Cinema as Readymade,” in Dada and Surrealist Film, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996], 46).

  3. 3.

    Jinhee Choi, “Apperception on Display: Structural Films and Philosophy,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 165.

  4. 4.

    Annette Michelson, “Art and the Structuralist Perspective,” in On the Future of Art (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, a Viking Compass Book, 1970), 57.

  5. 5.

    Michelson, “Bodies In Space: Film as ‘Carnal Knowledge’,” Artforum VII, no. 6 (February 1969): 58.

  6. 6.

    Annette Michelson, “Toward Snow,” in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1987), 172.

  7. 7.

    Shawn Loht, “Phenomenological Preconditions of the Concept of Film-as-Philosophy,” Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology 2, no. 2 (2015): 180.

  8. 8.

    There are also perhaps weaker senses as when we speak of an avant-garde film as philosophical because we can detect the influence of philosophy in it. However, there are more interesting and robust connections than mere influence between avant-garde cinema and philosophy, and it is these connections that I explore in this chapter.

  9. 9.

    Rebecca A. Sheehan, for example, maintains that the avant-garde films of Stan Brakhage “philosophize in a way similar to Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations” (“Stan Brakhage, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the Renewed Encounter with the Everyday,” Screen 53, no. 2 [Summer 2012]: 118).

  10. 10.

    Smith, “Film, Philosophy, and the Varieties of Aesthetic Value,” 195. See also Paisley Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), chapter two.

  11. 11.

    David Davies, “Can Film Be a Philosophical Medium?” Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics 5, no 2 (August 2008): 5.

  12. 12.

    Of course, verbal philosophy can be appreciated for its aesthetic qualities and its historical importance, much like a work of art, even if the verbal philosophy is no longer thought to be persuasive. My point is simply that verbal philosophy, unlike art, is primarily valued for its epistemic contribution, which accounts in part for the different ways we behave toward and treat the two.

  13. 13.

    Thomas E. Wartenberg, “Beyond Mere Illustration: How Films Can Be Philosophy,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 30.

  14. 14.

    Thomas E. Wartenberg, “Film as Philosophy: The Pro Position,” in Current Controversies in the Philosophy of Film, 167.

  15. 15.

    Wartenberg, “Beyond Mere Illustration: How Films Can Be Philosophy,” 20.

  16. 16.

    Wartenberg, “Film as Philosophy: The Pro Position,” 167.

  17. 17.

    Thomas E. Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2007), 12.

  18. 18.

    Paisley Livingston, “Recent Work on Cinema as Philosophy,” Philosophy Compass 3/4 (2008): 595.

  19. 19.

    Robert Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images (London: Continuum, 2011), 129.

  20. 20.

    Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film, 131.

  21. 21.

    Stephen Davies, “Authors’ Intentions, Literary Interpretation, and Literary Value,” British Journal of Aesthetics 46, no. 3 (July 2006): 240.

  22. 22.

    Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen, 26 (my emphasis).

  23. 23.

    Livingston, “Recent Work on Cinema as Philosophy,” 594–95.

  24. 24.

    Wartenberg, “Film as Philosophy: The Pro Position,” 176.

  25. 25.

    Wartenberg, “Film as Philosophy: The Pro Position,” 177.

  26. 26.

    Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 34.

  27. 27.

    Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy, 21.

  28. 28.

    Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy, 14 (my emphasis).

  29. 29.

    Wartenberg, “Film as Philosophy: The Pro Position,” 168.

  30. 30.

    Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy, 22.

  31. 31.

    Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy, 15.

  32. 32.

    Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy, 15.

  33. 33.

    Annette Michelson, introduction to Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, xxxvii.

  34. 34.

    As David Davies has astutely pointed out, there is an ambiguity in Livingston’s employment of the term “exclusively cinematic.” By it, he seems to mean both the capacities that are used to do philosophy in film and the requirement that only those capacities be used. But the latter is not warranted, as philosophical expression does not need to be confined to one medium at a time. Davies, “Can Film Be a Philosophical Medium?” 13.

  35. 35.

    Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy, 13.

  36. 36.

    Noël Carroll, “Philosophizing Through the Moving Image: The Case of Serene Velocity,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 174.

  37. 37.

    Livingston allows that “some avant-garde filmmakers have used their films to make implicit and insightful interventions in ongoing debates about the very nature of the cinematic medium.” But he continues: “That a few non-fiction and avant-garde films have been used to make points in debates over the nature of cinema hardly instills confidence about the cinema’s capacity to make exclusively cinematic and innovative epistemic contributions on philosophical topics more generally” (Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy, 35–36).

  38. 38.

    Aaron Smuts, “Film as Philosophy: In Defense of a Bold Thesis,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67, no. 4 (Fall 2009): 415–416.

  39. 39.

    Smuts, “Film as Philosophy: In Defense of a Bold Thesis,” 416.

  40. 40.

    Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy, 27.

  41. 41.

    Sergei Eisenstein, S. M. Eisenstein: Selected Works, vol. 1, Writings 1922–34, ed. and trans. Richard Taylor (London: BFI, 1988), 180.

  42. 42.

    Carroll, “Philosophizing Through the Moving Image: The Case of Serene Velocity,” 178.

  43. 43.

    Carroll, “Philosophizing Through the Moving Image: The Case of Serene Velocity,” 178.

  44. 44.

    Carroll, “Philosophizing Through the Moving Image: The Case of Serene Velocity,” 180. However, as David Davies points out, the cognitive value of thought experiments has been questioned in the philosophy of science, something that has been overlooked by philosophers of art who appeal to the analogy between thought experiments and films to bolster the cognitive value of the latter. Davies, “Can Film Be a Philosophical Medium?” 16.

  45. 45.

    Carroll, “Philosophizing Through the Moving Image: The Case of Serene Velocity,” 181.

  46. 46.

    Carroll, “Philosophizing Through the Moving Image: The Case of Serene Velocity,” 181.

  47. 47.

    Carroll, “Philosophizing Through the Moving Image: The Case of Serene Velocity,” 180 (my emphasis).

  48. 48.

    Choi, “Apperception on Display: Structural Films and Philosophy,” 168.

  49. 49.

    Loht, “Phenomenological Preconditions of the Concept of Film-as-Philosophy,” 177.

  50. 50.

    Carl R. Plantinga, Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 73.

  51. 51.

    I have borrowed the following two paragraphs from my essay “Epstein, Sound and the Return to Classical Film Theory,” Mise au Point no. 8 (2016).

  52. 52.

    Jean Epstein, “Photogénie and the Imponderable,” in French Film Theory and Criticism, A History/Anthology, 1907–1939, vol. 2: 1929–1939, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 189.

  53. 53.

    Epstein, “Photogénie and the Imponderable,” 189.

  54. 54.

    Epstein, “Photogénie and the Imponderable,” 189.

  55. 55.

    Jean Epstein, “The Slow Motion of Sound,” in Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, ed. Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2012), 382.

  56. 56.

    Jean Epstein, “The Slow Motion of Sound,” 382.

  57. 57.

    Stan Brakhage, “From Metaphors on Vision,” in The Avant-Garde Film, 120.

  58. 58.

    Brakhage, “From Metaphors on Vision,” 120.

  59. 59.

    Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen, 67.

  60. 60.

    Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen, 67.

  61. 61.

    Choi, “Apperception on Display: Structural Films and Philosophy,” 168.

  62. 62.

    Bruce Russell, “The Philosophical Limits of Film,” in Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology, ed. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi (Malden, MA; Blackwell, 2006), 390.

  63. 63.

    Trevor Ponech, “The Substance of Cinema,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 187.

  64. 64.

    Michelson, “Toward Snow,” 174.

  65. 65.

    Michelson, “Toward Snow,” 174–175.

  66. 66.

    Michelson, “Toward Snow,” 172.

  67. 67.

    John R. Searle, Seeing Things as They Are: A Theory of Perception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 13.

  68. 68.

    Quoted in Michelson, “Toward Snow,” 173.

  69. 69.

    Michelson, “Art and the Structuralist Perspective,” 57.

  70. 70.

    Michelson, “Toward Snow,” 172.

  71. 71.

    Thanks to Ted Nannicelli, Noël Carroll and Shawn Loht for their comments on earlier versions of this text.

Bibliography

  • Brakhage, Stan. 1987. From ‘Metaphors on Vision’. In The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney, 120–128. New York: Anthology Film Archives.

    Google Scholar 

  • Carroll, Noël. 2006. Philosophizing Through the Moving Image: The Case of Serene Velocity. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (1, Winter): 173–185.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Choi, Jinhee. 2006. Apperception on Display: Structural Films and Philosophy. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (1, Winter): 165–172.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Davies, Stephen. 2006. Authors’ Intentions, Literary Interpretation, and Literary Value. British Journal of Aesthetics 46 (3, July): 223–247.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Davies, David. 2008. Can Film Be a Philosophical Medium? Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics 5 (2, August): 1–20.

    Google Scholar 

  • Eisenstein, Sergei. 1988. S. M. Eisenstein: Selected Works, Writings 1922–34, vol. 1. Trans. and Ed. Richard Taylor. London: BFI.

    Google Scholar 

  • Epstein, Jean. 1988. Photogénie and the Imponderable (1935). In French Film Theory and Criticism, A History/Anthology, 1907–1939, vol. 2: 1929–1939, ed. Richard Abel, 188–192. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2012. The Slow Motion of Sound. In Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, ed. Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul, 381–382. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Judovitz, Dalia. 1996. Anemic Vision in Duchamp: Cinema as Readymade. In Dada and Surrealist Film, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli, 46–57. Cambridge: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Livingston, Paisley. 2008. Recent Work on Cinema as Philosophy. Philosophy Compass 3 (4): 590–603.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2009. Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Loht, Shawn. 2015. Phenomenological Preconditions of the Concept of Film-as-Philosophy. Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology 2 (2): 171–185.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Michelson, Annette. 1969. Bodies in Space: Film as ‘Carnal Knowledge’. Artforum VII (6, February): 53–64.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1970. Art and the Structuralist Perspective. In On the Future of Art, 37–59. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, a Viking Compass Book.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1984. Introduction. In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, xv–lxi. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. 1987. Toward Snow. In The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney, 172–183. New York: Anthology Film Archives.

    Google Scholar 

  • Plantinga, Carl R. 1997. Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ponech, Trevor. 2006. The Substance of Cinema. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (1, Winter): 187–198.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Russell, Bruce. 2006. The Philosophical Limits of Film. In Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology, ed. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi, 387–390. Malden: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Searle, John R. 2015. Seeing Things as They Are: A Theory of Perception. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Sheehan, Rebecca A. 2012. Stan Brakhage, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the Renewed Encounter with the Everyday. Screen 53 (2, Summer): 118–135.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sinnerbrink, Robert. 2011. New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images. London: Continuum.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smith, Murray. 2016. Film, Philosophy, and the Varieties of Aesthetic Value. In Current Controversies in the Philosophy of Film, ed. Katherine Thomas-Jones, 182–201. New York: Routledge.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Smuts, Aaron. 2009. Film as Philosophy: In Defense of a Bold Thesis. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67 (4, Fall): 409–420.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Turvey, Malcolm. 2016. Epstein, Sound and the Return to Classical Film Theory. Mise au Point 8. https://journals.openedition.org/map/2039. Accessed 11 July 2017.

  • Vertov, Dziga. 1984. In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wartenberg, Thomas E. 2006. Beyond Mere Illustration: How Films Can be Philosophy. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (1, Winter): 19–32.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2007. Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy. London: Routledge.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • ———. 2016. Film as Philosophy: The Pro Position. In Current Controversies in the Philosophy of Film, ed. Katherine Thomas-Jones, 165–181. New York: Routledge.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA

    Malcolm Turvey

Authors
  1. Malcolm Turvey
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA

    Noël Carroll

  2. William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ, USA

    Laura T. Di Summa

  3. Baton Rouge Community College, Baton Rouge, LA, USA

    Shawn Loht

Additional information

Dedicated to Annette Michelson

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Turvey, M. (2019). Avant-Garde Films as Philosophy. In: Carroll, N., Di Summa, L.T., Loht, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_25

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation