New

Philosophies
of Film

i
 ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY

Aesthetics and Film, Katherine Thomson-Jones

Aesthetics: The Key Thinkers, edited by Alessandro Giovannelli
Terrence Malick: Filmmaker and Philosopher, Robert Sinnerbrink
The Continental Philosophy of Film Reader, edited by Joseph Westfall
The Political Power of Visual Art, Daniel Herwitz

ii
 New
Philosophies
of Film
An Introduction to
Cinema as a Way
of Thinking
Second Edition

Robert Sinnerbrink

iii
 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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iv
To Louise, my favourite movie companion, and to
Eva and Miriam, film-philosophers of the future!

v
vi
 Contents

New Preface: Philosophical Film Theory Today ix

Acknowledgments xii

Introduction: Why Did Philosophy

Go to the Movies? 1

Part I The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

1 The Empire Strikes Back: Critiques of ‘Grand
Theory’ 21

2 The Rules of the Game: New Ontologies

of Film 39

3 Adaptation: Philosophical Approaches

to Narrative 65

Part II From Cognitivism and

Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy
4 A.I. Artificial Intelligence: Cognitivism Goes
to the Movies 91

5 Body Double: Adventures in

Phenomenology 117
vii
viii Contents

6 Bande à part: Deleuze’s Cine-Philosophy 141

7 Now, Voyager: Cavell as Film-Philosopher 171

8 Scenes from a Marriage: On the Idea of Film

as Philosophy 199

9 What is Cinematic Ethics? Cuáron’s Roma

(2018) as Case Study 225

Part III Cinematic Thinking

10 Photobiographies: The ‘Derrida’
Documentaries as Film-Philosophy 255

11 Planet Melancholia: Romanticism, Mood and

Cinematic Ethics 279

12 Television as Philosophy: Reflections on

Black Mirror 303

Conclusion: A Dialogue on the Future

of Film-Philosophy 329
Notes 339
Filmography 361
References 371
Index 401
 New Preface: Philosophical
Film Theory Today

At first blush, film and philosophy appear to be uneasy bedfellows. Going to

the movies and having a philosophical conversation seem to share little in
common. Philosophers feature very rarely in films, although it is usually
intriguing when they do. In a memorable scene from Jean-Luc Godard’s
Vivre sa vie (1962), for example, the beautiful Nana [Anna Karina] engages
a ‘real life’ philosopher [Brice Parain] in conversation at a café. In good
existentialist fashion, they talk of the necessity to talk, the difficulty of saying
what one means, the way speech and action conflict, whether one can speak
and live at once. At one point during the philosopher’s monologue, Nana
turns to the camera, addressing us with her ambiguous, mesmerising gaze.
Her gesture is simple but poses many questions: what is this experience we
call ‘cinema’? How are film and philosophy related? Can their relationship be
a true meeting of minds (and bodies)? Can films ‘do philosophy’?
This book is dedicated to these questions, exploring, in particular, the
fascinating and complex relationship between film and philosophy. From
strangers in the night they have become more than good friends. After a
longstanding suspicion or indifference (at least on the part of philosophy), the
recent flourishing of philosophical writing on film has been a very welcome
surprise. The idea that film can contribute to philosophy has gained traction
and opened up new ways of thinking about both film and philosophy. What are
these ‘new philosophies of film?’ Why have philosophy and film theory come
together in such fruitful (and sometimes fractious) ways? New Philosophies of
Film examines the new wave of philosophical film theory that has challenged
the older paradigm (so-called ‘Grand Theory’), drawn on the best of the history
of film theory, and combined these insights with novel philosophical approaches
to cinema. These philosophical approaches are distinguished by their retrieval
and renewal of the core problems of classical film theory, including the ontology
of film, the question of film as art, how we understand and interpret film, the
role of emotional engagement and moral evaluation and the question of film
and ethics. In the chapters that follow I focus on three major currents: the
analytic-cognitivist turn in film theory; an alternative stream (inspired by
Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze) that explores how film and philosophy

ix
x New Preface

respond to shared problems (film-philosophy); and the idea of ‘film as

philosophy’ (that films not only illustrate but can ‘do’ philosophy in their own
way). Because it is better to demonstrate than to describe a way of thinking, the
final three chapters of this book offer diverse examples of ‘film-philosophy’ in
action, focusing on individual works – documentary, cinematic and televisual
– in order to demonstrate how these works can be regarded as cases of ‘cinematic
thinking’ that contribute to philosophical and ethical understanding. In doing
so, I wish to show how the relationship between film and philosophy has the
possibility of becoming a mutually transformative encounter: an aesthetic
experiment in new ways of thinking.
In the ten years since the first edition of this book, there have been
remarkable and dramatic changes in the field of film theory and philosophy of
film (or what we might conveniently term ‘philosophical film theory’). The first
is the rise and impact of new digital media, the digital revolution in cinema
that has profoundly transformed how films are shot, produced, distributed and
viewed. This shift, from analogue to digital media, has major implications for
some of the ‘classical’ questions of film theory, in particular concerning the
ontology of the moving image, emotional engagement, moral evaluation and
the aesthetic possibilities of the transformed medium. I address these questions
in the chapters that follow, expanding my discussion where required in order
to take into account the ways in which the new digital forms of image-making
have shifted or transformed our more familiar forms of cinematic engagement.
The second is a more far-reaching and substantial synthesis of seemingly
disparate theoretical approaches, particularly phenomenological and
cognitivist approaches, but also drawing on neuroscientific and bioculturalist
perspectives, which have been brought to bear on areas that hitherto did not
receive much attention from these perspectives, notably the art film and
television. The third is the resurgence of ethico-political approaches to cinema,
drawing on feminist and gender theory, critical race theory, and post-
colonialist/critical theory perspectives. All of these recent developments are
important in their own right but they have also influenced, shaped and
redirected various strands of film theory and film-philosophy in ways that
deserve greater critical attention. I have therefore endeavoured to acknowledge
and incorporate discussion concerning these more recent developments in
relevant chapters of the book, which in the process has subtly broadened and
transformed my study in enriching and rewarding ways.
Finally, I have updated and diversified the selection of three case studies in
the concluding three chapters of the book. I focus on two philosophical
documentaries, Derrida (Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman 2002) and
 New Preface xi

D’ailleur Derrida (Safaa Fathy 1999), and on Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011),
but also extend my discussion to television, namely, the award-winning series
Black Mirror (2011–2019). I treat these audiovisual works as ways of not only
exploring the relationship between film and philosophy, or more particularly,
between film and ethics, but as cases of ‘cinematic thinking’ in action. My
rationale for doing this was to broaden the horizon of cinematic works that
could be approached from philosophical perspectives and that could be
regarded as contributing to philosophical understanding but as doing so in
specifically cinematic (and televisual) ways. Most philosophical work on cinema
has focused on (popular) narrative film, with some attention given to art cinema,
but it has only recently begun to explore documentary film. Television is another
domain that has only recently attracted serious philosophical, aesthetic and
theoretical attention, and is where we can find some of the most original,
dynamic and creative works today. Accordingly, I attempt to showcase some of
this philosophically rich and ethically engaging work in my concluding chapters
on challenging, creative and thought-provoking documentary, cinematic and
televisual works. They aim to show what it might mean to approach and
experience cinematic works as ‘ways of thinking’.
A book has many parents who contribute to the conception and maturing
of ideas that eventually appear in written form. This is especially true for
revisiting and revising my book for its second edition, which only lengthens
and deepens the list of people to whom I owe many debts, intellectual and
otherwise. Among the many friends and colleagues who have encouraged me
over the years, I owe a special debt of thanks to the following people, whether
for inspiring conversation, constructive suggestions or invaluable support:
Mathew Abbott, Louise D’Arcens, Lucy Bolton, Michelle Boulous-Walker,
William Brown, Romana Byrne, Havi Carel, Alan Cholodenko, Felicity Colman,
Amy Coplan, Damian Cox, David Davies, Stefan Deines, Ludo de Roo, Jean-
Philippe Deranty, Lisabeth During, Joanne Faulkner, Chris Falzon, the Film-
Philosophy editorial crew, Daniel Frampton, Berys Gaut, Michael Goddard,
Greg Hainge, Julian Hanich, Ilona Honigsto, Laleen Jayamanne, Fiona Jenkins,
Noel King, Andrew Klevan, Marguerite LaCaze, Tarja Laine, Paisley Livingston,
Adrian Martin, Brigid Martin, David Martin-Jones, Kathryn Millard, Matilda
Mroz, John Mullarkey, Tom Murray, Ted Nannicelli, Karen Pearlman, Mairead
Phillips, Patricia Pisters, Murray Pomerance, Daniel Ross, Martin Rossouw,
William Rothman, Libby Saxton, Martin Seel, Dan Shaw, Murray Smith,
Richard Smith, David Sorfa, Jane Stadler, Lisa Trahair, Greg Tuck, Julia
Vassilieva, Thomas Wartenberg, Mario Wenning, Saige Walton, Catherine
Wheatley and Magdalena Zolkos.
 Acknowledgments

Some of the chapters in this book draw on material previously published

elsewhere. I would like to thank the editors of the following publications for
their kind permission to use material from the following texts.

For the Introduction and Chapter 1:

Sinnerbrink, R. (2010), ‘Disenfranchising Film? On the Analytic-Cognitivist
Turn in Film Theory’, in J. Reynolds, E. Mares, J. Williams and J. Chase (eds),
Postanalytic and Metacontinental: Crossing Philosophical Divides, 173–189,
London and New York: Continuum.
Sinnerbrink, R. (2011), ‘Re-enfranchising Film: Towards a Romantic Film-
Philosophy’, in H. Carel and G. Tuck (eds), New Takes in Film-Philosophy,
25–47, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

For Chapter 3:
Sinnerbrink, R. (forthcoming), ‘Cinematic Experience: From Moving Images to
VR’, in K. Stevens (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Film Theory, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

For Chapter 4:
Sinnerbrink, R. (2010), ‘Cognitivism Goes to the Movies (Review Article):
Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga (eds), The Routledge Companion to
Philosophy and Film; Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers: American Film and the
Spectator’s Experience; Torben Grodal, Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion,
Culture, and Film’, Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, 4 (1): 83–98.
Sinnerbrink, R. (2019), ‘Guest Editor’s Introduction: Phenomenology
Encounters Cognitivism’, Projections, 13 (2): 1–19.

For Chapter 5:
Sinnerbrink, R. (2007), ‘Review of Filmosophy’, Projections, 1 (2): 109–115.
Sinnerbrink, R. (2019), ‘Guest Editor’s Introduction: Phenomenology
Encounters Cognitivism’, Projections, 13 (2): 1–19.
For Chapter 6:
Sinnerbrink, R. (2016), Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience through
Film, Chapter 3, London and New York: Routledge.

xii
 Acknowledgments xiii

For Chapter 7:
Sinnerbrink, R. (2016), Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience through
Film, Chapter 2, London and New York: Routledge.

For Chapter 9:
Sinnerbrink, R. (2016), Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience through
Film, Chapter 1, London and New York: Routledge.

For Chapter 10:

Sinnerbrink R. (2016), ‘Photobiographies: The “Derrida” Documentaries as
Film-Philosophy’, Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies, Spring.
Available online: www.necsus-ejms.org/photobiographies-derrida-
documentaries-film-philosophy/ (accessed 11 July 2016).

For Chapter 11:

Sinnerbrink, R. (2014), ‘Anatomy of Melancholia’, Angelaki, 19 (4): 111–126.
Sinnerbrink, R. (2016), ‘Planet Melancholia: Romanticism, Mood, and
Cinematic Ethics’, Filozofski Vestnik, 37 (2), 95–113.

For Chapter 12:

Sinnerbrink, R. (2021), ‘Through a Screen Darkly: Black Mirror, Thought
Experiments, and Televisual Philosophy’, in D. Shaw, K. Marshall and J.
Rocha (eds), Philosophical Reflections on Black Mirror, 11–30, London and
New York: Bloomsbury.

I also wish to acknowledge the Australian Research Council (ARC) for

funding support made available through a Discovery Grant on ‘Film as
Philosophy: Understanding Cinematic Thinking’ (with Dr Lisa Trahair and
Dr Gregory Flaxman). This grant made possible much of the research
necessary for the writing of the first edition of this book. I would also like to
thank my students in the Department of Philosophy, Macquarie University,
whose enthusiasm and engagement while teaching my ‘Film and Philosophy’
course contributed a great deal to my thinking. My colleagues at Macquarie
University, both in the Department of Philosophy and the School of Media
and Communication, have been wonderful supporters, encouraging, advising
and engaging with my work in a stimulating and encouraging manner.

Chapter 12, ‘Television as Philosophy: Reflections on Black Mirror’, is an

extended version of a book chapter I contributed to a volume on Black
Mirror edited by the late Dan Shaw (then taken over and completed by
Kendall Marshall and James Rocha). Due to a range of other commitments,
I ran late submitting this chapter to Dan late in 2019, who did an outstanding
xiv Acknowledgments

job as editor and promptly returned my overly long text just before Christmas
with excellent suggestions for cutting and streamlining the argument. Dan
then left for a holiday in Spain in early 2020 but returned home with
pneumonia. He died, suddenly and tragically on March 3, 2020. His passing
was a great blow to the film and philosophy community not only in the
United States but across the globe. He was a warm and affable person, with
great generosity of spirit, wry sense of humour and plucky resilience. He was
also an important pioneer and standout contributor to our field (having
edited the seminal journal Film and Philosophy up to his death), and an
inspiring teacher and valued colleague. I dedicate this book to his memory.
 Introduction:
Why Did Philosophy
Go to the Movies?

Chapter Outline
A User’s Guide to Film and Philosophy 3
Why Philosophy of Film Now? 6
Philosophy of Film and Film-Philosophy 8
The ‘Post-Theory’ Landscape (for a Pluralist Film-Philosophy) 11
Design of This Book 15

Over the past one hundred years or so, philosophy has been rather averse to the
cinema. Among the great modern thinkers, film barely rates a mention. In 1906,
French vitalist Henri Bergson described the ‘cinematographic mechanism’ of
consciousness, only to then criticise the ‘cinematographic illusion’ by which we
compose (apparent) movement from an animated series of static images
(Bergson 2005 [1907]: 251–252). Despite an intriguing philosophical dialogue
touching on Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), German thinker Martin Heidegger
denounced film and photography as part of the reduction of art to an aesthetic
resource that reflects the pernicious essence of modern technology (Heidegger
1982: 15–17). French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty is the exception
proving the rule, having composed a short essay on film and (gestalt) psychology,
and making significant remarks on cinematic examples in his phenomenological
work (1964: 48–59; 2002). Despite Merleau-Ponty’s evident interest in the
movies, French phenomenology, on the whole, tended to ignore it. Indeed, it is
1
2 Introduction

only in recent years that phenomenology, including representatives from both

classical (Husserl) and French phenomenological traditions (Merleau-Ponty),
has been brought to bear on the theorisation of film (see Casebier 1991;
Sobchack 1992). Even Walter Benjamin’s enthusiasm for the culturally and
politically emancipatory dimensions of film was tempered by concern over its
role in the ‘aestheticisation of the political’ (2006: 269).
Within modern culture, moreover, film has typically been presented as ‘the
other’ of serious philosophy. After delivering his arduous Cambridge lectures,
Ludwig Wittgenstein, so the story goes, would rush to find solace in the front
row of the local movie theatre. Stress release from the rigours of conceptual
analysis is how Wittgenstein’s passion for Hollywood musicals, Westerns and
detective stories is often portrayed (see Gilmore 2005). Until recent decades,
particularly within the Anglo-American (analytic) tradition, this has also
been true of philosophy’s relationship with film: an amusing distraction,
aesthetic example or theoretical resource, perhaps, but not something having
intrinsic philosophical worth. That a philosopher like Stanley Cavell felt
obliged to explain his decision to take movies – like romantic comedies and
melodramas – seriously as philosophy is telling in this regard. As Cavell
remarks, however, the great mystery is to explain why philosophy has ignored
film, and why their relationship has been so ambivalent. There is, on the one
hand, philosophy’s persistent avoidance of film, as though philosophy were
aware of film’s power to challenge it (Cavell 2008: xiv). On the other, there is
an affinity between film and philosophy (Cavell 1999: 25), with film presenting
a ‘moving image of scepticism’ that philosophy both stages and attempts to
dispel (Cavell 1981: 188–189). Such an encounter, however ambivalent,
should not mean that philosophy can now rejuvenate itself by appropriating
film. As this book will argue, the point is to show how the film-philosophy
encounter can open up new paths for thinking, exploring the idea that cinema
itself might be regarded as a way of thinking (through moving images).
New Philosophies of Film is intended as both an introduction to the dynamic
new wave of philosophising on film and as an independent contribution to this
developing model of interdisciplinary engagement. It welcomes both passionate
film enthusiast and dedicated philosophical reader (who may well be one and the
same), and aims to explore some of the most significant developments in
philosophical film theory over the past two-and-a-half decades, showing how the
emerging field of film and philosophy is one of the most exciting in aesthetics
today. This hybrid field, however, has not emerged in a vacuum. The rise of the
new philosophies of film, which have drawn on analytic philosophy, aesthetics
and cognitivist psychology, but also on phenomenology and various currents of
 Introduction 3

Continental philosophy, has coincided with the decline of 1970s and 1980s screen
theory. This interdisciplinary approach is also distinguished by its efforts to recast
many of the problems of classical film theory – concerning the ontology of film,
the question of film as art, questions of narrative, character, authorship and genre,
the role of emotional engagement and the question of ethics and film – within a
philosophically renewed and theoretically transformed paradigm (supplanting
the older paradigm of psychoanalytic-semiotic film theory). Such a shift is as
much motivated by the questions and challenges raised by the transition to
digital media, which has renewed speculation and reflection on classic aesthetic
or philosophical questions concerning the ontology of moving images, realism
and representation, distinctions between cinema and other visual arts, and
the relationship between fictional and non-fictional forms of audiovisual
narration. Whatever one’s view on this shift, which some regard as a productive
transformation, and others as a ‘hostile takeover’, this new wave of philosophical
film theory, which I will call the analytic-cognitivist paradigm, has become
increasingly influential over the past two decades (see Elsaesser 2019: 19–31;
Nannicelli and Taberham 2014; Rodowick 2007a, 2007b).1
At the same time, however, this paradigm is being challenged by alternative
philosophical approaches, which have also moved away from the earlier
paradigm of screen/film theory. In later chapters, I explore this alternative way
of approaching the film-philosophy relationship, namely the idea of ‘film as
philosophy’ (see Mulhall 2002, 2008; Rodowick 2014, 2015; Sinnerbrink 2013a,
2019a; Wartenberg 2007). In doing so, I argue for greater interactive engagement
between the more traditional philosophy of film, and the minor, interdisciplinary
current of what I call film-philosophy, an alternative approach that combines
aesthetic receptivity to film with philosophically informed reflection. My aim
is to elucidate the productive possibilities for rethinking the film-philosophy
relationship that are opened up by the encounter between new philosophies of
film and film-philosophy, as contrasting yet complementary ways of exploring
the philosophical dimensions of moving images.2

A User’s Guide to Film

and Philosophy
Interest in the film-philosophy relationship has burgeoned in the last three
decades, with a striking surge of interest in philosophical responses to
questions of classical film theory, and enthusiastic exploration of the idea of
4 Introduction

‘film as philosophy’.3 While film theory has retreated from psychoanalytical

and semiotic theorising, philosophers have discovered the manifold pleasures
of film. We can now speak of the ‘philosophy of film’ as an independent field
with its own theoretical debates, competing schools and research
programmes.4 Although Stanley Cavell published works on the topic during
the 1970s (The World Viewed was first published in 1971), philosophy of film
only emerged as a specialty area from the late 1980s through to the late
1990s.5 This was also the period in which the prevailing paradigm of film
theory – what Bordwell and Carroll dubbed ‘Grand Theory’ – began to enter
a theoretical and disciplinary crisis. Although establishing a clear causal
connection is difficult, one can venture that the philosophical critique of the
troubled paradigm of psychoanalytic-semiotic film theory was one important
factor in its decline. This was accompanied by simultaneous critiques from
historicist film studies, the emerging cognitivist film theory approach, from
‘Continental’ philosophical approaches, as well as internal critiques of film
theory (including from the perspective of ‘postmodernist’ forms of cultural
studies) (see Rodowick 2007a, 2007b; Elsaesser 2019: 19–31).
As D. N. Rodowick confirms, during the 1980s film studies was challenged
on three fronts, suffering a ‘triple displacement’ by historical studies, cognitivist
psychology and analytic philosophy (2007a: 94–95). According to Rodowick,
much of what is now dismissed as ‘Grand Theory’ – inspired by psychoanalytic
theory, semiotics, French structuralism and post-structuralism – is better
described as ‘aesthetics or philosophy’; such an approach should nonetheless
be set aside, Rodowick argues, in favour of an ethically oriented humanistic
‘film philosophy’ (as distinct from theory) (Rodowick 2007a: 100).6 Indeed, the
philosophical approaches to cinema in Cavell and Deleuze – which inspired
what I am calling film-philosophy – can contribute, as Rodowick remarks, to ‘a
philosophy of the humanities critically and reflexively attentive in equal
measure to its epistemological and ethical commitments’ (2007a: 92). For
Rodowick, however, the combined analytic-cognitivist attack on ‘Theory’ for
its lack of scientific credibility and philosophical cogency has had the
unfortunate effect of serving as ‘a de facto epistemological dismissal of the
humanities’ (2007a, 98). Whether Rodowick’s sweeping statement is true of
‘the humanities’ in general – and there are good reasons to distinguish ‘Theory’
from ‘the humanities’ and to acknowledge that some social-scientific
approaches have been as critical of ‘Theory’ as Bordwell and Carroll have – the
point remains that psychoanalytic-semiotic film theory was subjected to
critique for its theoretical and argumentative shortcomings as well as for its
ethico-political justifications for speculative theoretical claims.7
 Introduction 5

At the risk of generalisation, we can define contemporary philosophical

work on film via a number of competing currents. While psychoanalytical and
semiotic orthodoxies have entered a decline, other theoretical perspectives
remain important (cultural studies, media theory, post-colonialism, gender
studies, reception studies, production histories, historical and cross-cultural
approaches and so on). On the other hand, ‘post-Theory’, cognitivism, analytic
philosophy and more recently neuroscience and evolutionary bioculturalist
approaches have coalesced into a formidable research paradigm. The latter
maintains that film studies, ideally, should draw on the best available science,
be compatible with philosophical naturalism and demonstrate, where possible,
cumulative, testable results. This does not mean, however, that film theory
should become a science, or take natural scientific models as its foundation or
basis, or be required to produce scientifically quantifiable results (although
empirical research is welcome) (see Nannicelli and Taberham 2014). Rather,
the claim is that, among other theoretical approaches, engagement with
naturalistic approaches – whether natural scientific or social scientific – can
make an important contribution to addressing shared problems defining the
philosophical theorisation of film, even those more traditionally associated
with ideological and cultural-political concerns (see Plantinga 2018; Smith
2017). We can define these competing approaches, respectively, as the
culturalist-historicist versus the cognitivist-naturalist approaches to film.8
Against these currents we can also point to the recent emergence of film-
philosophy as a distinctive approach, the founding figures of which I take to
be Cavell and Deleuze (see also Elsaesser 2019: 19–22). Their groundbreaking
works treated film as an artform capable of engaging in a distinctly cinematic
exploration of philosophically important problems (such as scepticism,
movement, time and thought), and one that could provoke philosophy to
respond conceptually to what film explores through projected image-worlds
(see Cavell 1979, 1981, 1996; Deleuze 1986, 1989). A number of important
works, inspired by Cavell and/or Deleuze, have appeared in recent years,
distinguished by their critical performance of variations on the film-
philosophy theme (Bersani and Dutoit 2004; Brown 2013a; Elsaesser 2019;
Frampton 2006; Früchtl 2017; LaRocca 2020; Martin-Jones 2006, 2019;
Mulhall 2002, 2008; Mullarkey 2009; Peretz 2008; Phillips 2008; Pippin 2010,
2012, 2017, 2020; Pisters 2012; Rushton 2011). Such a perspective is distinct
from the more conventional ‘philosophy of film’, which is usually, but not
exclusively, affiliated with the cognitivist-naturalist approach, although there
are also interesting crosscurrents between dominant traditions (see
Mullarkey 2009: 133–155; Sinnerbrink 2019a).
6 Introduction

To anticipate the argument that I shall develop in this book, one thing that
distinguishes the approaches of Cavell and Deleuze from prevailing Anglo-
American philosophy of film is their questioning of the ‘Platonic prejudice’
against art, or what Arthur Danto has called the ‘philosophical
disenfranchisement of art’ (1986): the attempt to subsume works of art into a
philosophical discourse that enables us to master, comprehend and
subordinate the work to theoretical or moral concerns. Along with Cavell and
Deleuze, other film philosophers (such as Jacques Rancière 2004, 2006) have
engaged in similar critiques of this Platonic prejudice concerning film (see
Wartenberg 2007: 15–31), highlighting the significance of affect, pleasure and
thought in our experience of film. What unites many of these thinkers is
another anti-Platonic gesture: an ethico-political commitment to the inherent
egalitarianism of the cinema as a genuinely popular technological artform
that has inherently democratic potentials. By virtue of its technological
capabilities of recording, cinema is able to make any subject or event worthy
of audiovisual temporal presentation, bestowing a visual presence and
aesthetic fascination upon the most ordinary objects or scenes. It exercises a
generous ‘ontological equality’ between all kinds of entities, whether persons,
objects or events, depicted on screen (see Cavell 1979: 37). Indeed, it belongs
to what Rancière calls the aesthetic regime of art, which undoes the hierarchical
orders of representation structuring more traditional regimes, opens up
experience to a plurality of forms of representation, and thus anticipates the
possibility of an aesthetic critique of more hierarchical or alienated forms of
modern experience (2004: 20–30). It is this third philosophical approach to
film – the emergence of film-philosophy – that I explore in later chapters of
this book, as well as the possibility of a distinctive kind of ‘cinematic thinking’
that resists reduction to philosophical theory.

Why Philosophy of Film Now?

A brief look at the history of film theory shows that philosophy and film share
a longstanding affinity. All the great classical film theorists – Münsterberg,
Arnheim, Balázs, Eisenstein, Bazin, Kracauer, Morin and the like – engaged in
philosophical reflection: on film as an art, as a medium, in regard to its
ontology, on the question of realism, on cinematic expression and on its
cultural-ideological significance (see Colman 2009; Herzogenrath 2017;
Rawls, Neiva and Gouveia 2019). After this promising start, however,
philosophical reflection on film remained more or less dormant in the
 Introduction 7

Anglophone world.9 Leading philosopher of film Noël Carroll cites both

historical and intellectual reasons for this peculiar state of affairs (2008).
Historically speaking, as Carroll notes, it has taken a couple of generations for
there to be enough philosophers (within the Anglophone world) conversant
with film to create a ‘critical mass’ of philosophically minded film theorists
(2008: 1–2). Intellectually speaking, film theory abandoned its traditional
‘philosophical’ concerns, seemingly in the late 1980s and 1990s, and embraced
a ‘culturalist’ approach that left, in Carroll’s words, an intellectual vacuum that
philosophers have been eager to fill (2008: 2). By ‘philosophy’ Carroll means
specifically Anglo-American philosophy, rather than the broad sweep of
European as well as other Anglophone traditions. As for the ‘intellectual
vacuum’ claim, Carroll implies that the film theory produced during those
decades was in crisis, had begun to decline in relevance, and thus was ripe for
philosophical supplantation. On this view, philosophy’s intervention, at least
to its adherents, was to save film theory from intellectual irrelevance and
moral-political corruption. Unsurprisingly, sympathetic philosophers and
film theorists have often met this ‘humanitarian intervention’ with a mixture
of exasperation and irritation (see Brown 2010; Frampton 2006). So what was
this crisis in film theory to which philosophy responded so enthusiastically?
Although I shall consider the critique of ‘Grand Theory’ in more detail in
Chapter 1, we can sum up this critique, in the meantime, as resting on the
rejection of psychoanalytic, hermeneutic and ideological-critical approaches
to theorising film. At the same time, the strongly political orientation of
earlier forms of film theory – its explicit commitment to Marxist and
feminist theory and politics – has been significantly neutered or replaced in
recent years with a renewed focus on related strands of identity politics
recalling the ‘cultural politics’ of the 1990s. Indeed, the emerging paradigm
of philosophical film theory went ‘back to the future’, seeking to retrieve
some of the traditional problems of classical film theory, and addressing
these by drawing on the resources of analytic philosophy, cognitivist
psychology and related empirical disciplines (including neuroscience and
evolutionary biology). It could be described as a naturalistic rather than
hermeneutic paradigm (more concerned with explanatory theories drawing
upon the natural sciences than humanistic forms of reflection, analysis or
interpretation). The new paradigm embraces empirical and cognitivist
psychology, the argumentative techniques of analytic philosophy, rejects
basing theoretical inquiry on ideological-critical and politically committed
approaches, and downplays the former paradigm’s central emphasis on film
interpretation as key to film theorisation. Call this the analytic-cognitivist
8 Introduction

paradigm of film theory (an ungainly rubric that nonetheless captures

shared features of the new paradigm).
But does this account tell the whole story? Although there is a link
between the dismissal of ‘Continental’-style film theory and the rise of the
new philosophy of film, the picture involves far more than a shift from
‘Continental’ to analytic-cognitivist paradigms. There are important thinkers,
for example, who do not readily fit into this neat division (like Stanley
Cavell). There are ‘Continentals’ whose work on film is rationalist in
orientation (like Alain Badiou 2005);‘Continental’ thinkers whose philosophy
of film has certain ‘cognitivist’ elements (like Merleau-Ponty, even Deleuze);
and theorists whose work crosses over between cognitivism, ethics, cultural
theory and ‘Continental’ phenomenology or philosophy (see Brown 2013a,
Buckland 2009a, 2009b; Laine 2011; Pisters 2012; Sobchack 1992; Stadler
2008). As these remarks suggest, the most interesting work in this emerging
field cuts across this divide in exciting and innovative ways, retaining what
was most valuable in the older paradigm but sharpening its theoretical focus
thanks to the new one. There are now endeavours underway to overcome the
‘divide’ between humanistic and naturalistic approaches, and to find new
ways of theorising film in a pluralistic manner, a ‘third culture’ approach that
would overcome the opposition between the ‘two cultures’ of science and the
humanities (see Smith 2017). So how should we describe the competing
contemporary approaches to philosophising on film?

Philosophy of Film and

Film-Philosophy
Here I would like to propose a distinction between two ways of doing ‘film
and philosophy’: 1) philosophy of film, a theoretical explanatory approach to
examining recognised or established aesthetic problems arising from the
medium, reflecting on and analysing the nature of film and our experience
of it from a philosophical point of view; and 2) film-philosophy, an aesthetic,
self-reflective, exploratory or experimental approach that investigates the
encounter between film and philosophy, putting philosophy into dialogue
with film as an alternative way of thinking, and exploring the idea that film
can contribute to philosophical understanding via cinematic means.
Philosophy of film belongs to the traditional ‘theories of X’ approach
that seeks to provide, for example, a conceptual definition of, empirical
 Introduction 9

investigation into or philosophical critique of theories claiming to account

for X (where ‘X’ means film, motion pictures, moving images and so on). In
the ‘philosophy of X’ approach, philosophy analyses and theorises its object
conceptually precisely because the latter cannot do so. Philosophy of film is
essentially a part of aesthetics, which for a long time had ignored cinema,
despite Ricciotto Canudo’s acknowledgment of it as le septieme art back in
the 1920s. Early and later film theorists (e.g. Münsterberg, Balázs and
Arnheim) drew on philosophical aesthetics in order to theorise the new
medium. Film theory, however, soon departed from aesthetics and
phenomenology (which survived in figures like Dufrenne, Ayfre and
Meunier), and adopted semiology, psychoanalytic theory and Marxist-
Brechtian theories of ideology as preferred theoretical approaches. Within
the Anglophone world, moreover, cinema remained a neglected, even
precarious precinct of the artworld, only rarely frequented and then only
perfunctorily, which is why philosophers like Danto and Cavell drew on
Panofsky (1997 [1934]) and Bazin (1967 [1958–1959]) in their reflections
on the ontology of cinema (see Danto 1979 and Cavell 1979 [1971]). Today,
however, philosophy of film has become an accepted, even respectable, part
of the field of aesthetics, which has been energised by the ‘naturalistic turn’
embracing cognitivist psychology, bioculturalism and the neurosciences,
and begun to explore more pluralistic, interdisciplinary encounters between
philosophical traditions and perspectives (see Wartenberg 2015 [2004]).
The alternative position, ‘film-philosophy’, is a style of philosophical
exploration that questions the common tendency to privilege conceptual
theorisation over film aesthetics (see Sinnerbrink 2019a). Film-philosophy
argues that film should be regarded as engaging in philosophically relevant
reflection via the medium of film itself, or approached as being capable of a
distinctively cinematic kind of thinking (as I explore in Part III of this book).
It is a way of aesthetically disclosing, perhaps also transforming, our
experience of the modern world through cinema; one that prompts
philosophy to reflect upon its own limits or even to experiment with new
forms of philosophical expression thanks to its encounter with cinema.
Film-philosophy, which I suggest emerges in its current form largely inspired
by Deleuze and Cavell, provides an alternative tradition of philosophical
film theory – a term accommodating both philosophy of film and film-
philosophy – that overlaps with philosophy of film in its concern with film
aesthetics as well as the moral-ethical dimensions of cinematic experience. It
is an approach that treats cinema less as an object of theoretical analysis than
a partner in dialogue or provocation to thought.
10 Introduction

From this point of view, what I am calling film-philosophy has a history

traceable to the early days of film theory. The latter was generally inspired to
treat film by subsuming it under the traditional canon of the fine arts, only
to find that this new hybrid medium posed challenges and raised possibilities
no longer intelligible within these inherited canons of art. Thinkers and
practitioners in the more radical and speculative wing of film-philosophy, such
as Jean Epstein, proclaimed that cinema was a new mode of thinking, one that
traversed and perhaps even surpassed philosophy, or that called for a new way
of expressing this distinctively cinematic mode of thought (Sinnerbrink 2013a).
Although this more speculative dimension of film-philosophy – what critics
like Paisley Livingston (2006) would later call the ‘bold’ film as philosophy
thesis – survives in some strands of contemporary Deleuzian film-philosophy
(for example, Frampton’s Filmosophy, 2006), the more ‘moderate’ version of
film-philosophy, drawing not only on Deleuze or Cavell but on phenomenology,
critical theory (Walter Benjamin) and various strands of Continental
philosophy (from Heidegger and Levinas to Nancy and Rancière), has become
a thriving ethico-aesthetic counterpart to the more theoretically oriented
analytic-cognitivist philosophy of film (see Botz-Bornstein 2011; Colman 2009;
Westfall 2018).
Instead of mapping these competing approaches onto the dubious
analytic/‘Continental’ divide, we might do better to rethink these as expressing
a distinction between rationalist and romanticist approaches to theorising film.
These categories better capture the pertinent differences between practitioners
of the philosophy of film and advocates of film-philosophy. Rationalist
approaches to theory seek to provide explanatory models of various aspects of
film experience. They elaborate empirically grounded models of our experience
of moving images, of film ontology, of how we understand film narrative and
so on, and stress the importance of explanatory general theories relevant to
particular aspects of cinema and our experience of it. Romanticist approaches,
for their part, seek to reflect upon, interpret or extend the kind of aesthetic
experience that film evokes; they explore the ways in which cinema itself might
be understood as an artistic medium that is also a medium of thought.
Rationalist approaches tend to embrace various forms of naturalism in
aesthetics and be concerned with questions of ontology and traditional
aesthetics. Romanticist approaches tend to be more speculative, constructivist
and hermeneutic in orientation, concerned with questions pertaining to
metaphysics and ontology, but also adopt more transformative conceptions of
aesthetics, ethics and politics. They seek not only to explain and comprehend
but to question and transform our understanding of film experience and its
 Introduction 11

philosophical dimensions. They do not focus on conceptual analyses or

explanatory theories so much as describe and analyse the aesthetic experience
of cinema, and its ethical and political implications, in a philosophical discourse
that aims to elucidate and thus deepen our understanding of film and of the
transformative aesthetic experiences it makes possible.10
We might think here of how this divide between these two ways of doing
philosophical work on film reflects a deeper debate over how we conceptualise
the relationship between science and art. Is art, including film, reducible to
the kinds of explanatory theories informed by the best available science? Or
does the art of film express forms of meaning that resist reduction to
naturalistic explanatory accounts? Does film need philosophy in order to
explain what it is and how it works? Or can philosophy benefit from and be
transformed by its encounter with film as a way of thinking that complements
philosophical reflection? Is there a ‘third culture’ that could bring together
these competing traditions? How can we adopt what both philosophy of film
and film-philosophy have to offer in order to broaden and deepen our
experience and understanding of film? These are some of the key questions
that inform the lines of inquiry and argument explored in this book.
New Philosophies of Film offers an original account of the emergence of
these new approaches, maps out the conceptual terrain of debate that animates
them, and offers a modest contribution to philosophical film theory by arguing
for a more pluralist approach to the film-philosophy relationship. My proposal,
developed in the last four chapters, is that we shift our way of thinking (and
writing) in order to allow film to communicate with philosophy in more
aesthetically receptive ways; this means staging an encounter between film and
philosophy with the potential to bring out the philosophical contribution of
film, while rendering philosophy more open to other ways of thinking. We
might thereby open up new ways of thinking with film, approaching cinema
itself as a way of thinking. Such an approach could help ameliorate philosophy’s
traditional disenfranchisement of art, while also transforming how philosophy
might be put into practice in a dialogical relationship with cinema.

The ‘Post-Theory’ Landscape

(for a Pluralist Film-Philosophy)
One of the most dramatic developments since publishing the first edition of
this book has been the flourishing of film-philosophy as a recognised and
12 Introduction

dynamic area of inquiry, spanning film theory, philosophy, aesthetics and

ethics. Another has been the emergence of pluralist approaches to
philosophical film theory that combine theoretical approaches or that have
developed novel ways of addressing key problems arising in theorising the
medium and the nature of film experience. This reflects what we might call
the ‘post-Theory’ landscape that has become recognisable over the past
decade: the rise of a variety of theoretical perspectives adding complexity,
diversity and nuance to what I have described as the main currents of analytic-
cognitivist and film-philosophical theory. In what follows, I sketch some of
the main contours of this ‘post-Theory’ landscape and suggest that the
pluralistic approaches to philosophical film theory that have emerged offer
the most productive and promising paradigms for the future of our
interdisciplinary field of inquiry.
The term ‘post-Theory’, originally coined by Bordwell and Carroll, referred
to the analytic-cognitivist counter-current of film theory that emerged during
the 1990s (see Bordwell and Carroll 1996). As I discuss next chapter, the
analytic-cognitivist approach defined itself against so-called ‘Grand Theory’,
the then dominant paradigm of psycho-semiotic film theory deriving from
1970s screen theory that incorporated elements of French poststructuralist
philosophy into the theoretical frameworks of Freudo-Lacanian
psychoanalytic theory, structuralist semiotics, Althusserian apparatus theory
and Barthesian cultural semiology. Confronting the theoretical claims of
various strands of ‘Grand Theory’, Bordwell and Carroll, along with Richard
Allen and Murray Smith (1997), Greg Currie (1995), Joseph D. Anderson
(1996) and Carl Plantinga (2002), contributed to the development of a
formidable research paradigm combining analytic aesthetics with cognitive
psychology and other naturalistic approaches – a broad collection of related
theoretical works that I have called analytic-cognitivist philosophies of film.
On the more ‘Continental’ side of film theory, the extraordinary uptake of
Deleuze’s Cinema books, coupled with increasing acknowledgment of
Cavell’s philosophical work with film, has had a major impact on the
development of philosophical film theory and what I am calling ‘film-
philosophy’. As I discuss further in Chapter 6, after an initial ‘latency’ period
with little attention devoted to Deleuze’s monumental Cinema books,
published in the mid- to late 1980s, the uptake of Deleuzian film philosophy
accelerated dramatically from 2000 onwards, providing an alternative
‘theoretical’ paradigm for film theory in the wake of the demise of the ‘Grand
Theory’ approach.11 Over the past two decades, new waves of Deleuzian film
theory/film philosophy have emerged, moving, in what one is tempted to
 Introduction 13

call a ‘dialectical’ manner, from initial enthusiastic and faithful exegetical

explication of Deleuze’s concepts, to more comprehensive theoretical and
philosophical reflection and criticism of Deleuze’s formidable philosophical
model, to creative and critical appropriations and adaptations of Deleuzian
film-philosophy to a range of diverse traditions, genres, styles and film
cultures, notably with an emphasis on overcoming the ‘Eurocentrism’ of
Deleuze’s perspective (see, for example, Boljkovac 2013, Martin-Jones 2011,
2019; Martin-Jones and Brown 2012; Colman 2011; del Rio 2012; Flaxman
2011; Pisters 2012; Powell 2005, 2007; Rushton 2012). Indeed, the Deleuzian
paradigm of film-philosophy has also become increasingly pluralistic,
incorporating elements of other theoretical and philosophical perspectives,
but has also self-critically transformed itself in light of our diverse and plural
contemporary film cultures and historical-cultural contexts.
The other major current is Cavellian film-philosophy, often aligned with
Wittgensteinian approaches to philosophical aesthetics, which together
cross over the so-called ‘analytic/Continental’ divide (as in Mulhall’s and
Rodowick’s recent work, Mulhall drawing on Heidegger as well as Cavell,
and Rodowick drawing on both Deleuze and Cavell). This combination of
Cavellian film-philosophy, often coupled with a Wittgensteinian challenge
to the primacy of ‘theory’, provides rich and productive ways of articulating
the relationship between film and philosophy. The most prominent
representative of this current is Stephen Mulhall, whose work on Wittgenstein
and Cavell provided a basis for his groundbreaking text On Film (2002, 2008,
2016), which can be described as founding or sparking the ‘film as philosophy’
debate (as I discuss in Chapter 8). Mulhall’s framing of the film as philosophy
question – treating films not as illustrations of pre-existing philosophical
ideas or frameworks but as philosophical works in their own right – has
become profoundly influential as well as productively controversial. His
insistence on philosophical engagement with particular films, inspired by
Cavell, as well as valorising the ‘primacy of the particular’ in aesthetics,
extended the film as philosophy debate to popular genres and films drawn
from science fiction, action and thriller genres (focusing on films such as
Blade Runner, the Alien tetralogy, Minority Report and the Mission: Impossible
franchise). At the same time, such studies were also explicit attempts to
articulate the different ways in which we can understand film as contributing
to philosophy in original and distinctive ways.
A more sceptical Wittgensteinian strand of philosophical reflection on
film, less ‘Continental’ in orientation but critical of more analytic-cognitivist
approaches, can be found in the work of theorists such as Rupert Read and
14 Introduction

Malcolm Turvey (who both differ in regard to their particular version of

‘Wittgensteinian’ philosophy of film). Turvey, an early critic of both
‘Continental’-inspired Grand Theory and the more empirical and scientistic
strains of cognitivist theory, brings a Wittgensteinian approach to both
questioning the philosophical ‘speculative’ use of concepts in strands of
Continental film-philosophy (e.g. Deleuze) as well as the scientistic
tendencies of cognitivist theory (e.g. Grodal). Read, an early contributor to
the ‘film as philosophy’ debate, brings a Wittgensteinian sensibility to film as
a mode of thought, combining this with existentialist and ecological
philosophy in his recent work, which contributes to the emerging current of
cinematic ethics in original and creative ways. Central to Read’s philosophical
engagement with cinema is a profound commitment to the ways in which it
can engage with, or prompt, philosophical questioning and critical reflection,
particularly with respect to the existential, ethical and cultural-political
challenges raised by the ecological catastrophes of global climate change,
environmental destruction, species extinction and threats to biodiversity.
This emphasis on the ecological dimensions of cinematic engagement –
and emergence of ecocritical approaches – points to the importance of recent
ethico-politically engaged forms of philosophical film theory. This
ecologically oriented current, however, is to be distinguished from the recent
return of forms of philosophical film theory that have returned to the ‘identity
politics’ concerns of the 1990s. The new wave of politically oriented film
philosophical critiques, centred on contemporary forms of cultural ‘identity
politics’, focuses on how contemporary cinemas continue to both promulgate
and entrench, but also question, critique and displace, ideologically dominant
forms of subjectivity, identity and social as well as culturally diverse and
geopolitically inflected cultural values, norms and hierarchies. Such
‘interventionist’ and ‘committed’ modes of theoretical engagement – recalling
the politically oriented modes and values of 1970s screen theory – typically
foreground issues of gender diversity, ‘race’ and ethnicity, cultural diversity,
social privilege, colonialism/post-colonialism, the critique of globalisation
and the rise of ecocritical perspectives focusing on the relationship between
ecology, environmental concerns and new media technologies. In short, we
today find ourselves before a diverse and pluralistic ‘post-Theory’ landscape
that reflects a diverse and pluralistic set of theoretical perspectives, not to
mention cultural and intellectual contexts, with a more explicitly ‘global’ and
inclusive emphasis. They are all, in different ways, concerned to show how
philosophical film theory might address both its central theoretical problems
as well as contemporary ethical and political concerns.
 Introduction 15

Design of This Book

The aim of New Philosophies of Film is threefold: 1) to introduce major
developments in contemporary philosophies of film, from both so-called
analytic and ‘Continental’ perspectives; 2) to argue for new ways of thinking
about the film-philosophy relationship that have been opened up by theorists
working between these two traditions, as well as by those concerned with the
idea of film as philosophy; and 3) to explore the possibilities of a more
transformative relationship between film and philosophy. Throughout the book,
I argue that we should move beyond the adversarial battle between ‘Grand
Theory’ and ‘analytic-cognitivist’ paradigms, and attempt instead to understand
these new approaches as expressing two traditions or styles of thought: the
rationalist and romanticist strains of philosophical film theory. I characterise
these traditions by drawing the distinction between a more conventionally
theoretical and explanatory philosophy of film and a more aesthetic, self-
reflective, dialogical film-philosophy. The challenge for contemporary
practitioners, therefore, is to find ways of overcoming the rationalist-romanticist
divide; not to reprioritise one side of the binary opposition over the other, but
to synthesise the theoretical acumen of philosophy of film with film-
philosophy’s aesthetic receptivity to film’s distinctive ways of thinking.

In Part I, ‘The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn’, I outline the shift from so-called

‘Grand Theory’ to the new philosophies of film, and suggest that this shift
can be understood as recapitulating some of the classical problems of film
theory within a renewed theoretical paradigm (the analytic-cognitivist turn
in film theory). In Chapter 1, I present an account of the crisis in film/screen
theory and the Bordwell/Carroll attack on (‘Continental’) ‘Grand Theory’
that led to the analytic-cognitivist turn. In Chapter 2, I examine the return of
ontology in the new philosophies of film, which retrieve and renew problems
that preoccupied early film theory (such as the nature of the moving image,
or the question of whether film is art). In Chapter 3, I turn to questions of
narrative, authorship and ‘identification’ or character engagement. Contra
psychoanalytic theories of identification, contemporary philosophies of film
have developed sophisticated theories of narrative, authorship, affective
engagement and genre. The question, however, is whether these new
approaches have underplayed the role of pleasure, affect and thought that
more challenging kinds of film can evoke (what I call ‘cinematic thinking’).
Part II, ‘From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy’,
examines the ways in which contemporary philosophers of film have
16 Introduction

developed a variety of theoretical responses to the problems of classical film

theory. Chapter 4 examines the emergence of various cognitivist approaches,
including Bordwell’s and Carroll’s respective accounts of narrative and Carl
Plantinga’s moderate cognitivist theory of affective engagement and
cinematic genre. I consider both the possibilities and limits of cognitivist
philosophy of film in order to make a transition to my discussion of film
phenomenology in Chapter 5, which explores the question ‘what is film
phenomenology?’, canvasses both the pluralistic strands in these approaches,
focusing on embodiment, affect, subjectivity and ‘identity politics’. I also
consider some of the difficulties and challenges facing contemporary
phenomenological approaches. Chapters 6 and 7 explore Deleuze’s and
Cavell’s distinctive ways of doing film-philosophy as important alternatives
to the predominant analytic-cognitivist trends in contemporary philosophy
of film. Deleuze’s version of film-philosophy focuses on conceptualising
cinema from the viewpoint of the problems of movement and of time, rather
than exploring individual films or genres in depth. Cavell, by contrast,
develops a ‘classical’ ontology of film and explores its implications – in
particular the problem of scepticism – by way of detailed philosophical
‘readings’ of individual films (belonging to genres such as the remarriage
comedy or the melodrama of the unknown woman). Both thinkers share the
view that film can be an important response to scepticism or nihilism – our
loss of belief in the world – and thereby help us find ways of renewing a
sense of connection with the world. Chapter 8 explores the provocative idea
of ‘film as philosophy’, examining both proponents and critics of this
approach to film-philosophy; I challenge some of these critiques and argue
that the validity of this approach rests less on general theoretical arguments
than on robust and detailed philosophical film criticism. Chapter 9 turns to
the relationship between film and ethics, focusing on the ‘ethical turn’ in new
philosophies of film and exploring the concept of cinematic ethics: the idea
that film can be understood as a medium of ethical experience. This approach
to the ethical potential of cinema is put into practice by considering Alfonso
Cuarón’s award-winning familial drama, Roma (2018), an aesthically rich
and evocative example of how ethical and political concerns can be
articulated and expressed via cinematic means.
In Part III, ‘Cinematic Thinking’, I elaborate the potential of these new
approaches by exploring both non-fictional and fictional works by innovative
and accomplished filmmakers: the philosophical documentaries Derrida
(Kirby Dick and Amy Kofman, 2002) and D’ailleur, Derrida (Safaa Fathy,
1999); Lars von Trier’s ‘art disaster film’ Melancholia (2011); and Charlie
 Introduction 17

Brooker’s provocative dystopian ‘near future’ science fiction television series

Black Mirror (2011–2019). Apart from being remarkable works in their
own right, these films and television series can all be said, in different ways,
to both invite and at the same time ‘resist theory’: to invite philosophical
and ethical reflection but also to resist simple reduction to a particular
philosophical thesis, theoretical problem or moral debate. In doing so, they
open up new ways of thinking that present a challenge to more conventional
ways of doing philosophy (of film). These provide fascinating instances of
what I call cinematic thinking, which invites a more pluralistic and open way
of thinking (and writing) philosophically with film. My exploration of the
possibilities of film-philosophy concludes with an imagined debate between
critics and defenders of the idea of film-philosophy, one of whom argues for
taking further steps along this path of cinematic thinking. By staging this
encounter between film and philosophy, and exploring different ways that
cinema can elicit philosophical and ethical experiences, my hope is that this
book will suggest new ways of rethinking the film-philosophy relationship
and open up new ways of thinking about cinema itself as a way of thinking.12
18
 Part I
The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

1 The Empire Strikes Back: Critiques of

‘Grand Theory’
2 The Rules of the Game: New Ontologies
of Film
3 Adaptation: Philosophical Approaches to
Narrative

In Part I of this book I introduce some of the new approaches to philosophising

on film, which I have dubbed the analytic-cognitivist paradigm, analysing the
related strands of its critique of the preceding model of film theorising, so-
called ‘Grand Theory’. This approach has produced a host of powerful theories
addressing philosophical, psychological and aesthetic aspects of film (see
Livingston and Plantinga 2009). In Chapter 1, I examine the influential
critique of ‘Grand Theory’ developed during the 1990s by David Bordwell,
Noël Carroll, Richard Allen, Murray Smith and a host of other theorists.
Underlying this critique is a dispute between competing ways of doing
philosophy, associated with the vexed analytic/‘Continental’ philosophy
divide (see Critchley 2001; Glendinning 2006; Sinnerbrink 2010). After
addressing the critique of ‘Grand Theory’, I examine Carroll’s philosophy of
film (his ‘dialectical cognitivism’), which argues against ‘medium essentialism’
(the idea that film has a definable medium that would determine aesthetic
style and value); against interpretation (which conflates film theory with film

19
20 The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

criticism); and against the ‘film as language’ thesis (that language provides an
appropriate model for theorising film). I also consider Bordwell’s related
critique of film hermeneutics and of speculative film theory, suggesting that
there are problems with Bordwell’s critique of the hermeneutic (interpretative)
approach to film. Although generating a rich array of new theoretical work,
the analytic-cognitivist turn can also be challenged for its sometimes
‘reductionist’ approach to the complex aesthetic, hermeneutic and ideological
dimensions of film. In good dialectical fashion, the challenge is to incorporate
theoretical innovations in the new approaches, yet retain what remains
valuable in the older paradigms. The aim, in short, is to avoid both reductionism
and dogmatism (the bugbear of so-called ‘Grand Theory’).
 1
The Empire Strikes Back:
Critiques of ‘Grand Theory’

Chapter Outline
The Philosophical Turn in Film Theory 21
The Critique of ‘Grand Theory’ 23
Criticisms of ‘Grand Theory’ 25
Carroll’s Dialectical Cognitivism 29
Cognitivism Goes Pluralist 37

The Philosophical Turn

in Film Theory
As Adrian Martin observes (2006), every 15 years or so film studies seem to
undergo a distinctive kind of theoretical ‘turn’. From the psychoanalytic turn
of the 1960s and 1970s through the historiographic turn of the 1980s and
1990s, we now find ourselves, Martin remarks, in the midst of a ‘philosophic
turn’ that was sparked by Deleuze’s Cinema books in France and Cavell’s works
in the United States (2006: 76). In the 15 years or more since Martin’s
observation, we still appear to be working through this philosophical turn (see
Elsaesser 2019; Rawls, Neiva and Gouveia 2019). As Martin remarks, the
Deleuzian turn was followed by ‘various certified philosophers exploring their
passions for cinema – Bernard Stiegler, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Giorgio
Agamben, and Jacques Rancière, among others’ (2006: 76). To explain this

21
22 The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

‘philosophical turn’ in film theory, some philosophers have cited the general
cultural popularity of film, its pedagogical potential (particularly for teaching
philosophy) and the rise of cognitivist approaches in psychology and
philosophy of mind (see Carroll 2008; Gaut 2010; Shaw 2008). Although these
are all relevant factors, the most obvious reasons for the turn were institutional
and theoretical: the collapse of what Bordwell and Carroll (1996) called ‘Grand
Theory’ – 1970s and 1980s film theory that combined psychoanalytic, semiotic
and ideologico-critical perspectives – and its replacement by historicist,
culturalist and media-oriented approaches. In the so-called ‘theoretical
vacuum’ that followed the demise of ‘Grand Theory’ and the cultural-historicist
turn, so Carroll claims, philosophy offered the theoretical resources required
to renew the ‘classical’ problems of film theory that had been left in abeyance
by the previous paradigm (see Carroll 1988a, 1988b).
Whatever their theoretical orientations, the new wave of ‘post-Theory’
philosophers of film defined themselves against the older paradigm of
institutionalised film theory of the 1970s and 1980s inspired by psychoanalysis,
structuralism, semiotics, cultural theory and various strands of German critical
theory and French post-structuralism.1 The title of Noël Carroll’s 1988 book says
it all: Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (1988a).2
The new philosophical film theory challenging the prevailing theoretical models
styled itself as analytic rather than ‘Continental’ in inspiration; cognitivist rather
than psychoanalytic in approach; scientistic rather than hermeneutic in
orientation; concerned with drawing upon and applying empirical research
rather than engaging in speculation or interpretation. It aimed at a ‘rational’
understanding of film rather than at plumbing unconscious desire; and was
concerned to use plain language and theoretical arguments rather than what
critics derided as metaphysical jargon. With its preference for analytical argument
and empirically testable models, analytic-cognitivist film theory has become an
increasingly influential approach to the philosophical study of film.
The story becomes intriguing at this point, for the new philosophers of
film were challenging a very specific theoretical approach. Noël Carroll
usefully distinguishes between the then ‘contemporary film theory’
(semiological approaches that also drew on psychoanalytical and Marxist
theories of ideology) and ‘classical film theory’, which included earlier
theorists (like Arnheim and Bazin) along with more recent ones (such as
V. F. Perkins and Stanley Cavell) (1988a: 1).3 According to Carroll,
semiological film theory had a first wave (for example, Christian Metz),
taking its inspiration from linguist Ferdinand de Saussure; and then a second
wave (1970s screen theory), in which this semiological approach was
 Critiques of ‘Grand Theory’ 23

combined with (Lacanian) psychoanalytic and (Althusserian) Marxist

theories of ideology. This second wave of film theory also acquired a political
inflection during the mid- to late 1970s through the feminist analysis of
gender and a critique of the ideological function of Hollywood film.

The Critique of ‘Grand Theory’

Noël Carroll’s critique of ‘Grand Theory’ targets its uncritical commitment to
eclectic strains of ‘Continental’ philosophy (1996: 37–68). Indeed, Carroll
identifies what we might call ‘five obstructions’, pace Lars von Trier, to what he
argued were more rationally defensible ways of theorising on film, difficulties
that stem, he claims, from the flawed foundation of ‘Continental’ theory:
1) A monolithic conception of film theory, according to which a
‘foundational’ theoretical paradigm is assumed to account for all
relevant aspects of film; this is linked with an implausible ‘medium
essentialism’, which sought to explain all relevant phenomena in terms
of the film medium.
2) The conflation of film theory with film interpretation, according to
which film theorists adopt a theoretical framework (Lacanian
psychoanalysis, for example), and then ‘confirm’ the theory in question
by finding its concepts or ideas instantiated in specific film examples,
which are interpreted using the adopted theoretical framework in a
question-begging, circular manner.
3) Political correctness, ‘culture wars’ rhetoric aside, this unfortunate term
refers to the criticism that the progressive ethico-political claims of
film theory were rendered plausible or defensible thanks to their
solidarity with emancipatory social-political movements (of the 1960s
and 1970s and beyond). More particularly, it refers to the dogmatic
defence of theoretical claims, concepts or analyses because of their
political value, utility or contribution to emancipatory movements or
causes rather than their theoretical cogency, explanatory power or
evidentiary basis.
4) Charges of formalism, according to which ways of theorising about
film without a ‘political’ or ideological focus are dismissed as ‘formalist’
or as lacking substantive content; or the unwarranted rejection of
theoretical claims as ethico-politically vacuous because of their
theoretical rather than practical focus.
24 The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

5) Biases against truth, which refers to the postmodernist dismissal of

truth as an ideological construct, a relativist claim that rests on an
untenable ‘argument from absolute truth’ (any truth claim about film
presupposes an absolutist concept of truth; there is no such concept;
ergo truth claims about film are ‘ideologically suspect’, hence false or
pernicious) (Carroll 1996: 38–56).
Taken together, these five obstructions hampered philosophical
theorisation of film, Carroll argued, prompting the need for a ‘paradigm
shift’ towards more analytic-cognitivist forms of theory that were not
beholden to these ethico-political constraints (Carroll 1996: 56–68).
There are two features of so-called ‘Grand Theory’ deemed most troubling
by analytic-cognitivist critics: 1) the ‘decentred’ conception of the human
subject whose claims to rational autonomy are undermined by the role of
the unconscious in psychic life, and by the shared background structures of
language, culture and ideology; and 2) the conviction that film, whether in
its popular or modernist forms, is not just an art or popular cultural
audiovisual medium but an ideologico-political battleground over forms of
social and cultural representation (in particular, of gender, sexuality, class,
race and cultural identity). The upshot of these two theses – the challenge to
rational autonomy (posited by psychoanalytic theory), and the ideologico-
political function of film (posited by Marxist and feminist theory) – was to
suggest that film theory provided a privileged site for the examination of
psychic mechanisms of desire, theories of gendered subjectivity and for the
related critique of social and cultural ideology.
Indeed, the paradigm of ‘Grand Theory’, whatever its theoretical
shortcomings, clearly questioned two key assumptions of the new analytic-
cognitivist paradigm: 1) that the human being is a rational autonomous
agent whose cognitive powers are not completely beholden to irrational
‘unconscious’ forces or to ideological manipulation to the extent assumed by
‘Grand Theory’; and 2) that film as a popular form of entertainment is not
principally defined by its ideological function, and that it operates in the
main by using transparent visual and narrative techniques (rather than
learned social and semiotic ‘codes’). Hence movies can be analysed and
understood in broadly ‘naturalistic’ terms (with reference to psychological,
physiological, biological, neurological as well as evolutionary processes). In
short, the battle between ‘Grand Theory’ and the analytic-cognitivist
paradigm turned on our assumptions concerning human nature and the
relationship between subjectivity and culture. To what extent are we rational
beings, unperturbed by unconscious or ideological forces? And to what
 Critiques of ‘Grand Theory’ 25

extent does film – the mass artform of the modern age – have the primary
function of serving ideological ends?
Suffice to say, these are difficult and important philosophical questions
that cannot be answered glibly here. I raise them in order to signal that there
are deeper issues at stake in the dispute between competing paradigms in film
theory. Indeed, it is not obvious that these questions have been settled either
way. This point has been forgotten in the fractious debates over ‘Grand Theory’
and its critics, and remains pertinent today given the analytic-cognitivist turn
in film theory. After an initial standoff, the pendulum swing between the
‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ practised by ‘Grand Theory’ and the analytic-
cognitivist defence of a rational, commonsense approach to the movies
gained increasing momentum. Although there has been some rapprochement
between these competing approaches, the opposition between the more
‘objective/neutral’ approach of post-Theory analytic-cognitivist theory and
the ‘politically committed’ approach of post-Theory ‘Continental’ and neo-
ideological approaches – focusing, for example, on gender, ‘race’, anti-
colonialism, global capitalism and so on – remains a defining feature of our
theoretical and interdisciplinary context (see Shohat and Stam 1994, 2003;
Stam 2000). At the same time, many of the issues and debates that marked the
earlier wave of the critique of Grand Theory are returning in a revised form,
so it is worth revisiting these in order to understand our context in a more
reflective and critical manner.

Criticisms of ‘Grand Theory’

Carroll’s polemical critique of ‘Grand Theory’ was intended to challenge
the dogmas of a once dominant paradigm in crisis, and to advocate in its
stead a more rationally defensible model of film theorisation. Despite its
1990s ‘culture wars’ rhetoric, it is worth making some critical remarks on this
critique, which was crucial for the development of what we might call ‘post-
Theory theory’. I shall take each of Bordwell/Carroll’s ‘five obstructions’
facing film theory in turn.

1) Monolithic Theory and ‘Medium

Essentialism’
One of the sharpest criticisms of ‘Grand Theory’ was that it adopted an
all-encompassing theoretical paradigm – psychoanalytical, semiotic and
26 The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

so on – that was used to account for the manifold aspects of film. There is
some truth to the claim that ‘Grand Theory’ relied on all-encompassing
theories, even though these were not ‘monolithic’ in the sense of being
homogeneous or univocal. It is worth recalling, moreover, that the motivation
for doing so was to account for the two assumptions outlined above: that
human subjects are subject to ‘irrational’ forces that conflict with our rational
capacities; and that film is not only an accessible medium of mass
entertainment but also a complex instrument of ideological influence. That
is why ‘Grand Theory’, far from being ‘monolithic’, was characterised
by various theoretical ‘fusions’ (psychoanalytic-semiotic theory,
psychoanalytical-feminist theory, structural linguistic-ideology critique and
so on). ‘Grand Theory’ may have struggled to find theoretically convincing
ways of articulating these two assumptions, but it was at least concerned to
question the view that human subjects are rational masters of their conscious
experience, and to critique the medium of film for its role as a powerful
ideological force. In taking a more systemic approach to understanding the
ideological role of cinema in the formation of subjectivity, ‘Grand Theory’
did run the risk of lapsing into a monolithic – or ‘totalising’ – mode of
theorisation; but it also provided ways of conceptualising both the ‘deeper’
unconscious dimensions of cinematic experience and the broader ideological
significance of the medium. As for the latter, although earlier forms of film
theory did tend to adopt something like a ‘medium essentialism’ position
(apparatus theory, for example), later forms of ‘Grand Theory’, thanks to
their focus on subjectivity and ideology, tended to ignore questions of the
medium and its putative character and aesthetic features – an omission that
remains an issue today. Indeed, the recent return to focusing on the ontology
of film, especially with the rise of digital media, has directed attention
towards this important question within the new philosophies of film.

2) Conflation of Film Theory

with Film Criticism
One striking element in this critique is the assertion that ‘Grand Theory’
conflated ‘film theory’ with ‘film criticism’, confusing theoretical claims about
film with hermeneutic claims about the interpretation of particular films or
genres (Allen and Smith 1997: 6). As a result, post-Theorists generally insist
on a firm distinction between film theory and film criticism, arguing that the
two should be kept apart, lest we lapse into the ‘fallacy of exemplification’ –
‘proving’ the claims of a theory via selective film interpretations – to which
 Critiques of ‘Grand Theory’ 27

‘Grand Theory’ was supposedly prone.4 An example would be to assume the

validity of, say, the Lacanian ‘mirror stage’ or Althusser’s doctrine of
‘ideological state apparatuses’, then cherry pick certain film scenes or
cinematic examples that neatly ‘illustrate’ these theories (say, from Hitchcock
or Godard), and thereby claim that such examples provide ‘evidence’
supporting our theoretical claims. This would be an example of the ‘fallacy
of exemplification’: conflating the use of a theoretical heuristic to interpret
films with such interpretations serving as evidentiary support for theoretical
claims we might make using these films.
One consequence of this critique, however, has been to establish a sharper
divide between film theory and film criticism: the proliferation of theories
analysing film in general that remain aloof or separated from the detailed
analysis of particular films, save as useful illustrations of general theoretical
problems being examined by the theory (see, for example, Carroll 2008;
Gaut 2010). It is one thing to say that theory should be general in scope and
explanatory in nature; it is another to claim that such theorising should
therefore avoid focusing on particular, anomalous or deviant cases as might
be studied in film criticism. Moreover, theoretical issues frequently arise in
regard to film criticism (concerning, for example, authorship, aesthetic
evaluation and moral-ethical concerns), just as film criticism might raise
issues that are theoretically significant or shed light on theoretical debates
(concerning the role of certain aesthetic features, use of stylistic techniques
or how narrative film might function or be understood in particular cases).
Aesthetic theories, including philosophies of film, find their rigour and
plausibility to the degree that they illuminate our experience and
understanding of singular works of art. A theoretical claim readily challenged
by, or at odds with, various film examples, which can serve as ‘empirical’ case
studies in this regard, would hardly count as convincing or persuasive.

3) ‘Political Correctness’
A regrettably pejorative phrase, deriving from the ‘culture wars’ rhetoric of
the 1990s, the charge of ‘political correctness’ conjures up images of stoical
cultural warriors fighting off the barbarians at the university gates (or
alternatively, of committed cultural warriors battling to seize or destroy the
cultural citadels of the academy). Shorn of its unpleasant rhetorical and
ideological aspects, it refers to the manipulation of theory or rejection of
valid theoretical inquiry due to implicit ideological commitments (at least
according to those making the criticism) vitiating such theories or
28 The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

condemning the moral-ethical character, conduct or identity of its defenders.

To be sure, any attempt to stymie theoretical reflection in the name of
ideological or political orthodoxy is deserving of criticism; but so is a refusal
to acknowledge criticism or stance of political vacuity, namely, an indifference
towards the larger social, cultural, historical and ideological forces that also
contribute to the context of film production, circulation and reception. The
reduction of theoretical inquiry to political partisanship is destructive and
coercive; but the quarantining of theoretical inquiry from critical reflection
concerning its (implicit) moral-political or ideological commitments is also
limiting and blinding. Critical inquiry, especially into a medium as culturally
and ethically significant as film, should be able to accommodate both
perspectives, bringing one to bear on the other. Although some theorists
deride attempts to explore the ideological dimensions of film, few would
deny that film remains ‘ideological’ in some respects. Indeed, some
cognitivists have acknowledged that this remains an important topic to be
addressed (see Plantinga 2009a: 12–14, 2018: 135–139). The relationship
between the empirical social, economic and historical circumstances of
a film’s production or reception within broader cultural-ideological
fields remains an important question, especially for those pursuing a
methodologically pluralist approach. A robust pluralistic approach to
philosophising on and with film should exemplify free and impartial inquiry,
be free to respond to appropriate criticisms, as well as acknowledge implicit
ethico-political commitments, biases or blind spots in its own mode of
theorisation.

4) and 5) Formalism and

Biases against Truth
The complaint concerning so-called ‘biases against truth’ is fair enough,
assuming it is true that such theories have the kind of bias attributed to them
by their critics. Here the classic critique of ‘Grand Theory’ sometimes runs of
the risk of caricature or ‘straw man’ arguments in its presentation of such
theories, translating their claims in reductive terms, or else construing them
as narrowly concerned with problems of interest to contemporary
philosophers.5 Nonetheless, Carroll and other critics of ‘Grand Theory’ were
right to insist that questions of truth and falsity remain important in film
theory, no matter what kind of inquiry we might pursue. At the same time,
we should avoid assuming that there is only one paradigm of knowledge –
modelled exclusively on the natural sciences – that can provide the only
 Critiques of ‘Grand Theory’ 29

proper foundation for philosophising on film. Different kinds of inquiry

might call for different approaches, concepts, methodologies and arguments,
but this kind of epistemic pluralism need not be hostile to claims concerning
truth and falsity. On the contrary, the practice of critical reflection and
theoretical contestation assumes as much in order to enable practices of
theory contestation to take place. At the same time, it is important to be
aware of levels of theoretical explanation or critical engagement when
dealing with particular theoretical problems, arguments or debates. There is
as little to be gained in accusing, say, cognitive neuroscience of ‘Eurocentrism’
as in criticising ‘intersectionality’ for logical inconsistency. This is not to
deny the importance of scientifically informed theorising, or to ‘police’ the
latter in light of ideological purity, but to point out that the relationship
between philosophical naturalisms and the theorisation of art remains a
subject of philosophical debate. Indeed, it is part of what we reflect on when
we do philosophy of film, and what might enable us to find common ground
in developing genuinely pluralistic forms of philosophical film theory.
The important question to be drawn from these remarks on the critique
of ‘Grand Theory’ is how the new philosophies of film are to navigate the
twin perils of dogmatism (stereotypically attributed to ‘Grand Theory’) and
reductionism (stereotypically attributed to analytic-cognitivist theory). On
the one hand, theorists within the analytic-cognitivist paradigm sometimes
court the risk of assuming a too narrow conception of what counts as
knowledge, thus dismissing alternative ways of thinking about film as mere
‘pseudo-argumentation’. On the other hand, ‘Continental’-inspired theorists
can court the danger of reproducing theoretical dogmatism in their
assumption of a conceptual framework – or favoured master thinker – that
is then applied uncritically to various aspects of film, or reductively flattening
robust theoretical inquiry to a form of cultural-political activism pursued by
other means. The challenge for the new philosophies of film, therefore, is to
steer a successful course between the Scylla of dogmatism and the Charybdis
of reductionism. It is to find new ways of creatively synthesising, rather than
cynically dismissing, alternative theoretical frameworks and critical
philosophical perspectives.

Carroll’s Dialectical Cognitivism

Noël Carroll’s ‘piecemeal’ or middle-level approach to cognitive theory is
perhaps the most paradigmatic of the post-Theory approaches to emerge in
30 The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

recent decades.6 Carroll’s approach, which he dubs ‘dialectical cognitivism’,

draws on cognitive psychology and analytic philosophy and argues against
three pervasive assumptions held within the ‘Grand Theory’ paradigm. 1) It
criticises ‘medium essentialism’ (the view that there are particular essential
features of film as a medium that both define it and determine its aesthetic
possibilities). 2) It is against interpretation (the idea that the primary task of
film theory is to provide critical interpretations of films drawing on an
assumed theoretical framework). And 3), it rejects the ‘film as language’
thesis (the idea that language or semiotic ‘codes’ provide a privileged
theoretical model for theorising film). Carroll’s approach is ‘dialectical’, in
that it captures how competing theories attempt to dialectically supersede
each other by correcting the errors of previous theories. It is ‘cognitivist’ in
that it shows how film viewing involves cognitive phenomena amenable to
rational analysis according to empirically grounded psychologies or
naturalistic theories of mind. Let us consider each of these three aspects of
Carroll’s critique of ‘Grand Theory’.

1) Against ‘Medium Essentialism’

Since the late 1980s, Noël Carroll has been arguing against medium
essentialism: the pervasive assumption, part theoretical, part aesthetic, that
‘each artform has its own distinctive medium’ distinguishing it from other
artforms (Carroll 2006a: 113–114). Such a view, moreover, claims that
identifying this medium has important theoretical and aesthetic consequences
(for example, extolling the virtues of cinematic realism as a proper realisation
of the possibilities of the medium). From Eisenstein’s valorisation of montage,
to Bazin’s championing of deep-focus, philosophers of film have followed
classical aesthetics in attempting to define a distinctive medium (in physical
and material senses) proper to film, and on that basis to argue for the kind of
aesthetic possibilities that film can realise. ‘Grand Theory’ too, for its part,
made use of the medium essentialism thesis, arguing, for example, that the
nature of the cinematic apparatus determined both the nature of Classical
Hollywood narrative and the ideological capture of spectators’ desire (see
Baudry 2004a, 2004b; Metz 1974, 1982).
According to Carroll, received versions of medium essentialism display a
number of questionable assumptions, such as the view that each artform has
a distinctive medium; that the medium is also the (teleological) ‘essence’ of
the artform, realised in appropriate works; and that the medium determines
the style and/or content of the artform (2006a: 113–114). Carroll’s
 Critiques of ‘Grand Theory’ 31

assumption here is that the ‘medium’ refers to the artform’s underlying

physical or material basis; the materials necessary for the creation and
constitution of works of art within that artform. Such a view, however, is
clearly open to criticism. V. F. Perkins (1972) offered such a critique already
in the early 1970s, challenging Bazin’s and Kracauer’s claim that cinematic
realism, with its long takes, ‘naturalised’ mise-en-scène, and unity of space
and time, was therefore best suited to realise aesthetically the (photographic)
nature of the medium (1972: 28–39). As Perkins argued, this orthodoxy
privileged one aspect of the filmic medium at the expense of the rest, drawing
implausibly rigid aesthetic conclusions from the ‘realist’ ontology of the
moving image: ‘Despite Bazin’s careful qualifications and disclaimers, realist
theory becomes coherent only if we identify the cinema’s “essence” with a
single aspect of film – photographic reproduction’ (Perkins 1972: 39). It
seems the ‘sins of the Fathers’, to quote one of Perkins’ chapter titles, need to
be redeemed by each new generation of film theorists.
Carroll has taken up this task with gusto, developing the most
comprehensive critique of medium essentialism. How are we to define the
distinctive ‘medium’ of a given artform? We might be tempted to nominate as
‘essential’ the distinctive physical or material basis of the artform, say celluloid
film strip bearing ‘certain photographic emulsions’ (Carroll 2006a: 115) in
the case of (pre-digital) film. Here we can cite numerous counterexamples,
however, that refute the idea that the medium has a unique material basis (or
even that it uniquely involves movement). As remarked below, the class of
experimental films, without discernible images of represented objects, is a
case in point, since the material itself can be directly manipulated or even
destroyed in creating the work. Or consider Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993), a
film consisting of a deep blue visual field, mesmerising voiceover narration,
and carefully composed soundtrack, presenting the narrator/filmmaker’s
reminiscences, experiences of increasing blindness and preparation for his
impending death.7 There is no movement, no montage, no image, save for the
‘colour field’ of azure that serves as a pure phenomenological background,
and which attunes us to the poetic reflections of the narrator and evocative
soundscape presenting his life, memory and thought. One is hard-pressed to
identify the relevant ‘medium’ in a film such as Blue.
From a technological point of view, new digital video technology may
eventually become indistinguishable from traditional film stock (indeed, it is
close enough now, given that most movie making is short on digital video, to
be regarded as the standard equivalent to traditional film style). The digital
basis for moving images, moreover, is now shared with musical and sound
32 The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

recordings. Implements used to make films are also inadequate to distinguish

the medium, since films can readily be made without the use of cameras (for
example, flicker films, scratch films and painted films, where the film strip is
directly modified, inscribed or marked). As these counterexamples suggest,
the attempt to identify a unique medium for film, in any physical or material
sense, is problematic.8 Rather than deny the existence of (physical) media as
such, the point is to show that there are various media at play in works of art,
especially in cinema.
A similar criticism can be made concerning teleological attempts to
prescribe appropriate aesthetic forms for a given medium. If artforms
possess a plurality of media, then there is no reason to assume that they will
converge on a specific style or subject-matter. Media underdetermine the
aesthetic uses to which they can be put; artforms are open to technological
transformations and hence to new artistic uses. Artistic innovation involves
inventing ways in which technological and practical developments can be
given meaning and significance; think, for example, of the incorporation of
handheld camera movements into fictional film, the integration of CGI
(computer-generated image) animation into live action film, or the
simulation of ‘analogue’ effects (visual flare, for example) within digital
filmmaking practices. Does this mean that one should abandon all attempts
at defining what the media of film/cinema/the moving image might be? Not
at all; but it does mean that we ought to acknowledge that film/cinema/the
moving image remains a dynamic artform, open to technical, aesthetic and
practical innovations. Indeed, this fluidity in respect of the medium is what
‘defines’ film as an artform in perpetual flux.
For all its influence in contemporary film theory, Carroll’s rather strict
dismissal of ‘medium essentialism’ seems to sometimes revert to a ‘straw-
man’ argument. Do contemporary film theorists more generally assume as
rigid and prescriptive a concept of the ‘medium’ as Carroll avers? One can
surely regard the medium (or media) as important to understanding and
appreciating film without thereby being committed to an untenable ‘medium
essentialism’ (see Gaut 2010 for a defence of a moderate ‘medium’ approach).
Consider Stanley Cavell’s alternative version of the medium of film, which is
hardly essentialist in this sense (1979: 68–74). For Cavell, contra Carroll, a
‘medium’ is not to be confused with the physical, material or technical means
by which works of art are constituted. Rather, the ‘medium’ names the
manner in which an artform is invented and transformed; the ways found to
constitute enduring works, new means of expression, and uses of technique,
conventions and style that are creatively explored, inherited and renewed.
 Critiques of ‘Grand Theory’ 33

Cavell’s anti-essentialist concept of medium avoids reducing film to its

material or physical basis, is open to a plurality of uses and eschews aesthetic
prescriptivism about conforming to a given medium’s alleged ‘essence’.
Indeed, Cavell’s conception of a ‘medium’ corresponds with Carroll’s
requirements for media plurality. The ‘medium’ of film is what remains to be
invented by putting to work the inherited traditions, conventions and
aesthetic possibilities of film in an open-ended manner.

2) Against ‘Interpretation’
A second major criticism is that film theory (especially ‘Grand Theory’)
dogmatically assumes a strongly hermeneutic model of theory: that film
theories aim to provide interpretative frameworks (templates) that generate
multiple interpretations of films and genres, and that such interpretations
can even ‘confirm’ theoretically one’s chosen framework. Having assumed a
hermeneutic model that equates theorisation with interpretation, coupled
with the assumption that film theory was ideology-critique pursued by other
means, the way was paved for a dogmatic recycling of ‘theoretical readings’
of favoured films as a way of unmasking ideological, gender or cultural-
political biases. ‘Grand Theory’, according to Bordwell and Carroll, remained
captive to this hermeneutic paradigm, thereby blocking the development of
empirically contestable forms of film theorisation.
While I shall address later how film theory and criticism might enter into
a mutually beneficial relationship, it is worth commenting here on the
relationship between theory and criticism, that is, the difference between
hermeneutic and explanatory theories. These are distinct theoretical
approaches that do quite different things. Hermeneutic theories attempt to
describe, interpret or analyse with reference to other interpretative
communities, contexts, approaches or traditions; explanatory theories seek to
present causal explanations that solve theoretical problems, or integrate with
established bodies of empirical knowledge. They do share traits that overlap
in certain cases: we may wish to explain why a scene works a particular way
or has a certain meaning in the context of a narrative, for example, or we may
wish to show how a particular mechanism, device or process works in
narrative film and use a film example, suitably interpreted, to demonstrate
this. Nonetheless, these distinct theoretical approaches should not be conflated
as though they were essentially pursuing the same theoretical tasks or
practical ends. Does this imply that we should therefore avoid hermeneutic in
favour of explanatory theories? Not at all – both film analysis or criticism and
34 The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

film theorisation or philosophising on film require that we are able to avail

ourselves of both approaches as the context and nature of our inquiry requires.
Indeed, this kind of pluralistic, interactive approach is more pertinent than
ever: enhancing film theory through philosophically informed film criticism,
and developing philosophical film theory capable of both analysing and
interpreting as well as conceptualising and explaining various aspects of
cinematic works and our experience of them.
One problem that arises here is what we might call the ‘hermeneutic gap’:
how to account for the relationship between a high-level explanatory theory
(providing a causal account of X, couched in empirical/naturalistic terms)
and the use of a particular film/film genre as an ‘example’ of this theory. Even
strongly cognitivist film theories depend upon tacit hermeneutic models of
theory when they appeal to ‘film examples’ to help illustrate a theoretical
point or bolster a theoretical claim.9 In such cases, a hermeneutic gap opens
up between the level of general theoretical explanation and the illustration
of such claims with reference to a particular film or film genre. How do we
bridge this gap? One response is to erect a theoretical firewall between film
theory and film criticism; but doing this leaves unanswered how we move
from the general theoretical claims to our aesthetic experiences of particular
films. Interpretation, however, is precisely a way of mediating between
general explanatory claims and particular aesthetic experiences of particular
works of art – which means that we need to be engaging with appropriate
forms of hermeneutic theory (see Gadamer 1989; Yacavone 2015). This is
another important challenge for the new philosophy of film: how to heal the
sundered link between theory and criticism via philosophical film
interpretation and critical film analysis.

3) Against the ‘Film as Language’ Thesis

The third decisive element of the older paradigm of film theory, challenged
by Carroll’s dialectical cognitivism, was the attempt to draw an analogy
between film and language. From the more commonplace metaphor of film
as a language, theorists such as Christian Metz developed full-blown theories
of film as a species of semiotic utterance, whose character, meaning and
modalities were modelled on the rules and structures governing the linguistic
sign (see Metz 1974). This semiotic assimilation of the image to language was
coupled with a linguistically inflected psychoanalytic account of desire and
of the unconscious (structured like a language, according to Jacques Lacan).
The result was a theory that tended to reduce the image to a linguistic sign;
 Critiques of ‘Grand Theory’ 35

composition, montage and visual style to literary narration; the multiform

aesthetic of the movies to a structural matrix ‘suturing’ visual identification
and ideologically manipulating narrative pleasure. This orthodoxy has been
subjected to sharp critique, from Deleuze’s (1986) criticism of the application
of linguistic semiology to film, Carroll’s dismissal of the claim that
understanding movies depends upon assimilating culturally constructed
semiotic ‘codes’ (2006a, 2008), to Gregory Currie’s (1995) attack on the very
idea of film as language, and the correlated view that interpretation involves
‘reading’ a film, modelled on literary forms of analysis. Carroll’s and Currie’s
critiques are the most powerful of these recent challenges to the ‘film as
language’ thesis, so I shall take these as paradigmatic of this line of argument.
The analogy between film images and language has a long and venerable
history. Soviet filmmaker and theorist V. I. Pudovkin, for example, claimed
that individual shots play the same role as words in the composition of a film
‘sentence’: ‘[Film] editing is the language of the film director. Just as in living
speech, so one may say in editing: there is a word – the piece of exposed film,
the image; a phrase – the combination of these pieces’ (quoted in Carroll
2003: 14–15). From this analogy, theorists constructed a whole body of theory,
drawing initially on Saussurean linguistics and later on structuralist linguistics
(Roman Jakobson). Roland Barthes’ cultural-semiotic analyses of ideological
myths (in bourgeois popular culture) as well as of literary and cinematic texts
(in his later works), offered an influential semiological approach to analysing
the ideological significance of film language (Barthes 1972).
But how plausible is the comparison of a shot to a word, an edited
sequence to a phrase, or a ‘grammar of film’ that would encompass
conventional codes of representation enabling us to understand what we
see? For one thing, images are more complex than words; it takes many
sentences to describe even a very simple shot. For another, the relationship
between a word and its meaning is dependent upon arbitrary conventions
(we use the word ‘dog’ for canines but could have used something else). The
relation of an image to its referent, by contrast, is less a matter of applying
arbitrary semiotic conventions than of using our capacities for natural or
‘untutored’ perception in order to understand what we see (see Carroll
2003). The word ‘leg’ has an arbitrary relation to the limb in question, whereas
a shot of Barbara Stanwyck’s ankle in Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder 1944)
does not. It may require some cultural knowledge to appreciate that Phyllis
Dietrichson [Stanwyck] is a femme fatale, but not to recognise that I am
seeing an arresting female character’s ankle with anklet (as revealed to
Walter Neff [Fred MacMurray] in their steamy introductory encounter).
36 The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

As Gregory Currie points out, moreover, language depends upon the use
of recursive grammatical operations to compose sentences from words and
phrases (once we are familiar with them, we can apply them to ever new
cases); but no such recursive operations are evident in film images or the
way in which they are edited together to tell a story (1993: 209–215). Perhaps
we might want to say that the conventions in question apply at the level of
the combination (montage or editing) of images: that these are the arbitrary
conventions that lend weight and plausibility to the film-language analogy.
We might hold, for example, that the shot-reverse shot conventions of
Hollywood narrative cinema are a culturally constructed ‘code’ that has been
adopted – or even imposed – as a ‘universal’ film language. Comprehending
the meaning of such a sequence would therefore require an act of ‘decoding’
it according to the relevant cinematic ‘code’.
The problem with this approach, according to Carroll, is that it ignores the
pictorial character of moving images: a shot of Walter Neff speaking, followed
by Phyllis Dietrichson’s facial expression in responding to him, are images that
do not require ‘decoding’ in order to be understood (the wittiness of their
playful, seductive ‘speeding ticket’ banter notwithstanding). Rather, we grasp
what we see using the same perceptual abilities that enable us to perceive faces
and expression (not to mention speech) in ordinary experience. The shot-
reverse shot ‘rule’ is a pragmatically effective way of showing the interaction
and communication between two characters; but it depends upon the same
kinds of perceptual abilities we ordinarily use in order to communicate with
each other. Learning a language, with its arbitrary conventions and complex
rules of grammar, is an arduous and time-consuming process. Understanding
moving images, however, is relatively easy (young children have no difficultly
following animated as well as live action movies), as well as being cross-
culturally intelligible (similar cinematic conventions are used the world over).
This is best explained, Carroll argues, by the fact that moving images are
parasitic upon our capacities for natural perception, and hence that such
images do not require ‘decoding’ in order to be understood.
Now while it is true that the facility of understanding moving images
points to the way our comprehension of them is parasitic upon our shared
capacities for embodied perception, there is more to understanding movies
than simply recognising figures moving on a screen. It is one thing to criticise
a dogmatic conception of cinematic codes; it is another to argue that there
are complexities of meaning that require some familiarity with cinematic
conventions. Whether in the Hollywood tradition or in European/Asian/
South American art cinema, many films thematise, alter or reflect upon the
 Critiques of ‘Grand Theory’ 37

conventional and representational character of narrative cinema (think of

Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels (1941), Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950),
Renoir’s Rules of the Game (1939), Godard’s Breathless (1960), Ozu’s Tokyo
Story (1953), Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963) or Raúl Ruiz’s Three Crowns of the Sailor
(1983)). There is more to understanding Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001),
Wong-Kar-wai’s In the Mood For Love (2000), Claire Denis’ Beau travail
(1999), Kiarostami’s Shirin (2008), Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on
Fire (2019) or Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019) than relying on ‘untutored
perception’, or having an elementary grasp of the various images (and
sounds) composing the narrative one is perceiving on the screen. Such films
are also concerned to render explicit, play with or undermine a variety of
conventional devices used in mainstream narrative cinema, and moreover to
articulate a critical perspective on dominant (whether Hollywood or
European or Asian) models of filmmaking, not to mention exploring issues
and themes with broader psychological, moral and social-cultural
significance. This is the critical dimension of most interest in claims made
concerning the ‘language of film’; but this dimension – the ideologico-
critical significance of narrative conventions – is underplayed in critiques
launched by ‘post-Theory’ theorists. In the rush to abolish any vestiges of the
former paradigm, the ideological dimensions of narrative film have been left
in abeyance. Nonetheless, the question of ideology and cinema, as I shall
discuss further in later chapters, remains a pressing and important topic.

Cognitivism Goes Pluralist

Indeed, this is an area of inquiry that more recent work in cognitivist
philosophy of film has sought to remedy. Recent work in cognitivist film
theory offers a much wider array of approaches to the moral-ethical
dimensions of film experience, and broadens the understanding of the role of
emotion and cognition in our sensuous, embodied and imaginative
engagement with film (see Nannicelli and Taberham 2014; Plantinga 2018;
Shimamura 2013; Smith 2017). Indeed, there is a refreshing pluralism in
recent cognitivism – encompassing not only 4E cognitive theories but also the
crossover with phenomenological approaches – that is worth acknowledging
and exploring further (as I do later in this book). We have witnessed the
emergence of pluralistic approaches to cognitivist film theory, emphasising its
potential crossover with other theoretical and philosophical approaches
(Nannicelli and Taberham 2014; Plantinga 2009a; Shimamura 2013; Stadler
38 The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

2008). There has also been increasing recognition of the need to develop a
more pluralistic integration of naturalistic forms of film theory and aesthetics
as contributing to the humanistic study of cinema (see Smith 2017).10
Cognitivist approaches have become more diverse, while analytic approaches
have broadened thanks to ‘post-analytic’ perspectives (Rachjman and West
1985); phenomenological perspectives have been adapted to cognitivist
theories, while cognitivist theories have become more accommodating of
phenomenological insights. This is not to say that there are no longer stark
differences between cognitivist perspectives (some of which eschew natural
scientific foundations, others claiming that such foundations are required for
effective theory building) or that there is now a felicitous concordance, rather
than fractious conflict, between competing paradigms of philosophical film
theory. Indeed, there is a longer story to tell here concerning the complex, and
sometimes conflictual, relationship between ‘rationalist’ and ‘romanticist’
approaches to theorising cinema (see Elsaesser 2019; Rodowick 2014, 2015).
The first and perhaps most obvious shift – paralleling the shift within
cognitive theory itself – is from first-generation, mentalist or ‘hard’
(computational, top-down) models of cognition to second-generation
embodied or ‘soft’ (contextual, 4E, bottom-up) models, or various synthesising
combinations of these approaches. Although theorists such as Bordwell, Currie
and Carroll, in their earlier work (from the mid-1980s to the late-1990s),
focused on inferential models of perception, strongly ‘mentalist’ theories of
mind, or paid scant attention to the contextual, ecological or embodied and
embedded character of cognition,11 along with a host of other theorists
(Coëgnarts and Kravanja 2015; Nannicelli and Taberham 2014; Plantinga
2009a, 2018) they have embraced more expansive and pluralistic forms of
cognitivist theory. These tend to emphasise cultural-contextual, ecological,
social, embodied, extended and affective-emotional dimensions of cognitive
experience. Many of the standard critiques made of cognitivist theory (as I
discuss further in Chapter 4), such as reductionism, scientism or the neglect of
non-standard (art or ‘parametric’) forms of narrative film, have been addressed
in different ways by contemporary ‘soft’ cognitivist film theories. This shift has
been accompanied by a greater acknowledgment of, and engagement with,
phenomenological approaches to film (as I discuss in Chapter 5), emphasising
the centrality of sensuous, affective and bodily engagement with cinema, and
the essential role played by affective, involuntary, corporeal ‘bottom-up’
processes in our experience of film. Having broached this experiential
dimension of film, however, a more basic ontological question beckons, one to
be addressed in the next chapter: what is cinema, especially in the digital age?
 2
The Rules of the Game:
New Ontologies of Film

Chapter Outline
Ontologies of the Image 40
Moving Images 45
Film as Art Redux 51
Back to the Future: Bazin and Arnheim on Film as Art 54
The Challenge of the Digital 56
What Are Digital Images? 57
Image Scepticism and Claims to Veracity 60

Despite its attack on the older paradigm (‘Grand Theory’), the new
philosophical approaches to film have returned to key questions of classical
film theory. The original question that animated much early film theory was
the question of film as art. Was the new medium of film merely a clever
technical gadget, suitable for recording works of artistic performance? Or
was it a new artform with its own creative possibilities? With its novel
combination of technological, industrial and collaborative production, the
medium of cinema challenged traditional concepts of art. The question of
film as art has therefore also returned as a topic of debate in contemporary
philosophy of film, especially given the erosion of the distinction between
high art and popular art, and the profound transformation of our
understanding of audiovisual culture brought about by the advent of digital
image-making practices. In what follows I consider some of the key problems
of the new ontologies of film: the question of how to define the ‘medium’ of

39
40 The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

moving images; the problem of defining ‘movement’ in moving images;

and the return of philosophical debates over film as art. Once again, these
questions have gained a renewed urgency and relevance in the past decade
thanks to the shift to digital images, which raises the question of whether we
can still talk meaningfully about ‘film’ or need to modify or revise our
conceptions of moving images and cinema more generally (see McGregor
2013). Despite the plethora of attempts to ‘define’ the medium, the ontology
of the image or the nature of film as art, cinema seems to resist any such
attempts at conceptual definition, or indeed calls for a more pluralistic way of
articulating these ontological questions. Indeed, this inherent ambiguity of
film reflects its irreducibly hybrid character as a medium that is at once a
traditional form of narrative representation and an expression of the freedom
of modern aesthetics. This inherent ambiguity has only been heightened or
exacerbated by the shift towards digital images, raising the question of
ontology of cinema in a renewed, more acute sense.

Ontologies of the Image

The new philosophies of film have returned to investigating some of the
classical problems of film theory: the nature of the moving image, the
question of film as art, the problem of genre, how to understand narrative,
questions of film style and so on. These interconnected lines of inquiry
constitute a new ontology of the moving image. What distinguishes the
moving image from the photographic image? How is film to be distinguished
from painting, theatre and photography? Are digital images technological
variants of traditional cinematic images or do they constitute an ontologically
unique kind of moving image? What is distinctive about the way narrative
film works? As we have seen, Noël Carroll has argued against the idea of an
‘essentialist’ conception of the filmic medium, which medium would provide
aesthetic criteria for particular styles of filmmaking (2008: 35–52). Other
philosophers, however, have defended modified versions of a ‘medium’
approach to film, arguing that considerations of the medium remain
important ontologically and aesthetically (Gaut 2010: 282–307). As remarked,
the advent of digital images and widespread use of CGI in contemporary
filmmaking, moreover, have raised anew the traditional questions concerning
the ontology of the moving image. Do these technological transformations
mean that we need to rethink what we understand by ‘film’? Is cinema
essentially a form of animation? (see Cholodenko 2008; Manovich 2016;
 New Ontologies of Film 41

McGregor 2013). Do we need to discard traditional conceptions of the

ontology of film in favour of a renewed account of digital media? For some
thinkers, such D. N. Rodowick (2007b), not to mention filmmakers like
David Lynch (see 2006: 149–156), the advent of digital film images means
that we are witnessing the ‘end of film’, its transformation into something
rich and strange.1 Not only because of the novel aesthetics of the digital
image, its flatness, immediacy and manipulability, or because of the ways in
which digital photography breaks the ontological link between image and
referent, opening up a digital regime of quasi-animated ‘hyperimages’ (as
readily connectible and synthetic as hypertext). For some theorists, the
portability, immediacy, speed and diminished costs of digital video (DV)
production promise a re-democratisation of the medium, opening it up to
new narratives, filmmakers and otherwise marginalised perspectives. For
others, technological transformations in the way moving images are produced
or communicated do not warrant such radical claims, although they do
demand philosophical reflection on the significance of new forms of digital
cinema in relation to analogue forms, and further examination of the ways in
which digital images alter how we conceive of cinema as a medium (Gaut
2010: 43–50; Prince 2019).
One of the earliest tasks of film theory was to identify the nature of this
new medium, a sign that film theory has always had a philosophical bent.
Coupled with this was the cultural demand to defend its artistic value against
criticisms that it represented merely a photographic recording of dramatic
performances, hence was not an artform in its own right – a view recently
rehearsed by Roger Scruton (1981). This perplexing complaint, seemingly
consigned to the dustbin of history, nonetheless recurs in subtle form even
today, when cinema is relegated to a lowly position, relative to theatre,
literature, music and painting, in the hierarchy of the arts. To this end, early
film theorists (Münsterberg, Arnheim, Balázs and Kracauer, for example)
devoted much energy to arguing the case for the distinctiveness of film,
articulating its relative artistic strengths in comparison with photography,
painting and theatre. While this is no longer something that film theorists
need to defend, questions concerning the ontology of film have returned
thanks to the philosophical rethinking of classical film theory. Arthur Danto
(1979) and Noël Carroll (2006a), for example, have both offered important
contributions to the ontology of the moving image (a category more
congenial to the plural character of the image than the more conventional
term, ‘film’). Interestingly, however, they have abandoned any strong claim to
have enumerated necessary and sufficient conditions for defining the moving
42 The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

image.2 Their more modest definitions point, rather, to necessary conditions

(elements that are necessary for something to count as a moving image),
while acknowledging that moving images will continue to evolve, hence that
any definition must remain plural and open-ended.
Despite his criticisms of the ‘medium essentialism’ thesis, Noël Carroll has
proffered a definition of the moving image that articulates some of its ‘necessary,
general features’ in relation to other arts (2006a: 113). Taking up Bazin’s famous
claim concerning the photographic basis of film (1967: 9–16), Carroll
challenges the photographic realist approach, a view that has been described
(by Scruton (1981) and Walton (1984)) as the ‘transparency thesis’: the claim
that moving images, due to their automatic, photographic recording, are direct
presentations (rather than visual re-presentations) of what they depict (Bazin
1967; Scruton 1981; Walton 1984). According to this view, which we will find
rehearsed in Cavell’s ontology of film, there is an identity relation between
image and referent; the cinematic image is ‘transparent’, presenting us with an
image of ‘the object itself’, that is, a direct presentation rather than a
representation of it. According to photographic realists, moving images can be
seen therefore as akin to prosthetic images – telescopes, microscopes, convex
mirrors and the like – that involve an extension or enhancement of our
practices of natural perception. We might think here of the remarkable scene
in Blade Runner (1982) in which Deckard [Harrison Ford] deploys a visual
device enabling him to peer around corners within a photographic image. On
this view, photography and cinematic images are similarly prosthetic devices
that give us access to things, persons and events from the past. Such images,
moreover, are counterfactually dependent upon their referents; had these
referents been different, so too would the images. Had Paulette Goddard been
cast as Jean Harrington in The Lady Eve (1941), as originally intended, we
would not only have been deprived of Barbara Stanwyck’s brilliant performance,
but would also have an aesthetically quite different work.
A simple objection at this point is to question the photographic basis of
contemporary moving images. CGI and digital image technology, for example,
throw the identity between image and referent into question because such
images are not linked to a referent as their model, and so are a class of images
that need not refer to an actual object. Photography does not serve as a
constituent element of such images, which are nonetheless included in what
we understand by ‘film’. Does this mean that cinematic images, especially
computer animated ones, are more akin to paintings or drawings than to
photographs? This intriguing question recurs in discussions of digital imagery.
A traditional distinction that is relevant here is between the automatism of film
 New Ontologies of Film 43

images (thanks to mechanical recording) and the intentionalist character of

paintings or drawings (in the sense of including only those elements intended
by the artist who created it).3 Such a contrast immediately raises critical
questions.Despite the automatism of film,photographers and cinematographers
clearly intend to create certain aesthetic effects, and compose their shots
accordingly, including manipulated photographic images. The view that
paintings are the expressions of an artist’s intentions, on the other hand, flies in
the face of the ‘automatism’ of much modern art (in surrealism, in conceptual
art, in pop art, in hybrid installations, in industrially produced works and so
on). Whatever the case, Carroll deploys the distinction between film images
that are made by means of an automatic recording process involving the
camera, and paintings that require deliberation and execution of the work by
an artist. There can be unintended elements in a film shot that are recorded
inadvertently (in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), a young boy can be
seen covering his ears just seconds before a gunshot rings out in the diner on
Mount Rushmore). Traditional paintings and drawings, by contrast, include
only those elements intended by the artist (a painting that extends beyond its
own frame is this way because the artist intended it to be so).
Does this traditional distinction between the automatism of moving
images and the intentional character of pictorial depiction capture what is
distinctive to each? Carroll’s rejoinder to this distinction is intriguing: ‘there
is no principled difference between film shots and paintings here’ (2006a:
122), he argues, since it is still possible to find ‘unintended’ figures even
within a painting (Picasso, for example, claimed to have found the shape or
relief outline of a squirrel within one of Braque’s paintings). Even if one
granted Picasso’s claim to have ‘found’ (rather than simply seen) a squirrel in
Braque’s painting, it is not clear that this is the same kind of ‘unintentional’
effect that occurs within a film shot. The point of the contrast, rather, is to
show that a typical film shot (involving a recording of profilmic action) may
include ‘mistakes’ occurring during the recording that do not seem possible
in the same way for a painting. That Picasso found a ‘squirrel-like’ shape in
Braque’s painting may add to its aesthetic interest, or reflect Picasso’s lively
visual imagination, but it hardly constitutes a ‘mistake’ like the jumpy boy
actor’s precautionary ear-blocking in North by Northwest. Braque’s ‘squirrel’
exists, insofar as it does, as an accident of form or line more or less discernible
on the canvas (thanks to Picasso’s lively visual sense), whereas Hitchcock’s
jumpy extra was an ineliminable element within a recorded scene of live
action. To blur the ontological distinction between these two cases – between
accidental patterning of form and constituent element of the recorded image
44 The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

– seems to beg the question against the distinction between film images and
paintings.
What of the claim that film images are prosthetic in the way the telescopic,
microscopic and other perceptually enhanced images are? Carroll offers an
important criticism here that draws on similar arguments made by Arthur
Danto (1979) and Francis Sparshott (1975). The difference between ‘prosthetic’
images and those in a (fictional) film involves the discontinuity between the
latter and my own bodily orientation in space. According to Carroll, I can
always orient my body towards what the prosthetic image reveals (whether
supernova or bacteria), whereas I cannot do so with a film image (say Rick’s
bar in Casablanca (1942) or the film set where these scenes were shot). This is
because the latter both remain, ‘phenomenologically speaking, disconnected
from that space that I live in’ (Carroll 2006a: 123). This description, however,
is ambiguous and misleading, since the phenomenological space in which I
live enfolds the various contexts in which I happen to watch films. The
fictional world, however, is ontologically distinct from the space I inhabit in
ways that are more marked than, for example, live theatre viewing (because of
the ‘recorded’ and edited character of cinematic performance). At the same
time, such phenomenological connection with the space in which I view films
is essential to my bodily, perceptual and aesthetic engagement with them (the
wrong lighting, seating, noise levels, background features or image size will
ruin my experience of the film). Phenomenological orientation within space
is a condition of my bodily and perceptual engagement with film, even though
we always remain aware of our separation from the cinematic world.
Be that as it may, Carroll, following Sparshott, dubs this feature of
cinematic viewing ‘alienated vision’, claiming that what we see on the cinema
screen is a disembodied view or ‘detached view’ that disallows us any bodily
or kinaesthetic orientation towards it (2006a: 123). This makes sense in
relation to the cinematic character of the world depicted, whether that world
be fictional (in movies) or a perspective on the non-fictional world (in
documentary). Here again, however, one might question the scope of this
claim on phenomenological grounds: it is hard to see, for example, how I can
have the kind of bodily visceral responses of fear, panic or nausea to a horror
film unless there is some possibility of bodily or kinaesthetic orientation
towards the visual display – and what it depicts – before me. The phenomenon
of bodily or motor mimicry – where I involuntarily move, gesture, flinch or
experience muscular changes in response to a viewed scene – suggests that,
at an embodied phenomenological level, there is some version of bodily
orientation occurring in relation to elements of the (perceived and imagined)
 New Ontologies of Film 45

actions, objects or characters within a cinematic world. Think of the familiar

example of the bodily reaching for, or recoiling from, objects moving towards
the viewer in 3D movie contexts or extreme POV shots where the spectator
occupies the perspective of a protagonist (Smith 1997).
One can take these criticisms further. Using unaided embodied perception
as a phenomenological criterion for bodily orientation seems as dubious in the
case of microphenomena (bacteria, viruses) or macrophenomena (supernovae)
as in the case of an absent space or location (like a film set). It does not make
much sense to claim, either way, that I can orient my body towards a flu virus
or towards Alpha Centauri. Objects towards which we can take a bodily stance
or perceptual orientation tend to be those upon which we would, in principle,
be able to act in some way. On the other hand, one can nonetheless imagine
orienting one’s body towards a film set that is nearby, or doing so while
watching a film screening that takes place ‘on set’.4 Matters are complicated by
the fact that what we see may no longer exist (the film set, the distant star); how
can I orient my body towards past events? Carroll is clearly right to say that I
cannot orient my body towards fictional persons, places or events. While we
generally do not watch narrative films in order to work out how to get to the
fictional world in question (but think of The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming,
1939)), we can nonetheless orient ourselves imaginatively in relation to the
diegetic world of the film. In many cases, this involves a distinctively
phenomenological sense of bodily-perceptual orientation within the world of
the film: in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), for example, we quickly orient
ourselves in relation to Jeff Jeffries’ [James Stewart’s] apartment, his neighbours,
the facing courtyard and opposing apartment block with its interesting
residents.5 In Demme’s Silence of the Lambs, (1991), I could not experience the
bodily fear and panic that Clarice Starling [Jodie Foster] experiences groping
in the dark before a murderous ‘Buffalo Bill’ [Ted Levine] unless I could orient
myself imaginatively (and phenomenologically) within the darkened cellar in
which he stalks her wearing night vision goggles.6 Although I clearly remain
disconnected, from the perspective of my body, from any fictional world, I can
nonetheless be perceptually, affectively and imaginatively engaged within the
virtual world that I perceive on the screen.

Moving Images
David Lynch tells the story of contemplating one of his paintings and
wondering what it would look like if it could move, a thought that sparked
46 The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

his remarkable career as a filmmaker (quoted in Rodley 2005: 37). Animation

is precisely the giving of movement – or life – to images that would otherwise
be still, without life in the sense of self-movement. Here we seem to have an
undeniable element belonging to the ontology of the moving image (as
distinct from other images or ‘still images’). But what does it mean to say that
moving images move? Are we enjoying merely the illusion of movement? Or
do the characters we see on the screen ‘really’ move? What would distinguish
the perception of movement of characters on screen with the perception of
actors moving in real life? It would seem peculiar to deny that the movement
of a burglar entering a building captured on CCTV cannot serve as reliable
evidence of a robbery because the movements of the depicted suspect are not
real but illusory. One could say that we are watching a representation of the
robbery, not the robbery as such, apparent movements of those represented
figures, not real movements of the suspected burglars. This would nonetheless
sound odd, even counter-intuitive (and suggest some sophistry on the part of
the accused’s lawyer).
We know that the impression of movement in moving images is due to
combined effects of two psycho-physiological phenomena: the flicker fusion
threshold and apparent motion (or the stroboscopic effect). The flicker fusion
threshhold (an updated version of the ‘persistence of vision’ idea) is the point
at which a rapid succession of static images is perceived as fused into a
continuous image with ‘flicker free’ movement (slow the rate of image
succession and one begins to perceive flickering of the image and a breakdown
in one’s perception of continuous movement).7 This fusion effect occurs in
tandem with the phenomenon of apparent or stroboscopic motion (which
also used to be called the ‘phi phenomenon’ in Gestalt psychology). It refers to
the visual illusion whereby a static object, presented in succession, appears to
move (e.g. a circular row of lightbulbs lighting up in succession giving the
impression of a ‘movement’ of the light source in a circular motion). Although
the precise manner in which cinematic motion is perceived remains
scientifically debated from a neurological standpoint, there is broad consensus
that our experience of motion in motion pictures is due to the combined
effects of critical flicker fusion and the phenomenon of apparent motion (see
Hoerl 2012). There is also strong evidence that the same processes involved in
the perception of cinematic motion are also in play in the perception of
movement in ordinary experience.
Does this mean that the phenomenon of movement in movies gives us an
assured criterion to distinguish moving images from static images in painting
or photography? It might seem so, yet one can readily give counterexamples
 New Ontologies of Film 47

of films that eschew any movement of, or within, the image. Carroll (2008:
59), for example, provides an impressive list of experimental films, ranging
from Nagisa Oshima’s Band of Ninjas (1967) (a film of a comic strip), Michael
Snow’s One Second in Montreal (1969) (a film of photos), Hollis Frampton’s
Poetic Justice (1972) (a film of a shooting script), to Godard and Gorin’s Letter
to Jane (1972) (another film of photos).
The most famous example, however, is Chris Marker’s La jetée (1962), a
mesmerising reverie and time-travel narrative composed of a series of
projected still images, photographs one wants to say, with no movement (bar
one) throughout the entire film. As Carroll notes, one could imagine an
idealised version of La jetée (with no movement at all), and ask the question
whether this is a film, a work of cinema or something else. A similar question
is posed by Jarman’s Blue (1993), which presents a film without a moving
image or arguably any image at all (in the sense of being an image of
something, since all that appears on screen is a blue colour field, accompanied
by poetic voiceover). If we accept Blue as a moving picture, then we have to
ask if films need be composed of moving images in the conventional sense.
Similarly, if we accept La jetée as a work of cinema (indeed a revered and
memorable one), then we have to question whether movement need be a
necessary condition of film. On other hand, we could question on what
grounds we would count La jetée as a work of cinema, but not an identical
slideshow installation of just these enigmatic photographs telling the story of
a lost soul ‘haunted by an image’. Or one could approach Blue as an artistic
audiovisual work that poses the question ‘what is film?’ in such a way to invite
a phenomenological experiential encounter with philosophical significance
for both film theory and philosophy of film (see Sobchack 2011).
Carroll’s response is to argue that the ‘technical possibility’ of movement,
rather than actual movement, is a necessary element of film. Because we have
the reasonable expectation that we may see movement at some point (and,
of course, we do see one moving shot), we can classify La jetée as an
unconventional cinematic work. This could never be the case with a slideshow
of all the relevant still images screened in a comparable manner (say, an
installation in an art gallery consisting of a slideshow of just the images used
in Marker’s film). Hence the ontology of the moving image does not depend
on actual so much as potential movement within such images. Agreeing with
Arthur Danto (1979), Carroll concludes that it is the technical possibility,
hence reasonable expectation, of potential movement that distinguishes the
‘moving’ image, even if we are confronted by a cinematic work like La jetée in
which images may not actually move.
48 The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

A difficulty arises here, however, with Carroll’s preferred term for film
(‘moving images’). For if a film can be a film without having any images that
move (La jetée), or even any images in the conventional sense (Blue), why
insist on the term ‘moving images’ as the proper designation for works of
cinema? Admittedly, it would be perverse to cite La jetée or Blue as
paradigmatic cases of cinema, but their anomalous status does raise questions
about the ontology of moving images as definitive of cinema as a medium.
Indeed, we could also query Carroll’s assumption that La jetée is ‘indisputably
a motion picture’ (2008: 59). Why so? A number of alternative hypotheses are
equally possible. Perhaps La jetée shows that our assumptions concerning
what is ‘indisputably a motion picture’ are open to question. Perhaps it is a
slideshow masquerading as a work of cinema; perhaps it suggests that, under
certain circumstances, slideshows can be construed as films; or that the kind
of expectation we bring to our interpretation of images depends upon what
we take them to be, even on their context of presentation. Imagine an art
gallery photographic slideshow of images from La jetée presented by a
postmodern artist, perhaps presented as a clever ‘remake’ of the work that
copies it image for image in a slideshow presentation. One might respond
quite differently to the slideshow than to a conventional screening of the film
version. Imagine that we are in the gallery, and that we share a knowledge of
Marker’s film; we would now be perplexed as to whether we are seeing a
version of ‘Marker’s film’ or a clever ‘simulation’ of it by means of the slideshow
exhibit. What if no discernible physical difference distinguishes my viewing
of the slideshow from my viewing of (Carroll’s ‘ideal’ version of) the film?
What, ontologically speaking, distinguishes the slideshow version from the
film version? Would the means of exhibition, or the material ‘medium’ being
used, or the context of performance, change the meaning of the work? Here it
is the context of presentation (a gallery) as well as the viewer’s expectation
that are important, shaping how the film is ‘indexed’ as being of such and such
a category or kind, rather than any independent ontological features of the
images themselves. La jetée is thus a paradoxical ‘cinematic’ work that remains
ambiguous between still and moving image, slideshow and motion picture,
and thereby challenges us, philosophically and cinematically, to mark and
reflect upon the differences that we usually assume to exist between them.
Whatever the case, it is undeniable that movement, in most cases,
describes what moving images typically show. Is this movement, however,
real or illusory? Is it an apparent movement due to the animating effect of
perceiving related images in rapid succession? Or is it, rather, a ‘real’
movement that we perceive when we watch movies? This question was
 New Ontologies of Film 49

addressed in classical film theory, with Münsterberg and Arnheim both

arguing that the movement we observe is apparent movement that arises as
an effect of the psychological and cognitive operations of our own minds
(Münsterberg 2002 [1916]: 69–71). Münsterberg and Arnheim both make
the familiar phenomenological point that, while we are aware that we are
watching ‘flat’ two-dimensional images, we nonetheless experience the
impression of depth and movement on the screen (Münsterberg 2002
[1916]: 71; Arnheim 1957: 20). They take the further idealist step, however,
of imputing this experience to our ‘inner mental activity’ uniting separate
phases of movement in the ‘idea of connected action’ (Münsterberg 2002
[1916]: 78).8 Depth and movement on the screen, according to this view, are
a mixture of ‘objective’ perception, varieties of perceptual illusion, and the
subjective construal of this ‘mixed’ mode of perception, which we do not
even notice once perceptually and psychologically immersed in the complex
visual world of the film.
Henri Bergson offered (back in 1907) one of the paradigmatic criticisms of
the illusory character of the movement we perceive in cinematographic images.
Because the appearance of movement in moving images depends upon the
projection of a series of static images at a rapid rate of succession (through a
projector), cinematic images can only ever deliver the ‘illusion’ of movement
based upon the animation of a series of static poses. Bergson even argued that
ordinary perception and consciousness also operate according to the
‘cinematographic illusion’, composing apparent movement out of the synthesis
of successive static images (2005: 251–252). It is fair to say that this account of
the illusory character of cinematic motion – that it involves apparent motion
generated by the animation of static images – has remained the dominant view
in much film theory, although it has recently been challenged by a number of
contemporary philosophers (such as Deleuze (1986), Currie (1995) and Carroll
(2008)). As Deleuze argues, Bergson’s error was to assume that, because moving
images were composed of a succession of static images, the movement they
depicted could only ever be illusory (1986: 2). This is to confuse, however, the
mechanical genesis of moving images with the experience of what they depict
(movement). Movement-images give a direct presentation of movement, even
though the process by which they are generated involves the animation of
static images and the phenomenon of apparent motion.
Deleuze’s criticism is elaborated by Currie and Carroll, who both agree that,
although our impression of movement depends upon static images, we can still
hold that the moving image really does move for us (see Currie 1995, 1996;
Carroll 2008: 87–93). This is not to say that we need assert that this movement
50 The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

is ‘real’ in some deep metaphysical sense. Rather, it means that the movement
perceived in moving images is ‘objective’ in the sense of being intersubjectively
verifiable by other observers, hence that we need not accept that the movement
we perceive is merely illusory or somehow ‘subjective’ (Carroll 2008: 88).9 Both
Currie and Carroll draw the analogy with colour perception: even though the
colours we ordinarily perceive are merely apparent (dependent upon our
capacity for vision as much as the wavelengths of light reflected from particular
surfaces), this does not mean that they are ‘illusory’ (otherwise how could we
distinguish genuine colour illusions such as colour blindness?). In the same
way that we take colours to be real but response-dependent properties
(intersubjectively perceived, under normal conditions, by other human
subjects), we should also take movement to be a real but response-dependent
property of moving images (Carroll 2008: 89–93).
Hoerl (2012) makes a further argument. Compared with apparent motion,
which can be phenomenologically distinguished from real motion (I am aware
that the lightbulb does not ‘really’ move in a circular arrangement of lightbulbs
but only appears to do so), we do not experience this phenomenological
difference between real and apparent motion in the case of moving images and
respond to both in the same manner. When I see a character walking or
laughing on screen, this is not phenomenologically distinguishable as ‘apparent’
walking or laughing compared with ordinary experience, even though we
remain aware that we are seeing cinematic motion rather than real motion
(that is, a cinematic image rather than natural perception). From this point of
view, ‘movies’ are precisely what we see on screen.
The argument over movement in the movies is polarised between critics
who point to the way movement is generated by ‘illusory’ means, and
defenders who argue that the onus is on critics to explain why we should not
accept that the movement we perceive on screen is ‘real’ movement. Part of
the issue here, I suggest, is a conflation of phenomenological and causal
levels of explanation. Critics argue that, because the causal process involved
in generating moving images involves the perceived fusion of static images,
the movement can only be illusory. Defenders claim that we need not posit
any metaphysical kind of reality to the movement we perceive since it is
experienced, in a subjective or response-dependent way, like any other
movement we perceive in ordinary experience.
A way out of the impasse is to clarify that we do perceive movement on the
screen (within an image, between images, unfolding in time), from a
phenomenological point of view. There is nothing substantial in the phenomenal
experience of movement in a cinematic image to distinguish it from movement
 New Ontologies of Film 51

perceived by the unaided eye. Objects and spatial relations may appear ‘flatter’
(e.g. watching a race cyclist on television riding up a steep hill), due to the two-
dimensional nature of the image, but the movements themselves (the pedal
strokes, muscular leg efforts and movement of the bicycle) do not appear to be
discernibly different. We can even consult movement presented in cinematic
images in cases where our perception is doubtful or deceived (consider the use
of slow-motion footage of a closely fought running or cycling race, or visual
tracking and trajectory simulation technology in television sporting coverage
of cricket and tennis). There is no reason to question the phenomenological
reality of such movement perceived, since it accords with the kinds of
experiences of movement in ordinary perception. Indeed, the movies rely on
such emulation (and manipulation) of natural perception in all sorts of ways
(and it is why we do not need to absorb elaborate cultural codes in order to
perceive and understand movement in movies).
To make a familiar phenomenological point, theoretical questions concerning
the ontological status of movement in the moving image can arise only once
we (consciously or deliberately) interrupt the immersive experience of watching
a movie and reflect on the mechanisms or processes – be they technological,
psychological or physiological – that causally generate the movement we
perceive.10 Rather than questioning our phenomenological experience, we
need only distinguish what we might call the primacy of cinematic perception
– what we experience, phenomenologically, when we watch movies – from the
theoretical or explanatory accounts of the various causal mechanisms that
generate this phenomenological experience of movement in time. Our
phenomenological and aesthetic experience of movement is a perceptible
expression, rather than illusory distortion, of the causal mechanisms generating
what we perceive on screen (see Merleau-Ponty 1964: 54–59).

Film as Art Redux

Another striking feature of contemporary philosophy of film is its renewed
interest in the question of film as art, a question traditionally tied with the
ontology of film. Münsterberg’s The Photoplay (2002 [1916]) and Arnheim’s
Film as Art (1957 [1930]) inaugurated the tradition of commencing theoretical
reflection on film by addressing the aesthetic and ontological question
concerning film as art. Like Arnheim, Münsterberg argued that film (‘the
photoplay’) is an artform distinct from theatre and photography, yet aesthetically
superior in having become (artistically) freed from the constraints of space and
52 The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

time (2002: 129).11 Anticipating a line of inquiry that continues today,

Münsterberg and Arnheim argued that film artistically transforms, rather than
merely passively records, dramatic performance and visual display. Far from
simply recording interesting objects or events (like the early cinematic actualités
depicting everyday scenes) or dramatic performances (like the earliest narrative
films), cinema gives artistic expression to how things, events, performances are
depicted. In doing so, moreover, cinema can emulate psychological acts of
consciousness (perception, attention, imagination, recollection), thus suggesting
an intriguing film/mind analogy that has continued to fascinate theorists of
film from Münsterberg and Jean Mitry to cognitivist philosophers of film.12
The questions that animated early film theory were at once technological
and aesthetic, ontological and evaluative. What was the nature of this new
medium? Was it an artform akin to photography or theatre, or something
with its own artistic possibilities? Early reflection on film as art underlined
not only its technological character but also its cultural legitimacy. Given the
clash between technical and evaluative issues, however, it was paramount to
establish the nature of the new medium. Cinema emerged out of experiments
with animation that attempted to create the image of movement through the
rapid projection of successive images (late-19th century devices such as the
zoetrope, praxinoscope and kinetoscope). Film was subjected, however, to
the same sceptical arguments that had been made against photography as an
art. The new artform was derided by some critics for simply mechanically
recording actions and events, and hence as lacking the deliberate skill and
expressive power required for art (see Arnheim 1957: 8–9). Early theorists
thus developed a defence of film as not merely recording but as artistically
transforming our perception of reality. It was but a short step to ally the
filmmaker, typically the director, with the author of a work whose artistic
vision, thematic concerns and aesthetic style comprise an oeuvre belonging
to what was later baptised the cinematic auteur.
The debate here concerns the contrast between the medium of film
construed as a technical recording of an artistic performance (and so not an
artform in its own right) and film as expression of an artistic point of view,
using compositional and stylistic devices to evoke aesthetic meaning (and so
an artform expressing artistic intentions on the part of an artist). This debate
crystallised the polarity between realist (film captures reality thanks to its
mechanical recording of images) and expressivist positions (film expresses
subjective states and the artistic intentions of a director) regarding the
medium of film. Indeed, this intersection between ontological and aesthetic
concerns – does the medium of film shape its artistic possibilities? – continues
 New Ontologies of Film 53

to play a role in contemporary philosophical debates (for contrasting views

see Carroll 2006a and Gaut 2010). The most striking instance of such a return
to the question of film as art is Roger Scruton’s revisionist critique of both
photography and film as presentational, hence not artistic, mediums (1981).13
Perhaps because of its counter-intuitive character, Scruton’s critique of the
idea of film as an independent artform has generated a host of critical responses
(see Abell 2010; Gaut 2002; McIver Lopes 2005). For all its impact, however,
Scruton’s critique rehearses arguments that were prevalent in the early days of
film theory. Indeed, Scruton begins, in the traditional manner, with an
investigation of the question of photography and representation (1981: 578–
581). Contra most conventional accounts, Scruton claims that photography,
due to its mechanical nature, cannot be regarded as representational (it simply
records or shows us the subject, not how the photographer regards the subject).
Paintings, on the other hand, are representational, since they are intentional
artefacts that reflect how the artist intended to portray something: a painting
displays only those elements an artist intended to portray; a photograph, as a
recording of its subject, displays unintentional elements that bear no relation to
the photographer’s artistic intentions (Scruton 1981: 578–584). Assuming one
accepts this strongly intentionalist account of art (about which one can raise
doubts), Scruton goes on to distinguish painting as a representational art from
photography as a presentational recording of reality. On this view, Rembrandt’s
The Night Watch (1642) is a work of art, whereas Peter Greenaway’s Nightwatching
(2007), a complex cinematic reflection on Rembrandt’s painting, is not!
Scruton then extends this critique, arguing that film, as dependent upon
photographic recording of its subjects, similarly fails to qualify as a
representational art. Rather, a ‘film is a photograph of a dramatic representation’
(Scruton 1981: 598). Scruton concludes that the common assertion that there
are cinematic masterpieces rests on a confusion between dramatic art and its
photographic recording: ‘It follows that if there is such a thing as a cinematic
masterpiece it will be so because – like Wild Strawberries and Le règle de jeu – it
is in the first place a dramatic masterpiece’ (1981: 577).
Again echoing criticisms from the early days of film theory, Scruton goes
further in his attack on the aesthetic status of film, arguing that its
unintentional recording of a plethora of extraneous detail and unfocused
jumble of visual information detracts from the aesthetic form of the image
and is apt to confuse the unfortunate filmgoer (1981: 599–600). Indeed, our
aesthetic interest in film, Scruton claims, concerns only its subject; we cannot
take an aesthetic interest in it as such because it is essentially a photographic
recording, rather than an aesthetic representation, of a performance.
54 The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

Repeating a pattern that has unfortunately become rather familiar, in this

kind of prescriptive critique the philosopher feels little need to acknowledge
the rich history of theorisation over precisely the question of film (or
photography) as art. The idea that there might be philosophical film criticism
– or even specific claims and arguments within the history of film theory
(Arnheim, for example) – that argues precisely for the artistic achievement
of film (or photography) barely rates a mention.
In any event, Scruton’s critics have rehearsed sophisticated defences of
film as art using arguments that go back to Münsterberg and Arnheim. As
Katherine Thomson-Jones points out, one can either challenge Scruton’s
claim that photography cannot be an artform in its own right, or one can
challenge Scruton’s extension of his claims concerning photography to
cinema, arguing that film has its own distinctive aesthetic possibilities (2008:
8–9). Another strategy is to argue that Scruton is simply wrong in construing
cinema as a photographic, that is, non-representational, art, either because
his account of photographic art is implausible (McIver Lopes 2005), or
because his account of cinema as non-representational is untenable (Abell
2010). From an aesthetic point of view, the burden of proof, one might argue,
falls on the sceptic who claims that we cannot entertain a genuine aesthetic
interest in photographs (and by extension films), but are merely satisfying
our intellectual curiosity while mistakenly believing that we are enjoying art.
As we shall see, this depends, of course, on what we understand by ‘art’,
indeed what kind of aesthetic theory of the work of art we entertain (for
example, that art is the object of a disinterested aesthetic pleasure; or an
expression of cultural-historical meaning; or a unity of significant form; or
whatever the relevant art institutions of the day count as belonging to the
‘artworld’ and so on). Suffice to say that these are deeply contested aesthetic
questions. Although Scruton refines Bazin’s claims concerning the
photographic character of film, it is ironic that the aesthetic conclusions
Scruton draws are quite opposed to those that inspired Bazin.

Back to the Future: Bazin and

Arnheim on Film as Art
Contemporary critics of Scruton repeat more sophisticated versions of the
defence of film as art that began with Münsterberg and Arnheim. Such
critics argue either that photography is a representational art that can sustain
 New Ontologies of Film 55

aesthetic interest and involves a variety of intentional artistic effects, or that

the extension of claims made concerning photography cannot be extrapolated
to film, since film is a distinctive representational art with its own aesthetic
potentials that contribute to its artistic significance.
Alexander Sesonske, for example, argues that the aesthetics of film can be
articulated via the affordances of the medium itself: film has its own ways of
representing space, time and movement that are novel in relation to the other
arts, as are the ways of experiencing space, time and movement that film affords
us as viewers (1974: 53–55). Film offers a way of representing and of experiencing
space as two-dimensional, yet as creating the impression of depth in which
action and movement can occur. It reveals a new way of representing time, both
within the world of the film as for the viewers who experience a complex
narrative spanning different times and places all within a ‘real time’ cinematic
viewing timespan of one to two hours. It represents a new way of framing and
depicting movement that incorporates natural perception as much as the
complex artistry of camera movement, framing and montage, sound and music,
with rhythms of movement and shot sequencing that can both heighten
meaning as well as intensify our affective responsiveness. All of these novelties
of representation and aesthetic experience are characteristic of cinema as an
artform, one that partakes of all the rest, yet has its own unique possibilities of
aesthetic expression. As Carroll remarks, the main service performed by
Scruton’s arguments against film as art is, ironically, to help focus, clarify and
articulate our reasons for defending film’s aesthetic significance.
An alternative position that has emerged in recent years involves an
uncoupling of ontological and aesthetic questions. The ontology of film,
according to Carroll, does not have normative implications concerning
aesthetic questions of film as art, or at best, it leaves open the question of the
aesthetic uses to which the (pluralistic) medium of film can be put. To say it
differently, one cannot always get an aesthetic ‘ought’ from an artistic ‘is’. For all
the sophistication of the philosophical debate, however, what we might call the
aesthetic question still persists: granted that film is a (mass) art, what is it that
qualifies a particular film as art? Philosophers of film, when they acknowledge
this question, tend to respond by presenting a theory of film as art or by
invoking criteria of aesthetic evaluation. Carroll, for example, argues that we
should remotivate a traditional (Aristotelian) categorical approach that would
distinguish differing genres and styles, each with their own aesthetic qualities
and excellences (2008: 192–225). Such an approach, with its laudable emphasis
on pluralism, nonetheless raises the question of the way in which we should
decide the relevant criteria of aesthetic evaluation: what are the criteria for
56 The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

choosing our aesthetic criteria, especially when it comes to particular genres?

This question is complicated further by the technological-industrial character
of film. Even if we refrain from drawing normative conclusions from the
physical or technical aspects of the medium, the technical, collective,
commercial and cultural-ideological dimensions of film still present filmmaker,
critic and audience with a unique set of aesthetic questions and challenges.
Part of the problem, I suggest, is that the aesthetic criteria we use either
derive from ‘the medium’ or from our shared horizon of cultural practices; and
here we find both a plurality of criteria and a plurality of ways in which film
can be understood. As Jacques Rancière argues (2004: 20–30; 2006: 1–19), film
is a hybrid artform that cuts across the three main historical regimes of art: 1)
the ethical regime (going back to Plato), which grasps images in regard to their
truth content and the ethical uses to which they are put. 2) The representational-
poetic regime (emerging with Aristotle’s poetics), which grasps images in
terms of their representational character and the ways in which they are
composed into narrative forms. And 3), the aesthetic regime (Kant and
beyond), which links the autonomy of art with the theme of freedom, sunders
the link between hierarchies of representation and social hierarchies, and
posits an ‘egalitarianism’ of subject-matter and plurality of aesthetic forms
(Rancière 2004: 20–30). From this point of view, film belongs principally to
the modern aesthetic regime of art; it introduces an ontological egalitarianism
(all objects are ontologically ‘equal’ from the viewpoint of the cinematic image)
and an aesthetic pluralism that philosophers have linked to film’s inherently
democratic potentials (see Cavell 1979: 35). Film shares the freedom of
aesthetic art, the ‘premodern’ concern with the ethical use of images and the
representational conventions of narrative fiction. This is why arguments over
the ontology of the moving image and the question of the aesthetics of film
remain so intractable: film is inherently plural, hybrid, with myriad, sometimes
conflicting, aesthetic possibilities. The question of what makes particular films
works of art, moreover, is best addressed by way of aesthetically responsive
philosophical film criticism. I shall return to this issue in later chapters dealing
with particular films as offering cases of ‘film as philosophy’.

The Challenge of the Digital

In approaching the ontology of cinema, philosophical film theory has
focused overwhelmingly on traditional celluloid-based film. From Bazin and
Eisenstein to Cavell and Deleuze, ‘film’ has meant analogue motion pictures
 New Ontologies of Film 57

photographically captured by a camera, using reflected light to photochemically

alter light-sensitive salts on celluloid film stock, which is then developed,
manually edited and screened in a public venue via a projector. Until recent
decades, this was the practical, historical and technological basis for the shared
consensus over the meaning of ‘film’ – a shorthand term covering both the
medium and the works produced within it. Since the emergence of video and
advent of digital images and media, however, as well as new viewing platforms
and practices no longer confined to the movie theatre, the very meaning of the
term ‘film’ has come under question.
On the one hand, some philosophers of film, for example Deleuze and
Carroll, were aware of the profound implications of the shift to digital images. In
the 1980s, Deleuze noted the emergence of new kinds of images based on digital
information interfaces (1989: 265)14 and pointed to the importance of the brain
sciences for understanding cinema (2000: 366).15 Carroll, for his part, forecast in
the 1990s that digital images may well replace photographically based analogue
images, adding further weight to his arguments against any putative ‘medium
essentialism’ pertaining to film. On the other hand, as Berys Gaut (2010) and
Rafe McGregor (2013), point out, the overwhelming majority of theoretical
contributions to the philosophical study of film focus on traditional analogue or
photographically based versions of the cinematic medium, leaving in abeyance
the philosophical and cultural implications of digital media.16
With the shift from analogue to digital all but complete (encompassing not
only the recording and editing but also distribution, screening and reception
of moving image culture, which now includes television, streaming services,
mobile platforms and computer gaming), further reflection on the ontological
and aesthetic challenges raised by digital images is timely and apposite. For it
is not only the question of how the ontology of cinema is challenged, displaced
or transformed by the advent of digital culture but whether we are talking
about a transformation of cinema as a hybrid assemblage of mediums or
about an ontologically distinct form of image regime altogether. I shall suggest
the former account is a more plausible position than the latter (see Prince
2019), which assumes the very materialist form of medium essentialism that
the shift to digital image culture throws into question.

What Are Digital Images?

Although they are a ubiquitous feature of contemporary culture, the manner in
which digital images are produced is not always well understood. Like analogue
58 The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

photographic images, digital photographic images depend upon contact with

reflected light: light captured by a CCD (charge-coupled device) converts light
intensities into electric voltages and then into streams of binary numbers,
which are stored as binary-coded bits of information pertaining to dot-point
light values (pixels). This mathematical information, stored in the form of a
bitmap, can be processed algorithmically (according to prescribed input-output
rules) in order to construct a mathematical model that can be represented as a
digital image. Such images are constituted via pixels that instantiate particular
values pertaining to light, colour, saturation, texture and so on, all of which
values can be subjected to further variation or alteration via editing and post-
production processes (see McGregor 2013). Whereas an analogue image
involves a process of photochemical ‘inscription’ of the image in a manner that
remains isomorphic or mimetic with respect to its profilmic object (hence an
‘analogical’ image), a digital photographic image offers an informationally
based mathematical model of the object (hence a ‘digital’ image) that no longer
has a direct causal link with its referent. It is less a representation of a pre-existing
object than a simulation of it; and the elements of that model are in principle
open to variation (or manipulation) such that the ‘evidentiary’ or referential
function of the digital photographic becomes open to question.
Indeed, it is also possible to construct digital images without any reference
to a pre-existing photographed object: hand-drawn, computer-generated or
software-composed images can be constructed that are essentially animated
works (e.g. using CGI software) or that involve a hybridised synthesis of
both live-action and CGI-animated footage (as has become commonplace
in mainstream action, fantasy and blockbuster movies). It is clear, therefore,
that it is no longer possible to use, without qualification, arguments
predicated on the photographic basis of analogue film images to understand
digital photographic images, let alone digital image media more generally
that involve processes spanning the spectrum of analogue photographic
capture and computerised animation processes. As we shall see, this raises
interesting questions concerning the ontology of moving images, as well as
the meaning of any putative ‘medium’ defining what has historically and
culturally been known as ‘cinema’.
These stark differences between analogue and digital images have led a
number of film and media theorists to argue that digital media represent a
radical break with traditional conceptions of the film medium, hence we
require a new ontology of moving images. W. J. T. Mitchell, for example, argues
that digital images are an entirely distinctive form compared with analogue
images, stating that they do not have a photographic basis in the way that
 New Ontologies of Film 59

analogue film images do (1992). He goes so far as to claim that we should not
describe digital photographs as ‘photographs’ since they do not share the same
properties as analogue photographic images and are more akin to paintings.
Lev Manovich (2016: 29) identifies digital images as ‘a particular case of
animated image that uses live-action footage as one of its many elements’,
thereby reversing the hierarchy between photographic realism and animated
drawing: cinema is closer to the graphic art of animation than the representational
character of traditional (analogue) photography. Indeed, there are grounds for
considering contemporary digital cinema as returning to cinema’s roots in
animation, rather than neglecting animation as a minor offshoot of (live action)
cinema proper (see also Cholodenko 2008). The widespread use of CGI
technology in conjunction with other post-production techniques (compositing
digital animation and so on), means that contemporary cinema is a hybrid
artform that should be understood in conjunction with animation as key forms
of moving image media.
Rafe McGregor follows this strong account of the difference between
analogue and digital images, holding to Gaut’s ‘melange’ or hybrid account
(2010) of moving images as a wider, more appropriate category than ‘film’ or
even ‘moving images’, if the latter are confined to mechanically generated
images (as is the case with Carroll). He argues that Gaut’s ‘synthetic’ or hybrid
view of moving images is the most appropriate for understanding contemporary
cinema but also for recognising that cinema, now in its digital form, is the latest
manifestation of the art of moving images that goes back millennia. Cinema is
the art of moving images, encompassing photochemically based analogue
images and digital photographic images but also other forms of moving image.
These can include object-generated (Indonesian and Chinese shadow puppet
plays), handmade (flip-books, magic lanterns, the phenatakistocope and the
praxinoscope) or mechanically generated moving images (including Edison’s
kinetoscope, the Lumiere brothers’ cinematographe, which both used film
stock, and ‘subsequent electronic and digital developments’) (McGregor, 2013:
266). This is a more capacious account of moving images, which comprises all
three modes of generation (object, handmade or mechanical), while recognising
the specificities of digital photography and digital images more generally.
As McGregor points out, Carroll’s more restricted account of moving
images is confined to mechanical-generated images but excludes object-
generated images (shadow puppet plays and the like) without good
justification (they are still ‘moving images’, even if object-generated, and even
if they are not what we typically understand by the term ‘moving image’). To
be sure, there are important ontological differences between analogue and
60 The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

digital images (analogue images are causally linked to their objects, whereas
computer-generated digital images generally are not; digital images are
generated by mathematical representation rather than photochemical
reproduction; digital photographic images are vastly more manipulable than
analogue photographic images and so on). Both belong, however, to the
broader category of ‘moving images’, which we can still regard as constituting
the medium of cinema, while remaining mindful of the fact that cinema
today is a hybrid digital medium encompassing live action footage, motion
capture, animation, CGI, post-production effects and so on.
As Gaut remarks, the best way of categorising the digital images is therefore
as ‘a melange (or blended) image – that is, it can be produced by any of the
three distinct techniques and each technique may vary in proportion it has in
the making of a particular image’ (Gaut 2010: 45). The manipulability of the
digital image extends right through the production process (including
variations in digital capture during recording), editing and post-production
processes, which allow the digital image to be edited, recomposited, animated
and manipulated in myriad ways, seamlessly combining, for example, live-
action with motion-capture animation and CGI technology. As remarked, the
manipulability of the digital image has led theorists like Mitchell to argue that
digital images should not be called photographs, even if captured on a digital
camera, since they are closer to paintings than traditional photography (1992:
3; quoted in McGregor 2013: 270). As Gaut argues, however, both traditional
and digital photography employ similar generative techniques and serve
similar artistic ends, hence legitimately can be regarded as distinctive kinds of
photograph (Gaut 2010: 49). We can say the same of digital cinema, which,
despite its ontological difference from traditional film, still employs related
generative methods and has been integrated into canonical narrative film
genres and styles, while extending and blending these with other digital media
(gaming, for example). It is the static nature of photography, rather, which
marks an ontological difference in relation to moving images (which are also
temporal), not whether these are analogue or digital photographs.

Image Scepticism and

Claims to Veracity
One of the most notable debates surrounding the implications of the shift to
digital images in cinema, and the shift to digital media image culture more
 New Ontologies of Film 61

generally, involves what we might call an‘image scepticism’ (or iconoscepticism)

that accompanies many accounts of the ontology of digital images. As opposed
to ‘indexical’ accounts of traditional cinema, with their emphasis on the
photographic realism of photography and, by extension, the capacity of
cinema to capture reality, many contemporary accounts of digital cinema
adopt a sceptical stance towards any form of realism or the capacity of (digital)
images to capture or represent what we used to call pro-filmic reality. The
severing of the ontological or causal link between image and referent, coupled
with the manipulability of the digital image at all stages of production, editing
and post-production, has resulted in the questioning or even abandonment of
claims to realism and a pervasive image scepticism concerning the veracity of
moving images. Much like earlier debates concerning documentary film,
particularly the influential critique of cinéma vérité and direct cinema, today’s
theorists of digital media culture counsel a sceptical view of image culture and
reject claims to truth, objectivity or veracity, as ideological relics of an
outmoded medium ontology. Given the ideological reworking of this image
scepticism, now promulgated as part of the pervasive scepticism towards news
media and audiovisual culture more generally (the rise of ‘fake news’,
circulation of deepfakes and so on), it behooves us to consider some of the
arguments presented in favour of this image scepticism, and to offer some
critical reflections on their scope and limits.
McGregor, for example, casts doubt on what Currie called the ‘presentation
thesis’ with regard to analogue photographs (that such photographs present,
rather than represent, reality). As discussed previously, the presentation
thesis – exemplified by Walton’s ‘transparency thesis’ – has four aspects: that
such photographs display objectivity with respect to their objects; that they
photochemically reproduce their object; that are therefore causally related to
their objects; and that they are in an important sense ‘transparent’ in relation
to their objects, hence are ‘presentations’ rather than ‘representations’. As part
of his refutation, McGregor criticises claims that photojournalism and crime
scene photography, for example, ‘typically present reality’, arguing that this is
not always the case (2013: 269–270). He cites famous examples (used by
Walton) such as Timothy H. O’Sullivan’s photograph, ‘Death on a Misty
Morning’ (1863),17 a famous image of fallen soldiers during the American
Civil War, but where O’Sullivan reportedly moved the corpses in order to
create a more dramatic visual effect (expressing a certain artistic but also
moral intention in depicting the pathos and suffering of war). McGregor
concludes that this, along with other famous cases of ‘manipulated’
photojournalism, shows that ‘even photojournalistic images do not
62 The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

necessarily present reality’, and hence that ‘there is room for doubt as to the
reality, and room for expression on the part of the photographer’ (2013: 269).
These examples, however, only show that photojournalistic images can be
manipulated; that they do not necessarily provide a ‘transparent’ (or truthful/
accurate) depiction of reality but rather a mediated representation of it. The
possibility of alteration leading to misrepresentation or even distortion of a
profilmic state of affairs, however, is parasitic on the possibility of a truthful
or veracious representation of this state of affairs (otherwise we would have
no grounds for calling it ‘manipulated’, ‘misleading’ or a ‘misrepresentation’).
Manipulation of the image is dependent on its recording capacity and the
manner in which both the profilmic objects can be altered or modified
(posed), as well as the manner in which the image itself can be manipulated
post-factum, which, as Tom Gunning points out, has accompanied the history
of photography since its inception (Gunning 2008). Such images do not
‘present reality’ in any unmediated purity, but do so in a (humanly) mediated
or ‘impure’ manner. This does not mean that reality cannot be captured but
rather that any image – like any representation – remains open to the
possibility of manipulation or distortion, but also that any representation of
reality is mediated in myriad ways.
McGregor questions the veracity of such images, and this is indeed
important; but the fact that there is ‘room to doubt’ the veracity of
photojournalistic (or indeed any photographic) images does not mean that
we need doubt the ‘reality’ of what is depicted as such (such as the bodies of
the fallen soldiers). As McGregor remarks, this shows that photographic
images are representational, rather than presentational; but their
representational character does not mean that they can have no purchase on
reality or make claims to veracity that may be fallible or unreliable. Citing
famous photographic hoaxes – ‘like the Cottingly Fairies (1917) and the
surgeon’s photograph of the Loch Ness monster (1934)’ (McGregor 2013:
270) – again shows that such images are manipulable, subject to distortion or
deception, rather than that they can make no (mediated) claim to reality as
such. Photographic hoaxes (like fake documentaries) are, once again, parasitic
on the possibility of veracious images (otherwise the distinction between
hoax and non-hoax images would collapse); hence they do not refute claims
to reality tout court (any more than the existence of ‘fake news’ refutes the idea
of journalistic objectivity or truthful media reporting). Digital images do
challenge the claims to veracity that typically accompanied analogue
photography; but they do so by increasing the possibilities of alteration,
modification, reconfiguration and manipulation to which such images are
 New Ontologies of Film 63

subject, thereby underlining the complexity and fallibility (rather than

impossibility) of any claims to veracity that we might entertain with regard to
such images.
Digital cinema is a novel and innovative technological outgrowth of
traditional analogue cinema; despite its distinctive features, however, it is not
a fundamentally different medium or artform altogether (Prince 2019). As
with the introduction of recorded synch sound, technological transformations
in the medium have corresponding artistic effects and open up new
possibilities for creative development of the medium. Digital cinema is no
different, and it is striking how seamlessly the new digital media technologies
have been taken up into ‘mainstream’ filmmaking practices. Claims regarding
the ontological gulf between analogue and digital images have been
exaggerated, as have the forms of image scepticism accompanying such
claims (the idea that, with the attenuation or severing of the causal link
between image and object or referent, digital image regimes mean the
abandonment of all claims to veracity, truth, objectivity or realism in cinema).
Cinema has always been a hybrid medium playing on both its realist and
expressive, direct and constructed dimensions, offering in both fictional and
non-fictional modalities a ‘creative treatment of actuality’ (to paraphrase
Grier’s famous dictum). Conventional or canonical narrative cinema still
overwhelmingly dominates cinematic production, and cinema is still
predominantly a narrative artform that presents fictional dramas combining
realism and expressivism, fantasy and factuality, subjectivity and objectivity,
in myriad artful combinations. Digital image-making practices, as Gaut
(2010) and McGregor (2013) point out, have increased the artistic possibilities
of the cinematic medium, while raising the question of how we are to
understand and interpret such images given their complex, mediated and
manipulable claims to veracity.18
64
 3
Adaptation:
Philosophical
Approaches to Narrative

Chapter Outline
Plot, Story and Style 66
Visual Sequencing and Narrative Technique 68
Carroll’s ‘Erotetic’ Model of Narrative 70
‘Juste une image’: The Aesthetic Dimension 71
Cinematic Authorship 74
Is There a Narrator in This Film? 78
Digital Transformations: Immersion, Interactivity and
VR cinema 84

In my previous chapter, I discussed the renaissance of classical questions of film

theory within the new philosophies of film, in particular the question of film
as art and the ontology of the moving image. I also addressed some of the
implications of the shift to digital images and subsequent transformation of the
medium of cinema, which is now best understood as a hybrid form combining
traditional analogue and digital media production techniques and visual
styles. Other elements of classical film theory that have been renewed within
contemporary philosophy of film include narrative, character and the concept
of ‘identification’ – a shorthand term referring to our psychological and
emotional engagement with film. Here again analytic-cognitivist philosophers
have sharply criticised the theoretical models developed within the previous

65
66 The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

paradigm of film theory (structuralist and semiotic theories of narrative,

psychoanalytic theories of identification and so on). Theorists like Bordwell,
Carroll, Wilson and Gaut have proposed alternative accounts of narrative,
character and emotional engagement that draw on debates in analytic aesthetics,
philosophy of literature and cognitivist psychology. What post-Theory
theorists generally dismiss or ignore, on the other hand, is the Critical Theory-
inspired claim that popular film narratives are also vehicles of ideological
manipulation. Whatever the case, a host of contemporary film theorists have
developed complex theories of narrative, character engagement and affective
responsiveness to film (Bordwell 1985; Branigan 1992; Buckland 2009; Elsaesser
and Buckland 2002; Gaut 2004; Smith 1995; Tan 2011; Wilson 1986, 1997). Far
from being a neglected area in film theory, narrative studies have been
flourishing in recent decades, with philosophical theories of narrative adding a
significant contribution to current debate (see Chatman 1990).
In this chapter, I shall consider some of the most significant recent
philosophical contributions to theorising narrative film, canvassing topics such
as the differences between literary and cinematic narrative, the significance of
plot, story and style, the problem of cinematic authorship, and the vexed question
of whether films have narrators – more specifically an ‘implied narrator’ as the
agent responsible for the images comprising the narrative. I shall focus on
Bordwell’s and Carroll’s highly influential problem-solving or question-and-
answer models, which hold that film narrative activates the same cognitive
capacities for perceptual engagement, making inferences, testing hypotheses
and drawing conclusions as we use in ordinary experience. In conclusion I shall
also discuss briefly the important issues and questions raised by the emergence
of interactive audiovisual narrative forms such as computer gaming and
experimental forms of cinema and television (my focus in Chapter 12 on Black
Mirror). The question I shall consider is whether such cognitivist theories have
an overly intellectualist view of narrative engagement. Does the close analysis of
the mechanisms of narrative understanding (and of emotional and affective
engagement) do justice to the aesthetic dimension of narrative film? Or can we
use the conceptual and theoretical tools of cognitivist theory and contemporary
aesthetics to meet the aesthetic challenges of contemporary audiovisual media?

Plot, Story and Style

Although movies are among the most accessible of narrative artforms, the
cognitive tasks of understanding, interpreting and evaluating them are far
 Philosophical Approaches to Narrative 67

from simple. As Metz famously quipped, ‘[a] film is difficult to explain because
it is easy to understand’ (1974: 69). The intuitive obviousness of narrative film
is what makes it puzzling and perplexing. There is our perceptual engagement
with the image, which relies on the same cognitive operations as ordinary,
‘untutored’ perception. The images we perceive in a film, however, are linked
in an orderly sequence depicting a meaningful series of interconnected events.
Despite some notable exceptions (the early cinema of attractions, experimental
and modernist art film), movies have remained overwhelmingly narrative-
driven. In the simplest terms, narrative refers to the temporally and/or causally
ordered representation of meaningful actions and events, presented from
particular points of view, within an overarching structure with an intelligible
meaning. In this respect, narrative is a very general phenomenon, found in
fictional works (novels, plays, films) but also non-fictional ones (journalism,
documentaries, scientific investigations and historical accounts). For these
reasons, we need to ask what distinguishes narrative film from other narrative
forms and to investigate how it works.
Here David Bordwell’s deployment of the Russian formalist distinction
between plot [syuzhet] and story [fabula] has proven very useful (1985: 49–53).
The plot refers to the ordered structure of what is (visually or linguistically)
narrated. It is literally what we see on screen, a selection of images composed in
a certain sequential order. The story, on the other hand, is the narration (the
telling or showing) of what happens chronologically, which viewers understand
by reconstructing an account of events from the visual and narrative cues
composing the plot. On Bordwell’s view, viewers are therefore active participants
in the construction of narrative, whereas plot and style are ‘objective’ features
that can be identified via aesthetic and historical critical analysis. Viewers frame
their interpretation of the narrative from the visual and narrative elements
comprising the plot, applying various culturally and historically acquired
interpretative schemata (familiarity with narrative patterns, historically shaped
forms of style, relevant genres, traditions, tropes and so on). Individual viewers
may draw different inferences, hence hold different versions of the story,
depending on which interpretative schema he or she has applied to the plot.
On the other hand, we can also have formal film criticism that conforms to
norms of interpretation, focusing on formal generic elements, relevant historical
context, a filmmaker’s development, generic features, comparisons between
relevant works, hermeneutic insights derived from the skilled use of
interpretative heuristics and so on. To this duality, Bordwell also adds cinematic
‘style’: the historical evolution of norms and cinematic techniques used to order
and structure (that is, to plot) the manner in which the story is narrated (for
68 The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

example, the use of certain camera angles, point of view, lighting, editing,
montage, mise-en-scène, performance, production techniques and so on). Style,
which is how plot is articulated, can also be the object of formal analysis from
an historical point of view, according to which we discern and comprehend
style by testing its elements and techniques against already familiar, ‘classical’
norms (Bordwell’s ‘historical poetics’ (see 1985, 1998b).
To take a familiar example, let us consider Christopher Nolan’s Memento
(2000). Its complex ‘puzzle plot’ (Buckland 2009a, 2009b) centres on Leonard
Shelby [Guy Pearce], who is suffering from anterograde amnesia and so cannot
form new memories. The film consists of short, seemingly disconnected
sequences, which unfold both forwards (in black-and-white) and backwards
in time (colour). The viewer is thus placed in a position much like Leonard;
both are forced to reconstruct the story in piecemeal fashion, relying on the
various visual and narrative clues presented in each out-of-order episode
(scrawled notes, annotated photographs, tattooed messages, ambiguous
conjectures and so on). The visual style, using black-and-white images for the
‘real time’ events in Leonard’s current situation, and colour for the reverse
chronological presentation of his investigation sequences, combines elements
of the action/crime film, neo-noir, psychological thriller and art film genres. It
also includes the addition of various literary and philosophical references (not
only to Jonathan Nolan’s short story ‘Memento Mori’ but also to Oliver Sacks’
remarkable literary medical narratives (1986)).1 It is not surprising that
Memento has become a philosophers’ favourite (possibly trumping Rashomon
and The Matrix) (see Kania 2007). For it not only deals with personal identity,
the relationship between memory, identity and moral agency, and our
experiences of trauma and grief, it also enacts the kind of rational reconstruction
of meaning that renders conscious experience coherent. Memento therefore
chimes with cognitivist theories of narrative that emphasise the roles of
rational inference-making, the testing and adjusting of beliefs, and the cognitive
matching of affective tone with perceptual awareness.

Visual Sequencing and

Narrative Technique
Noël Carroll (2008) has developed a similar theory of narrative, arguing that
narrative is a means of patterning information that requires cognitive
processing in order to grasp and resolve the various cognitive puzzles that a
 Philosophical Approaches to Narrative 69

narrative poses. His ‘erotetic’ (question-and-answer) model – where viewers

are driven by a desire to know the answers to narrative questions posed by
the film – is an attempt to explain the basic elements of film narrative that
dominate contemporary filmmaking (the Hollywood style). As Carroll points
out (2008), most films involve visual sequencing, the assembling of images
into meaningful sequences, most commonly, though not exclusively, used for
narrative. Having rejected the ‘film as language’ thesis, Carroll proposes an
alternative model – involving ‘attention management’ – to account for our
ability to make sense of visual sequencing (2008: 122 ff ). Movies manipulate
audience attention, directing our attention to salient aspects of the image,
visual sequence or narrative episode; filmmakers carefully select what we see,
from which point of view, in which style, and with what narrative purpose.
Our attention is guided by the composition and sequencing of images, which
direct us towards the film’s intended narrative meaning. We do not require
culturally complex competences in decoding film conventions in order to
make sense of such sequences; rather, we need only respond using the same
perceptual and cognitive abilities that we use in ordinary experience. To be
sure, the use of culturally specific codes, conventions, or stylistic features can
contribute to or deepen our experience of narrative, adding complexity and
density to its meaning, but they are not necessary for the basic understanding
of film narrative itself, which relies on more basic perceptual, affective-
emotional, imaginative and cognitive processes.
There are a number of ways in which a director or filmmaker can guide
our attention. As Carroll suggests (2008: 124), images can use scale to
emphasise salience (a close-up of a showerhead, for example, as a woman
showers alone), and they can be ‘variably reframed’ to draw attention to
relevant connections between images that we are encouraged to make (the
shadow of a raised knife behind the shower curtain, the woman’s face,
screaming). Carroll identifies three variables in particular that can be used
to direct audience attention: indexing (bring the camera closer to a salient
object or tracking relevant movements or actions), bracketing (screening out
irrelevant details, objects or spaces, and thus emphasising relevance by
selective framing), and scaling (altering the scale of the object that is the
focus of our concern, thus underlining its significance for the story) (2008:
123–128). To be sure, directors can deviate from all three variables
(misleading uses of indexing, bracketing that draws attention to what is off-
screen and avoiding obvious forms of scaling); yet most narrative films, even
non-standard ones, use all three devices to direct audience attention and
thus communicate narrative meaning.
70 The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

Carroll’s ‘Erotetic’ Model

of Narrative
How, then, do meaningful cinematic sequences fit together in a coherent
narrative? Carroll’s (2008) cognitivist account of ‘erotetic narration’ shares
similarities with Bordwell’s neo-formalist approach. The first feature of the
erotetic model Carroll identifies is narrative ‘closure’: unlike soap operas
with their indefinitely expanding plot lines, movies are supposed to conclude
in such a way as to ‘tie-up’ their various narrative lines. Agreeing with
Aristotle’s classic definition – stressing the importance of plot as a unity of
action with a beginning, middle and end – Carroll highlights the sense of
finality for which most mainstream narrative films aim; a fitting conclusion
that leaves nothing left for the film to reveal or explain. Why do viewers find
narrative closure so satisfying?
Drawing on Hume’s essay ‘On Tragedy’, Carroll points to the way narrative
films typically set up a series of questions that pique our curiosity, and then
delay their resolution until the film’s conclusion. The appropriate ‘ending’ for
the film is one in which all relevant narrative questions posed have been
addressed or resolved. Within shorter narrative sequences, smaller ‘micro-
questions’ can be posed and answered. In Brian de Palma’s Body Double
(1984), for example, one wants to know whether voyeuristic protagonist Jake
Scully [Craig Wasson] will reach his beautiful neighbour Gloria Revelle
[Deborah Shelton] before she is killed by the drill-wielding killer hiding in
her apartment. In respect of the whole film, however, the larger narrative
‘macro-questions’ remain unanswered until the film’s conclusion. What is
the nature of the murderous plot in which Jake has been cast? Who really
killed Gloria? Will Jake be able to rescue Holly Body [Melanie Griffith] from
the driller killer’s clutches? Whereas plots are generally networks of events
and situations held together by various forms of causation, movie narratives
are typically ‘a network of questions and answers, where the questions are
self-generated but then finally resolved’ (Carroll 2008: 136). Resolving these
self-generated questions is what drives the narrative forward and affords us
the satisfaction of a conclusion.
Narrative film manipulates time in order to select and order the various
sequences for the purposes of guiding viewer attention. Flashbacks and
flashforwards, for example, are conventional ways of organising and
manipulating time; they allow the film to provoke questions or answer
puzzles and help solicit audience attention until the resolution of salient
 Philosophical Approaches to Narrative 71

questions at the end of the film. Memento, for example, uses both devices to
great effect, posing (and answering) micro-questions about particular
narrative sequences (should Leonard [Guy Pearce] trust Teddy Gammell
[Joe Pantoliano]?) and macro-questions (was Leonard responsible for his
wife’s death?). The desire to pose questions and seek answers to narrative
puzzles, for Carroll, is an extension of the ‘natural’ forms of cognition we
deploy in everyday experience. Such questions can involve the significance
of details, objects or contexts (what is the significance of the key and of the
cellared wine bottles in Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946)?); of character
knowledge, belief, affect or motivation (does Devlin [Cary Grant] really love
Alicia Hubermann [Ingrid Bergman]?); or concern the broader project of
the characters or indeed of the film narrative as a whole (will their plot to
expose Nazi collaborator Alexander Sebastian [Claude Rains] succeed?).
Alternatively, art films can refuse to resolve all narrative questions in order
to frustrate viewer expectation, provoke thought about narrative conventions,
pose questions of a more philosophical nature or intensify associative
aesthetic experience. Michael Haneke’s Hidden [Caché] (2006), for example,
does all of the above in its refusal to reveal the ‘source’ of the mysterious
surveillance videotapes left on the doorstep of Parisian couple Georges and
Anne Laurent [Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche]. The narrative combines
elements of the psychological thriller with reflections on the effects of
colonialism, our consumption of media images and the traumatic experience
of guilt. It concludes with a further unresolved question in the film’s final
enigmatic shot – perhaps from another surveillance video? – of students
leaving school at the end of the day, which reveals (to attentive viewers)
George’s teenage son Pierrot [Lester Makedonsky] and Algerian Majid’s older
son [Walid Afkir] in animated conversation before they walk off together. . .

‘Juste une image’: The Aesthetic

Dimension
Both Bordwell and Carroll propose enlightening cognitivist models to
explain our ability to reconstruct the story of a film from its plotted images
and narrative cues, or to resolve narrative questions by drawing inferences
and framing hypotheses that will be resolved at the conclusion of the film. As
I shall discuss next chapter, however, Bordwell’s constructivist model has
been criticised by Gaut (2010: 173–174) for sharply opposing the construction
72 The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

to the discovery of meaning in the film’s various cinematic structures; for its
undervaluing of naturalistic and cultural-historical constraints on
interpretation (2010: 176–177); and for positing an overly rigid distinction
between comprehension and interpretation.
Before we consider these objections in more detail, there is another
criticism worth exploring: namely whether Bordwell’s and Carroll’s cognitivist
models of narrative account adequately for our aesthetic experience of cinema.
Not all films conform to the canonical narrative style of Hollywood, or are
amenable to the ‘erotetic’, question-and-answer model. Such cases, however,
Bordwell and Carroll classify as ‘parasitic’ on the norms of conventional,
narrative films. Art films with ‘parametric’ styles of narrative – Bordwell
mentions classic examples such as Resnais’ La guerre est finie (1966), Bresson’s
Pickpocket (1959), Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and Godard’s Vivre
sa vie (1962) – present deviant cases that refuse the question-answer format,
frustrate our desire for narrative coherence or closure, and in doing so
provoke reflection on the conventional norms and expectations that we bring
to narrative film. As other cognitivist theorists have argued, on this view
canonical narrative models remain the source of norms and conventions that
are violated, challenged or transformed by non-mainstream narrative films
(see Plantinga 2009b: 86–87).
As Daniel Frampton points out, however, one can also argue that strong
cognitivist accounts of film narrative, which emphasise the intellectual
operations of film experience, fail to do justice to the sensuous, affective,
aesthetic dimension of film (2006: 106–107). Are images simply there to
provide information for the cognitive reconstruction of the story or to resolve
narrative puzzles set by the film? On the Bordwell/Carroll view, a narrative
film can appear akin to a giant Sudoku puzzle principally designed to satisfy
our intellectual curiosity. Although viewers do understand and interpret
images as sources of narrative information and cues for reconstructing the
story, there are also other important ways in which we engage with images in
narrative film, ways that are not principally concerned with narrative meaning.
This is what we could call the image’s ‘aesthetic dimension’, those features
which contribute to, but also remain independent of, narrative meaning: the
images’ sensuous qualities, their visual rhythms and tempo, their use of
colour, texture and form, their dramatic (and undramatic) moments of
singularity in gesture and performance, their mood-disclosing capacities,
their orchestrating of aural and visual patterning, their ability to reveal and
conceal nuances of expression in the human face and body, their capacity to
express movement and time in novel ways and so on. So much of our
 Philosophical Approaches to Narrative 73

aesthetic engagement with cinema concerns these aesthetic dimensions of

experience rather than the more narrative-focused elements so dear to
cognitivist theorists. To be sure, Bordwell develops a theory of film style,
grounded in the appropriation of historically acquired stylistic norms, which
can be revealed through formalist analysis of such conventions; but here too
the point is to avoid ‘impressionistic’ interpretation in favour of formalist
analysis, generic classification and historical contextualisation. Does this
intellectualist account of narrative do justice to the receptive viewer’s
aesthetic experience of cinema?
Cognitivist theories assume that it is our intellectual satisfaction in
reconstructing meaning and solving narrative puzzles that accounts for our
pleasure in a film, which is certainly true for most ‘canonical’ forms of narrative
film. On this view, however, it becomes difficult to explain our aesthetic delight
in being misled or deceived by a work of art. Why do we enjoy narrative
deception? If our engagement with narrative film were primarily about
processing and resolving narrative puzzles, one would expect to experience
displeasure at having one’s desire for cognitive closure thwarted. My response
however, to the discovery of the duplicitous narrative presentation in M. Night
Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999), for example, or the ‘impossible’ narrative
paradoxes in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) is not frustration or
embarrassment but pleasure and fascination. That said, a cognitivist might
respond that the pleasure lies in the attempt to process the narrative puzzles,
not in whether such puzzles are actually resolved by film’s end. ‘Puzzle films’
(Buckland 2009), for example, often seem to intentionally thwart cognitive
closure via the resolution of narrative puzzles, which then prompts the
engaged viewer to reconstruct or ‘replay’ the narrative in imagination (or even
to see the film again) in order to explore alternative interpretations or to
analyse how the narrative puzzles work.2 A cognitivist might add that
‘parametric’ films (like Mulholland Drive) are principally directed towards this
kind of cognitive processing, satisfying the more reflexive viewer, or soliciting
the critic’s ability to engage in formal analysis or symptomatic readings (or
even to surprise us by defying expectations). All of which makes good sense of
the cognitive pleasures that such puzzle films can afford.
Nonetheless, this kind of cognitivist approach overlooks the varieties of
‘non-cognitive’ affective response, cognitive dissonance and visual fascination
that such films evoke so powerfully. Cognitivist accounts of narrative, for all
their other merits, do not always adequately acknowledge the role of our
‘non-cognitive’ aesthetic responses to film; the multifarious sensuous and
affective ways in which film can provoke altered states of mind, body and
74 The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

thought. As Deleuze points out, in addition to canonical narrative (defined

by what he calls the ‘sensory-motor action scheme’), there are also ‘pure
optical and sound situations’ that are not principally concerned with revealing
the plot or developing narrative through action (1986: 141–151, 205–215;
1989: 1–24). Rather, these are images concerned with eliciting affect and
thought; images that resist familiar interpretative schemata, and thereby
open up different ways of experiencing time, movement and the body.
We might gloss Deleuze’s point by saying that cognitivist theories risk
missing the ‘excessive’ aspects of the visual image: those dimensions that resist
rational reconstruction or cognitive comprehension. To borrow a term from
an earlier generation of theorists, we could call this aesthetic dimension of
images ‘photogenie’. This term refers to expressive aesthetic power of movement
revealed through cinema: the ‘magical’ aspect of images, what Morin described,
quoting a host of other theorists, as ‘“that extreme poetic aspect of being and
things” (Delluc),“that poetic quality of beings and things” (Moussinac),“capable
of being revealed to us only through the cinematograph” (both Moussinac and
Delluc)’ (Morin 2002: 15; see also Andrews 2009). We could gloss this
‘photogenic’ dimension of images as that which exceeds cognitivist narrative
functionality, and thereby exposes the viewer to an intensive experience of
aesthetic singularity. There is a rich tradition of films that evoke fascination
thanks to this aesthetic or ‘photogenic’ dimension of images. Think of
Falconetti’s suffering visage in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928); the
traumatic fascination elicited by Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929); the
mesmersising ‘pillow shots’ in Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953); the unbearable pathos
of Nadine Nortier in Bresson’s Mouchette (1967); the wind blowing mysteriously
over grass in Tarkovsky’s Mirror [Zerkalo] (1979); the sublime fields of wheat
being harvested in Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978); the visionary encounters
with animals in Apichatpong’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
(2010). . . Any account of our affective and intellectual engagement with
narrative film remains incomplete without some acknowledgment of the
aesthetic or ‘photogenic’ dimension of moving images. It is what we allude to,
as Morin observes, when we talk of the ‘magic of movies’ (2002: 13–17).

Cinematic Authorship
But who (or what), we might ask, is the source of these remarkable images?
More prosaically, who (or what) is responsible for the plot and visual style of
a film? It is not surprising that narrative film raises the question of authorship,
 Philosophical Approaches to Narrative 75

especially given the influence of literary theory on the theorisation of film.

The topicality of authorship, however, has waxed and waned in the history of
film studies. The concept of film author or, later, the auteur was part of the
campaign to legitimate film as art: an organising centre whose artistic vision,
authorial control and signature motifs guaranteed the artistic legitimacy of
certain films. As the traditional argument goes (despite being subjected to
various critiques), works of art are the expression of an artist’s intentions;
hence films that aspire to the status of art must have their provenance in the
intentions of an author. The rise of structuralist, psychoanalytical and critical
theories of film, however, challenged the individualist assumptions that
underpinned auteur theory. The figure of the auteur nonetheless survived, if
not as a particular individual, then as a postulated construct unifying the
cinematic text. Although auteur theory has waned, reports of the death of
the (cinematic) author are greatly exaggerated.
The question of authorship reflects a curious state of affairs. On the one
hand, it is common to question the plausibility of auteur theory; on the other,
it is also common to refer to films by their directors, which is to say, their
authors (we talk of Douglas Sirk’s mastery of melodrama, Wes Anderson’s
self-reflexive irony, Bong Joon-ho’s masterful blending of genres, the visual
daring of Gaspar Noé, Agnès Varda’s idiosyncratic mix of lyricism and
realism and so on). Even Berys Gaut (2010), incisive critic of the doctrine of
single authorship, refers to films by the proper name of the director with
artistic responsibility for the film.3 Perhaps precisely because of this
ambiguous state of affairs, authorship has returned as a major issue in
philosophical film theory.4
Indeed, the debate over authorship in the new philosophies of film owes
much to debates over authorship in the philosophy of literature (see
Chatman 1990). Literary narratives can have narrators, who are usually part
of the fictional world being narrated (like Sam Spade in Farewell, My Lovely);
they also have authors, whether actual (Raymond Chandler, the empirical
individual who wrote this novel) or implied (‘Chandler’ as the authorial
persona or agent postulated as responsible for the composition of this text).
Both actual and implied authors are external to the fictional or diegetic
world of the narrative (Sam Spade takes as real the events he relates truthfully,
more or less, whereas for the actual/implicit author Chandler, they are
mandated as fictional, which is how they are understood by the reader). Do
the same distinctions apply to cinematic fictions?
As a collaborative and industrial art, film introduces a number of
complexities to the debate over authorship. Indeed, as Berys Gaut points out
76 The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

(2010: 99–102), there can be a number of distinct claims and senses relevant
to the concept of an author in film. We can make existential claims concerning
the existence of film authors, who are responsible for the creation of films as
works of art. We can postulate an author in order to make hermeneutic
claims about the interpretation of a film (which is taken to express the
author’s artistic intentions), or evaluative claims about its artistic merit
(where a film is compared with others in an author’s body of work, or with
works by another author, with relevant works in a genre). We can make
ontological claims, concerning the author as an actual individual (Charlie
Chaplin, the great filmmaker and comic genius) or Chaplin as a ‘textual
construct’ unifying various filmic texts (City Lights (1931), The Great Dictator
(1940), Modern Times (1936) and so on). The author can be construed as an
artist (Welles, Hitchcock, Ozu), or as a textual author, the composer of a film
text analogous to a literary text (Welles as author of Citizen Kane (1941),
Ozu as author of Tokyo Story (1953)). We can nominate different candidates
for the role of cinematic author: most commonly, the director, but also the
screenwriter, cinematographer, star actor, or the producer and/or production
studio (Finding Nemo (2003) as a Pixar animated film). Finally, there can be
solo authors (Errol Morris as author of The Fog of War (2003)5), or multiple
authors (Michel Gondry/Charlie Kaufman as authors of Eternal Sunshine of
the Spotless Mind (2004)). As Gaut observes, variable combinations of these
dimensions of authorship are possible; claims for cinematic auteurs generally
posit at least one, sometimes several of these claims, in varying permutations
(2010: 102).
As we have seen, the construction of a cinematic auteur (typically the
director), whatever combination of elements is selected, remains part of the
process of legitimating film art (works of art require an author who
intentionally creates them). Whereas some forms of cinema are collaborative
enterprises with shared authorship, defenders of the solo author model, such
as Paisley Livingston (2009a), claim that only some films are authored: those
in which an individual artist (the director) exercises sufficient control over
the relevant aspects of the filmmaking process (for example, Bergman writing
the script for, and then directing, Winter Light (1963)). Even in cases where
there are significant artistic contributions by other collaborators – say Harriet
Andersson’s performance of Monika in Bergman’s Summer with Monika
(1953), or the indispensable role played by Bergman’s cinematographer Sven
Nykvist – these contributory sub-plans, while meshing with Bergman’s
intentions, are still subordinate to Bergman’s creative control over the film.
For Livingston, screenwriters, cinematographers, actors or producers can
 Philosophical Approaches to Narrative 77

contribute to, but not define or control, the cinematic realisation of the whole;
hence, they cannot be co-authors.
According to Gaut (2010: 118 ff ), however, such a model, which
acknowledges contributors but not co-authors, has difficulty explaining how
the artistic whole of a film can be realised. Moreover, it overlooks the decisive
and often independent role played by the various collaborators involved in
making a film. Actors frequently argue with directors over the interpretation
of a role or presentation of a character in the script. In cases where an actor
persuades a director to follow their lead, there is no good reason to deny him
or her co-authorship, even if the director retains primary artistic control over
the film. Gaut cites the case of Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing (1989), in which
Lee saw Pizza parlour proprietor Sal [Danny Aiello] as an unambiguous
racist; Aiello disagreed, however, and in the end portrayed him more
sympathetically, thus adding nuance and complexity to the film’s dramatic
treatment of the climactic race riot. Another interesting example is Sigourney
Weaver’s arguments with Ridley Scott, director of Alien (1979), over the
interpretation of her character, Ripley (Gaut 2010: 130). Scott wanted Ripley
to ‘hate’ the alien, whereas Weaver argued that Ripley couldn’t possibly ‘hate’
a creature driven by instinct; the end result of their dispute, according to
Scott, was ‘this incredibly modulated performance’ (quoted in Gaut 2010:
130–131), the happy result of the creative tension between actor and director.
We can make the same point concerning scriptwriters, cinematographers,
editors, producers and other collaborators in the filmmaking process. Thus,
films can be co-authored, with many creative contributions to the film as a
whole, even if these artistic contributions vary in degree and kind, and
even if they are subsumed under the director’s authorial accomplishments
(praising ‘Welles’ deep focus camera’, for example, rather than the artistic
contribution of his cinematographer, Gregg Toland).
Film is a collective and collaborative enterprise, with multiple authors,
whose contributions often mesh (and sometimes clash) to produce
unanticipated creative achievements. Contemporary practices of criticism
and interpretation, moreover, still require the attribution of authorship,
whether individual or collective, so the question is how this is best done. One
plausible candidate is a critical concept of authorship that admits of multiple
authors, that relates filmmaking practice to its broader cultural-historical
contexts, but also aims to capture the shared intentionality – between co-
authors – that we often need to acknowledge in order to deepen our
understanding of a film. By knowing about Nykvist’s collaboration with
Bergman, or Lee’s conflicts with Aiello, Weaver’s disagreement with Scott, or
78 The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

about Toland’s contributions to Welles’ direction, we gain a more nuanced

and complex understanding and critical interpretation of the film. But
how widely should we construe film authorship? Should we acknowledge
all significant contributors as co-authors? The concept of authorship, after all,
is discriminating as much as evaluative. It distinguishes individual films
within a coherent body of work, enabling us to make comparisons, pursue
parallels and venture interpretations. At the same time, a too narrow concept
of authorship can constrain our understanding of film, its contexts of
production and of reception, as well as its broader cultural, historical or
ideological meaning.
Perhaps, then, we should understand the proper name of the author as
naming an artistic event (like the ‘Hitchcock’ event), analogous with the way
we name complex natural phenomena (Hurricane Katrina, the Doppler
effect). The proper name ‘Hitchcock’ would thereby unite the actual/implied
author with a distinctive innovation in film style, an ‘event-like’ contribution
to the ‘historical poetics’ of cinema. One problem with this analogy, however,
is that artworks are intentional artefacts whereas natural phenomena are not.
On the other hand, one can use the proper name of the author to designate a
body of work and stylistic innovation within a history of cinema; this helps
preserve a concept of authorship that strives to reconcile the intentionalist
sense of the concept with its more functionalist and historicist senses. This
unresolved ambiguity – we recognise that films are co-authored, a collaborative
enterprise, part of a shared cultural practice, yet usually name them according
to their solo director/author (or even their lead star or production house) –
suggests that the concept of film authorship continues to evolve. We need not
vacillate between taking film, on the one hand, as the expression of impersonal
semantic structures, of economic-industrial or ideological-cultural forces,
and film as the expression of individual psychology or the mythology of
genius, on the other. Instead, we can posit a plural and hybrid concept of
authorship that accommodates the multiplicity of aspects we need to take
into consideration in understanding and interpreting narrative film.

Is There a Narrator in This Film?

Another puzzling situation arises when we consider the nature of film
narration. Perhaps because of the perceived affinities between literary and
cinematic fiction, philosophers of film have been exercised by the question
of whether films have (implicit) narrators (Branigan 1992; Carroll 2008;
 Philosophical Approaches to Narrative 79

Chatman 1990; Gaut 2010; Wilson 1986, 2009). To be sure, there are
narrative films with explicit verbal narrators, characters within the diegetic
world who narrate events, usually via voiceover (Walter Neff ’s [Fred
MacMurray’s] confessional narration in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity
(1944), dead screenwriter-narrator Joe Gillis [William Holden] in Wilder’s
Sunset Boulevard (1950), Lester Burnham [Kevin Spacey] in American
Beauty (1999), ‘The Narrator’ [Edward Norton] in David Fincher’s Fight
Club (1999), Carrie Bradshaw [Sarah Jessica Parker] in the television series
Sex and the City (Bushnell/HBO 1998–2004), or the indeterminate character
narrators in Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998)). There are also absent/
external narrators who comment on characters and events but who do not
appear within the diegetic world of the film itself (for example, in Jean-
Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie (2001), P. T. Anderson’s Magnolia (1999) and Wes
Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)). What of narrative films in which
there is no explicit narrator? According to Seymour Chatman’s ‘a priori’
argument (1990), narrative is a kind of activity, which thus requires an agent,
namely the narrator, who performs this activity; where there is no explicit
narrator, there must be an implicit one, the agency responsible for (our access
to) the particular images composing the film.
This argument might strike the reader as peculiar. Ordinarily we would
say that Hitchcock was the author (whether explicit or implied) of the
images comprising the shower scene from Psycho (1960). Why postulate
such exotica as ‘implied narrators’ when an (implied) author will do the job?
As we shall see below, this is a persuasive response. The interesting point
here, however, concerns the ontological status of fiction: how do we viewers
gain access to the diegetic (fictional) world of the film? We might think of
this implicit narrating agent, for example, as what is often called ‘the camera’,
which is generally identified with the agency of ‘the director’. Obviously, the
director (with the cinematographer) decides on camera setups and how to
frame particular shots; however, neither ‘the camera’ nor the director is part
of the diegetic film-world. I might say, ‘Hitchcock’s camera rotates on its axis
as it zooms out slowly from the open eye of Marion Crane’s corpse’; but
neither Hitchcock nor his camera is part of the fictional world of Psycho,
more specifically, of the Bates Motel with its creepy proprietor and famous
shower recess. When we talk of directors and cameras in this fashion, we are
describing the artistic decisions and stylistic techniques evident in the film,
rather than recounting what happens within the fictional world of the
narrative. We are doing (low-level) film criticism rather than recounting the
story.6
80 The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

There are cases, of course, where the camera and director are included
within the diegetic film-world, which happens in narrative films that
incorporate a ‘film-within-a-film’ (the film theorist’s mise-en-abyme). We
might think here of Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963), de Palma’s Body Double (1984), or
Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), which all feature directors as characters, and
reveal the cameras used for making the film-within-the-film. In conventional
narrative cinema, however, we do not see ‘cameras’ or ‘directors’ within the
diegetic film-world since they do not exist within that world. Yet the narrative
is presented through the composition and arrangement of certain images,
with a particular visual style, selectively showing salient details necessary for
our understanding of the story. So who (or what), we might ask, is the source
of the images showing us these objects, characters, actions and events?
One answer is to posit an implied narrator. This is distinct from a verbal
narrator, who may also be a character within the fiction (as in Fincher’s Fight
Club (1999); but which character is the narrator here?) or else an impersonal,
omniscient narrator (as in P. T. Anderson’s Magnolia (1999)) (see Thomson-
Jones 2008: 75). As Bordwell points out, early film theorists frequently posited
the visual narrator as ‘witness’ or ‘guide’ to what is relevant in the narrative
(1985: 9–12). Such an approach to film narrators, however, strains credulity
once it is taken as more than a suggestive metaphor (What kind of entity do
have we in mind here? How does this guide manage to gain access to a
character’s private thoughts? How can they witness, and reveal to us, say in
Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a spaceship’s balletic movements in
space?). While suggestive as a metaphor, the narrator as invisible witness or
guide suffers from the difficulty of explaining ‘impossible’ shots or points of
view, as well as how we can have access to the images presented by the implied
narrator (see Gaut 2010: 204–205). Do we personally imagine seeing these
characters and events from within the fictional world? (I imagine being in
the shower alongside Marion Crane.) Or do we perceptually imagine them,
impersonally, from outside of the fictional world? (I imaginatively perceive
Marion’s stabbing within the shower, but from a viewpoint outside of the
fictional world). The difficulty with suggesting that we ‘make-believedly’
imagine the events on screen through the narrator’s eyes is that it implausibly
personalises the narrative point of view, and demands that we somehow
inhabit the diegetic fictional world ourselves (which viewers cannot do).
George M. Wilson (1986) examines another kind of implied narrator. Using
a term borrowed from Christian Metz, Wilson describes the ‘grand imagier’ or
grand image-maker as implied narrator, the imputed source of the images
composing the narrative film. The grand-image maker is an intermediary
 Philosophical Approaches to Narrative 81

between fictional and non-fictional worlds; it is thanks to her/him/it that we

have access to the images composing the fictional narrative. On this account,
however, the implied image-maker sounds suspiciously close to an implied
author (director). The relevant difference here, however, is that the narrated
events are fictional for the implied author but ‘real’ for the implied narrator
who is part of the fictional world. How, then, do we distinguish between
implied author and implied narrator? Indeed, why postulate an implied
narrator distinct from the implied author? Why not just say that ‘Hitchcock’, as
implied author, is responsible for the images in the shower scene from Psycho?
The question gains urgency in cases involving unreliable narration, a
phenomenon well known in literary fiction. Cinematic narrative, however,
creates interesting possibilities for unreliable narration due to film’s capacity
for both visual showing and verbal narration (telling). The visual representation
of the narrative shows us the events comprising the story; the verbal
representation (dialogue or voiceover) conveys a character’s (or narrator’s)
perspective on the story’s events. In some cases, however, there is a conflict
between the visual showing and verbal telling of the story. In Bryan Singer’s
The Usual Suspects (1995), both the visual showing and verbal tellings are
unreliable for most of the film, since we eventually learn that Keyser Soze,
whose story is both shown and told, does not exist (or rather, that he is
revealed to be ‘Verbal’ [Kevin Spacey], the master teller of the tale!). Hitchcock’s
Stage Fright (1950) is another famous case of unreliable narration in that it
visually suggests that a dubious account of events is correct. When Johnny
tells his friend Eve how he came to be on the run, his false version of events
(that Johnny’s lover, rather than Johnny, killed her husband) is shown in
flashback, thereby suggesting its veracity (since the visual showing of events
is usually given credence over a character’s verbal telling). Verbal narrators,
on the other hand, can be unreliable in revealing the limitations of their own
perspective or their inability to grasp the significance of what is shown
visually in the narrative. A great example here is Linda’s [Linda Manz’s] lyrical,
naïve voiceover in Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), which suggests her inability
to grasp the true nature of the relationship between her sister Abby [Brooke
Adams] and Bill [Richard Gere]). By positing an implied narrator, so the
argument goes, the clash between visual showing and verbal telling in
unreliable narration can be explained by attributing the unreliability, where
appropriate, to either an implied visual narrator or explicit verbal narrator.
Does the case of unreliable narration warrant the postulation of an
implied narrator? As Currie argues (1995: 269–270), we are better off
postulating an implied author, rather than implied narrator, as the agent
82 The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

responsible for the unreliable narration. For an implied author (which is not
the same as an actual author) can intend for a film narrative to have two (or
more) levels of hermeneutic complexity. There can be a superficial version
that gives a seemingly accurate account of events (in M. Night Shyamalan’s
The Sixth Sense (1999), child psychologist Dr Malcolm Crowe [Bruce Willis]
treats young Cole Sear [Haley Joel Osment], a traumatised child who claims
that he can see the ghosts of dead people). There can also be a more complex
level that reveals the unreliability of the account given of certain events or of
the narrative overall. We only ever see Cole [Osment], for example, speaking
directly with Crowe [Willis], even though Crowe appears in various shots
with other characters, such as his wife Anna [Olivia Williams] or Cole’s
mother [Toni Collette], but without ever being directly addressed by those
characters. Whoever the actual author of the film turns out to be, the implied
author of The Sixth Sense can be understood as the agent responsible for the
ambiguity between visual showing and verbal telling.7
Novels can give us access to a fictional world by way of a third-person
omniscient narrator (as in George Eliot’s Middlemarch). We might ask
whether fictional films do the same, although an interesting problem arises at
this point. As we have seen, only the author can present events as fictional; the
narrator, ensconced within the fictional world, presents these events as being
true. If we take the images we see on screen as direct presentations of the
characters and events within the fictional world (that is, as ‘true’ images), then
the ‘camera’ is indeed akin to an implied narrator. If, however, we take the
images we see to be representations of fictional characters and events that we
imagine composing a narrative (that is, as ‘fictional’ images), then the ‘camera’
is more akin to an author (implied or actual). It is the latter that is more
plausible to describe our experience of narrative cinema. In watching
Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950), I both perceive Bette Davis and imagine
Margo Channing, a dual perspective allowing me to relish the play of senses
in her famous warning (‘Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night’!)
Given the paradoxes that arise once we start to postulate implied narrators,
we are probably better off ignoring him or her (or it). Indeed, there is no
need to postulate such an entity unless the film explicitly directs us to do so
(presumably by way of its author). It certainly behoves philosophers,
however, to study more carefully what intelligent and accomplished films
have done with the concepts of narrator, author and character. In
Mankiewicz’s All About Eve, narrator and character Addison DeWitt [George
Sanders] not only has the power to guide us verbally through the story of
Eve Harrington’s rise to fame, he can also ‘direct’ the film – acting momentarily
 Philosophical Approaches to Narrative 83

as its implied author – showing us certain things, avoiding showing others

and controlling the film’s underscore (as when he ‘tells’ the film to not show
this scene or song but to show something else).
In Pasolini’s version of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1972),
the paradoxes are dizzying. Pasolini directs the film but also features in it as
a character, one ‘Geoffrey Chaucer’, who appears in the literary text of The
Canterbury Tales (which he authored) as a hapless pilgrim who tells the
worst tale. Pasolini’s film is a cinematic ‘adaptation’ of Chaucer’s famous
tales, in which Pasolini interprets ‘Chaucer’ less as pilgrim than as author
(Chaucer/Pasolini is seen composing the written text of the separate tales
that are depicted cinematically). Chaucer/Pasolini is at once author of The
Canterbury Tales and author (explicit and implied) of the cinematic tales
that we see, playing his authorial role as a character in the film that he has
himself authored (as a cinematic adaptation).
In Haneke’s Funny Games (1997/2007), one of the two tormentors is shot by
the unfortunate woman being tortured in her family’s affluent summer house.
He also has, however, the authorial power of the filmmaker (to direct the
images) as well as that of the spectator willing the tormentors to be killed (to
‘rewind’ the image), after having directly addressed the spectator about what he
or she would like to see. He can not only interrupt the narrative but also rewind
the film/video and ‘replay’ the scene so that the shooting never takes place
(as the viewer no doubt wishes he or she could do, thus implicating him or her
in the consumption of images of violence that is the subject of the film).
In Spike Jonze/Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation (2002), we see a cinematic
adaptation of a non-fictional text (Susan Orleans’ The Orchid Thief). The film
takes as its subject the travails of blocked screenwriter Charlie Kaufman
[Nicolas Cage] (the actual screenwriter, if not part-author), as Charlie
struggles to adapt The Orchid Thief into a cinematic screenplay. Resolving to
break his block by writing a screenplay precisely on his experience of failing
to adapt The Orchid Thief, Charlie’s ironic failure turns the film – thanks to the
wit and irony of Kaufman/Jonze – into a self-referential meditation on
authorship, on adaptation, on screenwriting and on the mysterious alchemy
between text and image. In an amusingly ironic twist, Charlie finally succeeds
in having his script made into a high concept blockbuster with Gerard
Depardieu to play Charlie! Adaptation thus turns a potentially ponderous
literary-philosophical thought experiment into a self-referential but charming
‘puzzle’ narrative. In such cases, far from determining who has authorial status
or narrative authority, the philosopher-theorist struggles to adapt the creative
cinematic thinking of inventive films.
84 The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

Digital Transformations: Immersion,

Interactivity and VR cinema
What about our experience of contemporary audiovisual media? How has the
digital revolution changed narrative cinema? Film theory has, for obvious
reasons, focused on the kind of spectatorial experience afforded by the
traditional cinematic apparatus. With the rise of digital media, emphasising
immersive and interactive forms of audiovisual engagement, embodied
experience has returned as a key concept and focus in contemporary film
theory and philosophy of film (see Hansen 2004). With the shift towards digital
media, interactive media and VR technology, moreover, new challenges
and questions can be raised about how we are to understand cinematic
engagement with narrative and our experience of digital cinema more generally
(encompassing these profound transformations and proliferations of the
medium).8 One important issue is the shift from the apparent passivity and
transparency of cinematic engagement (the conventions of invisible continuity
editing, narrative shot conventions, clearly individuated protagonists and
antagonists, personalised causal plot structuration, perspicuous narrative
development and clear narrative closure, familiar from what Bordwell calls
‘canonical’ film narrative) towards greater interactivity and deeply immersive
forms of engagement in interactive media and VR narrative (fictional and
non-fictional) works – a trajectory, as Grau (2003) shows, with a long history
(see Aylett and Louchart 2003; Bollmer 2017; Daniel 2018; Grau 2003; Nash
2017; Ross 2018). A number of theorists argue that, due to its immersive and
interactive character, encouraging a sense of ‘presence’ within the audiovisual
world, VR diminishes our awareness of cinematic narrative conventions,
including the directing of attention via shot selection, cutting, montage or
editing, sound and music effects, lighting, colour, mise en scène and so on
(Daniel 2018; Loomis 2016; Nash 2017). VR offers, moreover, a deeply
‘immersive’ perpetual experience: situating the viewer within the diegetic
audiovisual world that allows for both directed perceptual engagement and
agential interactive involvement (Griffiths 2008; Grodal 2003; Tikka 2004). In
short, with the shift towards immersive interactivity, we are no longer dealing
with a spectatorial relationship but rather with a participatory attitude and
agential orientation towards the audiovisual world.
At the same time, we should reflect further on the posited contrast
between the ‘transparency’ of (canonical) narrative cinema and the
immersive sense of ‘presence’ and interactive involvement solicited by VR
 Philosophical Approaches to Narrative 85

technology (Loomis 2016).9 There are significant contrasts between

conventional narrative cinema and VR forms of narrative that help articulate
how VR audiovisual works engage us in a multimodal manner. These include
the contrasts between 1) directed versus immersive engagement; 2)
spectatorial versus participant perspectives; and 3) audiovisual displacement
(via framing, cutting, perspective/point of view/spatio-temporal location)
versus audiovisual continuity (within a bounded immersive environment,
with a unitary time/space, centralised participant perspective and strong
alignment between participant/protagonist action and point of view).
Examining the relationships between these key contrasts between VR and
conventional cinema can help us better understand the transformed version
of cinematic experience, as well as aesthetic and ethical potentials of digital
cinema, evoked by interactive VR works.
The first contrast, that between directed versus immersive engagement,
refers to the manner in which conventional cinematic narrative explicitly
directs our attention, whereas interactive VR narrative immerses us in a
fictional world in relation to which we have more attentional agency.
Although often described as ‘immersive’, spectatorial engagement with
conventional cinematic narrative is in fact highly orchestrated or directed
(prefocused or ‘cued’ according to a variety of cinematic techniques, generic
conventions and audiovisual prompts). Even within the tradition of Bazinian
realism or ‘slow’, contemplative cinema – with its unity of time and space,
emphasis on duration and freedom to direct our attention to various elements
of the image – cinematic narrative depends essentially on the directing of
attention and perceptual focus as well as the modulation of emotional
responsiveness. By contrast, in VR narrative the spectator occupies a
perspective included within the diegetic world, and has the capacity to direct
his/her attention to salient elements, aspects or features of this world
according to his or her own will. Our attention is no longer primarily directed
or guided by the cinematic techniques or devices deployed by the film –
although this still remains a relevant feature – but can be directed by the
spectator depending on his/her own perceptual, cognitive and/or emotional
responses to the situation in which they are interactively immersed. In some
cases, explicit intervention in the diegetic world is invited, even demanded,
which transforms the cinematic spectator into a virtual world participant.
This presents a challenge for VR cineastes, because it is clearly still necessary,
for the purposes of developing the narrative and ensuring emotional
engagement, to guide or direct the participant viewer’s attention towards
salient objects, characters or events (see Daniel 2018). Nonetheless, the
86 The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn

degree of agential activity accorded to the viewer is far greater than in

conventional narrative cinema, thus transforming the nature of the
spectatorial relationship into an interactive encounter or relationship.
The second, related feature is that the ‘spectator’ thus assumes a
participatory, rather than spectatorial, attitude towards the fictional world
and the characters that populate it. In conventional cinema, the spectator
does not feature within the diegetic world of the narrative; if attention is
drawn to the fictional status of the cinematic world, or the spectator
addressed directly, this becomes a moment of interruption or distanciation
which momentarily suspends and thereby calls attention to both the
conventions of cinematic spectatorship and the fictional status of the
cinematic work. In the case of interactive VR fiction, however, the viewer is
enfolded within the virtual environment, can be addressed by or interact
with fictional characters and in some cases intervene in or respond to events
that he or she encounters within the audiovisual world. One’s attitude
towards this world is therefore defined by the possibility of participatory
rather than (purely) spectatorial engagement, even though large parts of the
narrative may involve no direct participation and moments of participatory
intervention may be quite rare. Nonetheless, the potential for direct address
and agential response is built into the cinematic world in a manner that does
not obtain in the fictional worlds of conventional narrative cinema.
The third contrast is more ontological, namely the inherent displacement
that defines conventional cinematic spectatorship versus the immanent
continuity that characterises VR fictional experience. By this I am referring
to the idea that conventional cinema, as Carroll and others have argued, is
defined as a ‘detached display’ that bears no relationship to the spectator’s
actual spatio-temporal location (there is no relationship between, say, the
fictional world of Citizen Kane and my lounge room as I watch this film on
my television screen). In the case of VR fiction, however, the participatory
spectator’s perspective is included or ‘built into’ the fictional world in an
immersive, involved, potentially interactive manner. This means that there is
an internal relationship between my point of view and the diegetic fictional
world that does not exist in the case of conventional cinema. I am able to
move, within certain limits, within the fictional world, interact with
characters, direct my attention towards different elements of it, departing
from the narrative focus of events if I choose, even intervene in and, in some
cases, affect the outcome of narrative situations or events. The VR display, in
short, is not a ‘detached display’ but rather an involved display: the participatory
spectator is immanently involved as a participant within the fictional world
 Philosophical Approaches to Narrative 87

rather than occupying the position of a detached (yet engaged or interested)

observer of such a world and the events transpiring within it. Such a display
is defined not by ‘alienated vision’ (Carroll) so much as by ‘immersive
involvement’. This again has profound consequences for the manner in which
VR fictional narratives are made and what kind of aesthetic affordances and
modes of ethical experience might be possible with this new medium (or
expansion/transformation of the conventional cinematic medium).10
What aesthetic as well as ethical implications arise from these differences
between conventional and VR fictional narrative in understanding cinematic
experience? Do VR and interactive fictional works, due to the immersive
interactivity they invite, present a more direct form of ethical engagement
than the more detached spectatorial modes defining conventional narrative
cinema? A related question concerns the rich potential for hybrid or crossover
forms of VR fictional and non-fictional works. How might hybrid VR works
prompt us to rethink our conceptions of ‘cinema’ or indeed of ‘narrative’ in
new ways? Are there ethical differences (concerning the role of empathy, for
example) in the way that VR fictional and non-fictional works function
compared with conventional cinema? What kind of critical vocabulary or
philosophical concepts might we need in order to understand the new kinds
of cinematic experience, notably the kind of hybrid spectator/participant –
immersive-interactive VR world relationships being explored today? These
are some of the most compelling questions facing us in attempting to
understand how new digital and interactive media are promising to transform
the meaning and potential of cinematic experience in profoundly immersive,
enactive and embodied ways.
88
 Part II
From Cognitivism
and Phenomenology
to Film-Philosophy

4 A.I. Artificial Intelligence: Cognitivism Goes

to the Movies
5 Body Double: Adventures in Phenomenology
6 Bande à part: Deleuze’s Cine-Philosophy
7 Now, Voyager: Cavell as Film-Philosopher
8 Scenes from a Marriage: On the Idea of Film
as Philosophy
9 What is Cinematic Ethics? Cuáron’s Roma
(2018) as Case Study

The new philosophies of film are characterised by their critique of the older
paradigm of film theory – so-called ‘Grand Theory’ – and their recasting of
some of the ‘classical problems’ of film theory (concerning the ontology of
film, film as art, understanding narrative, character engagement, authorship
and so on). What I have called the analytic-cognitivist turn is the dominant

89
90 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

strain in this new wave of philosophical film theory, but there are other ways
of philosophising on film that have also become prominent; alternative paths
of thinking that also move away from the older paradigm but draw on
hermeneutic, romantic and aesthetic approaches to film (particularly in the
‘Continental’ tradition). In Part II of this book, I consider some of the most
significant and original developments in the new wave of philosophical film
theory: cognitivism, film phenomenology, Deleuzian and Cavellian film-
philosophy, cinematic ethics, and the idea of ‘film as philosophy’. While
Chapter 4 on Cognitivism continues the discussion of narrative film
developed in the previous chapter, it also explores the ways in which
cognitivism has theorised affect and emotion, emotional engagement, and
narrative understanding. A new chapter on phenomenological approaches to
film then follows, which explores a variety of descriptive approaches to our
understanding of subjective but also embodied and contextual dimensions of
film experience. I offer some concluding remarks on the ways in which
cognitivist and phenomenological approaches might not only intersect but
productively supplement each other. Chapters 6 and 7, on Deleuze and Cavell,
introduce ‘film-philosophy’ as an alternative way of philosophising with film.
These chapters explore both convergences and divergences between Deleuze
and Cavell, both of whom argue that cinema can respond to problems in ways
that contribute to philosophical understanding, which thus prepares the way
for my elaboration of the idea of ‘film as philosophy’ in Chapter 8. The latter
chapter analyses the claims made by critics and advocates of the bold thesis
that films do not simply reflect or illustrate philosophical ideas but can be said
to philosophise, by cinematic means, in an independent manner. I conclude
this chapter with an argument to show that the film as philosophy thesis is
best supported by including philosophical film interpretation. I then turn to
the relationship between film and ethics, elaborating and exploring the idea
of film as a medium of ethical experience, introducing my first case study –
Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2017) – as an example of cinematic ethics in action.
 4
A.I. Artificial Intelligence:
Cognitivism Goes
to the Movies

Chapter Outline
The Critique of Psychoanalytic ‘Identification’ 93
Making Meaning: Bordwell’s Cognitivism 95
The ‘Paradox’ of Fiction? 98
Affect and Emotion 103
Emotional Engagement 106
Structures of Sympathy 108
In the Mood 109
Contemporary Cognitivism and Cinema 112
The ‘Reductionism’ Objection 115

In a number of survey essays that introduce ‘cognitivism’ as a new way of

theorising film, it is common to find remarks lamenting its relatively marginal
status in film studies (see Bordwell 1989a; Carroll 1996; Currie 1999).
Although the same point continues to be made today (see Nannicelli and
Taberham 2014), in the last 30 years, analytic philosophies of film and
cognitivist theory have combined forces to create a formidable research
paradigm, despite experiencing only a modest but growing uptake during this
time within the institutional contexts of film studies. Bordwell (1985, 1989a,
1989b) and Carroll (1985) pioneered the early wave of film theory that based

91
92 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

itself on analytic philosophy and cognitive psychology. Having attacked

‘Grand Theory’, Bordwell and Carroll’s follow-up collection of essays, Post-
Theory (1996) showcased the kinds of analytic-cognitivist approaches they
hoped would define future research in the discipline. Cognitivist film theory
has developed in multiple directions since that time, and become more
pluralistic in both its methods and its aims. Nonetheless, it remains a contested
approach within some quarters of film studies, despite a proliferating number
of publications, journal issues and edited volumes showcasing what it can
contribute to the philosophical study of cinema (Brylla and Kramer 2018;
Coëgnarts and Kravanja 2015; Nannicelli and Taberham 2014).
Whatever tensions persist, cognitivism has rejuvenated film theory on key
questions of affective engagement, narrative understanding and the role of
genre. Here again we find a vigorous theoretical revision of the problems of
classical film theory. Challenging ‘psychosemiological’ accounts of unconscious
desire, cognitivist theories focus instead on everyday forms of affective and
perceptual experience, arguing that we activate the same processes in our
engagement with movies. Cognitivism has revised, in particular, three main
areas of inquiry: the question of interpretation and our (cognitive) understanding
of film; the problem of ‘identification’ or our affective engagement; and
understanding genre, focusing especially on the relationship between genre and
the emotion-cueing structure of narrative film.
One challenge facing cognitivist accounts of emotion, understanding and
character engagement, however, is how to deal with films that resist the kind
of cognitive mapping invited by mainstream narrative film. How do we explain
our affective and aesthetic responsiveness to films that thwart narrative
expectations and disrupt routine cognitive reasoning processes? How would a
cognitivist approach deal with films like Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) or
Apichatpong’s Memoria (2021)? Such questions (and films) suggest that we
need to consider ‘non-cognitive’ affective responses as part of any nuanced
account of our affective, emotional and aesthetic engagement with film. This
challenge has been taken up in recent work by cognitivist theorists, who have
tackled what I am inclined to call ‘the hard problem’ of cinematic aesthetics
(how do we get from the very general cognitive, neurophysiological and
affective bodily processes and generic responses to moving images to particular
aesthetic pleasures and modes of fascination afforded by great films?) As I
discuss in the concluding sections, they offer some fascinating and compelling
analyses of why particular aesthetic features of cinema have the effects that
they do, although the question still remains how best to approach the aesthetic
dimension of such films.
 Cognitivism Goes to the Movies 93

The Critique of Psychoanalytic

‘Identification’
As Bordwell (1989b), Currie (1999) and Plantinga (2002) all observe,
cognitivism in film theory emerges during the late 1980s and 1990s as an
alternative to psychoanalytic theories of film identification. As is well known,
a key turning point for psychoanalytic film theory was Lacan’s famous
theory of the ‘mirror stage’ (2006 [1936]: 75–81). For Lacan, the developing
infant begins to identify with a unified (mirror) image of its own body
(between six to 18 months), but misrecognises itself in doing so due to the
disparity between its unified ideal image and its underdeveloped sensory-
motor capacities. According to Lacan, this condition of misrecognition
distorts and deflects the development of our imaginary psycho-sexual self-
image, and thus motivates our (unconscious) tendency to restore a sense of
psychic unity by identifying with idealised ego surrogates (like movie stars).
Drawing on Lacan, psychoanalytic film theories thus distinguished between
primary identification (with the point of view of the camera) and secondary
identification (with a character as a psychological surrogate or ideal ego
type). According to Baudry (2004a, 2004b) and Metz (1974, 1982), for
example, the primary identification with the all-seeing viewpoint of the
camera offers the spectator an illusory sense of mastery over the film’s visual
field. Feminist theorists such as Laura Mulvey (1975) famously extended this
analysis to include secondary identification with a character, aligned along
gendered hierarchies that privileged a masculine ‘gaze’ (identifying with a
male character as source of narrative action, while taking female characters
as objects of the character’s, hence spectator’s, ‘masculinised’ gaze).
This concept of ‘identification’ has generated a plethora of criticisms by
analytic-cognitivist theorists (Bordwell 1996: 15–17; Prince 1996). We can
summarise these criticisms under two heads: 1) the lack of clarity in the
concept of identification, which covers a multitude of conflicting meanings;
and 2) the lack of empirical evidence for psychoanalytic theory, or its selective
use of evidence in order to make sweeping generalisations about human
psychosexual development. According to critics like Carroll, it is unclear, for
example, what it would mean to ‘identify with the camera’ since the camera is
not a character (‘identifying’ with the director or a directorial point of view
raises the same thorny issues of authorship we discussed earlier). Moreover,
the psychoanalytic concept of ‘identification’, Carroll claims, posits a kind of
numerical identity relation or ‘Vulcan mindmeld’ (Carroll 1990: 89) that is
94 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

supposed to hold between my perception and that of a character or the

camera. According to the second criticism, psychoanalytic theory ignores
commonsense intuitions, offering a speculative account of ‘identification’
that remains under-supported by empirical evidence (Prince 1996).
Secondary identification, for example, rests on a dubious account of
psychosexual development, a politicised critique of gender bias in cultural
representations, coupled with an implausibly ‘deterministic’ account of the
manipulative ideological power of narrative film. Pathological or deviant
cases – fetishism, voyeurism, sadism and so on – are taken to be paradigmatic
of the general processes of spectator ‘identification’. Psychoanalytic theory, on
this view, is prone to taking the exceptional case as revealing the general rule.
We can question these key points of the analytic-cognitivist critique.
Take the distinction between our commonsense intuitions concerning
‘identification’ and the theoretical concept developed by psychoanalytic
theory. The latter concept is explicitly different from the commonsense
notion, and indeed questions whether we can assume that our intuitions are
psychologically reliable or ideologically neutral. Psychoanalytic ‘primary
identification’ does not refer to identifying with characters but to the process
enabling the spectator to enjoy an illusory mastery over the visual field of
the film. To cite commonsense intuitions as evidence against a claim that
such intuitions may be specious is to beg the question. Indeed, the issue at
stake is whether such intuitions are reliable or truthful, or whether they are
ideologically tainted sources of knowledge or evidence. The same point
applies to the question of gender: to assert that we are not subject to
ideological manipulation in respect of cultural representations of gender
because we do not believe or feel ourselves to be so manipulated is again to
beg the question. For the kind of ideological influence at issue here is that
which would manipulate or distort our intuitions or assumptions concerning
‘normal’ gender identity in an unconscious or subthreshold manner. This is
precisely the matter to resolve in such disputes, and so it cannot be cited as
evidence settling the debate. Suffice to say, this dispute is far from over; some
aspects of cognitivist psychology may even turn out to help reform, rather
than refute, psychoanalytic theories.
Whatever the case, the growing dissatisfaction with psychoanalytic film
theory, not only amongst cognitivists but also within film studies more
generally, prompted a variety of alternative cognitivist theories. Currie
identifies two related themes characterising the cognitivist approach. 1) That
we take films to be rationally motivated, and thus endeavour to make sense of
a work at each of its various levels of presentation (as sensory stimulus in light
 Cognitivism Goes to the Movies 95

and sound, as narrative and as cultural object expressing higher-order

meanings). And 2), that we approach the process of making sense of film as
one that deploys the same cognitive processes and perceptual resources that
we also deploy ‘in making sense of the real world’ (Currie 1999: 106). The
corollary to these two themes, we might add, is that cognitivists assume that
‘irrational’ processes – as thematised in psychoanalysis – are of marginal
interest in accounting for our experience of film; and that we can rely on
ordinary processes of cognition – including intuitions – as evidentiary sources
for claims about our experience of film (points shared by phenomenological
approaches). Cognitivism as a research programme, furthermore, applies
scientifically informed ‘theories of perception, information processing,
hypothesis-building, and interpretation’, in tandem with an analytical, problem-
focused philosophy oriented towards the natural sciences (Currie 1999: 106).
How does this cognitivist map relate to cinema?

Making Meaning: Bordwell’s

Cognitivism
Bordwell’s ‘constructionist’ cognitivism (1985) combines elements of
cognitivist theory with a theoretical framework borrowed from the
Russian formalists. By ‘constructionist’, however, Bordwell means an account
of cognitive processes that emphasises the active role of the subject in
hypothesising, making inferences and drawing conclusions that go beyond
what is immediately ‘given’. This kind of cognitive constructionism applies not
only to (‘bottom-up’) processes of perception and affective engagement, but
also to higher-order (‘top-down’) processes of comprehension, interpretation
and evaluation. We do not passively perceive or automatically understand the
world; rather, we apply concepts and cultural schemata to sensory inputs in
order to ‘construct’ coherent and meaningful cognitive experience.
So how do we understand movies? Bordwell (1985: 48–62) distinguishes
between our comprehension of the film narrative (understanding the
referential meaning of the images pertaining to the narrative world); our
more complex interpretations of the film (grasping implicit meanings,
themes, symbolic motifs and so on); and the critic’s symptomatic readings of
a film’s ‘suppressed’ psychological or ideological meanings (which reflect
deeper psychic or cultural-historical forces). Take Welles’ Citizen Kane, for
example: we can comprehend the narrative film-world of Charles Foster
96 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

Kane [Orson Welles], successful media tycoon, unhappy husband and failed
politician, whose life reporter Jerry Thompson attempts to investigate. We
can interpret the implicit meaning of key scenes or narrative elements (for
example, the meaning of Kane’s dying word, ‘Rosebud’, and hence the tragic
significance of his forgotten childhood sled as it is consumed by flames). The
critic can also posit a symptomatic reading of the film, elaborating its
suppressed or indirect meaning (Citizen Kane as an allegory of the self-
destructive ‘masculinist’ drive for phallic power, or a narrative expression of
the American/capitalist ideology of (flawed) individual genius, hyper-
ambitious egoism and so on). Film theory and criticism, Bordwell claims,
focus on implicit and symptomatic interpretation, thus generating a variety
of ‘readings’ that draw on favoured ‘semantic fields’ (discourses or theoretical
frameworks), and which conform to institutionalised hermeneutic routines.
Although widely influential, Bordwell’s cognitivist account of narrative has
also been subjected to various critiques. Berys Gaut (2010: 164–179), for
example, argues that Bordwell overemphasises the role of what Gombrich
called the ‘viewer’s share’ (as well as institutional routines) in the construction
of film meaning. Bordwell’s concept of ‘construction’ encompasses quite
distinct cognitive processes, only some of which may involve a degree of
construction. Gaut identifies three relevant senses of the term that are
operative, if not thematic, in Bordwell’s account. First, conceptual construction,
which refers to the application of concepts to visual arrays guided by shared
background knowledge (Gaut 2010: 170). Secondly, normative construction,
which refers to how movies, like other artworks, are ‘incomplete’, and require
‘fleshing out’ by the viewer (Gaut 2010: 172). Examples here would include
the way in which we extrapolate from 2D images in order ‘construct’ a film-
world of 3D objects (we perceive 2D objects but visually imagine that they are
3D). ‘Construction’, however, can also refer to the way that practitioners
generate interpretations and evaluations by mapping concepts from ‘semantic
fields’ on to relevant narrative cues, following the established routines and
norms of institutions of criticism. This third, more radical sense is what Gaut
calls ‘critical school constructionism’; a radical constructionism that ‘really
does entail that meanings are made, not found’ (2010: 173–174). If a new
school arises, or applies different semantic fields to the film, different meanings
are attributed to the film, which are accepted as legitimate or not by the
relevant critical school. Thus we can speak of a ‘Lacanian’, a ‘Deleuzian’ or a
‘post-colonialist’ reading of a film and so forth.
The problem, according to Gaut, is that Bordwell’s model conflates these
distinct senses of ‘construction’, and thus relativises understanding and
 Cognitivism Goes to the Movies 97

interpretation either to the individual viewer or to a relevant critical school

or community of interpreters. To overextend the concept in this way,
however, is to risk conflating conceptual, normative and institutional senses
of construction. It is one thing to ‘construct’ perceptual experience by making
inferences that go beyond immediate sensory inputs; it is another to map
concepts drawn from a particular ‘semantic field’ (or what Foucault called a
‘discourse’) in order to produce, say, a psychoanalytic reading of a film. If
everything is ‘construction’, then nothing really is, since the term loses
conceptual specificity and therefore explanatory power and theoretical
plausibility.
Rehearsing a criticism that has also been made of ‘social constructionism’,
Gaut argues further that a constructionist account should not imply that
whatever we perceive, understand or interpret is therefore a ‘construct’ (2010:
170). Perception can be ‘constructed’ in that the cognitive processing of
sensory inputs goes beyond what is immediately given; but this does not
mean that the objects we perceive are ‘constructions’, hence a matter of
cultural convention or subjective invention. On the contrary, there are both
naturalistic and cultural-historical constraints on interpreting film that
question the view that such interpretations are simply ‘constructed’ by
institutionalised film theorists. If we take the ‘semantic fields’ and institutional
norms governing practices of criticism as authoritative, then we lose the
hermeneutic constraints that formalist and historicist approaches to
criticism can provide.1 The result, over time, is a relativistic proliferation of
interpretations, which fail to provide ‘an independent brake’ on whether they
are ‘valid’ for the work in question (Gaut 2010: 175). How do we know, in
other words, when we are ‘making meaning’ or just making it up?
The counterexample Gaut cites against Bordwell’s constructionism refers
to the significance of cross-cultural differences for interpreting film style.
Welles’ use of low-angle shots, Gaut points out, might well signify power and
stature in Citizen Kane, but the same kind of shots do not have this meaning
in Japanese cinema (2010: 176). This is because low-angle shots in such films
can reflect a culturally specific vantage point: the view one might have while
seated on a traditional tatami mat, as one finds, for example, in Kurosawa’s
Rashomon. Such counterexamples, Gaut argues, suggest that practices of
interpretation and evaluation are not simply ‘constructed’ but are subject to
various normative constraints, be they cultural, historical or ‘institutional’
(2010: 177–179).
In response, however, one could argue that Gaut’s contrast between the
use of low-angle shots in Citizen Kane and in Japanese films is itself open to
98 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

question. Welles’ celebrated low-angle shots do not always straightforwardly

signify ‘power’ or ‘authority’ but work ironically as well: the team of Welles/
Toland both deploy and subvert this conventional assumption, showing at
once the stature and superficiality of Kane’s self-image as leader destined for
power and glory.2 Gaut’s example, moreover, echoes Bordwell’s own
insistence on historical specificity and attention to style.3 Indeed, Gaut’s
point about placing the low-angle shots from Rashomon in their proper
historical and hence cinematic context inadvertently supports Bordwell’s
claims for his ‘historical poetics’: a practice of critical interpretation and
evaluation that analyses formal elements with regard to historically shared
norms of film style.

The ‘Paradox’ of Fiction?

We are all no doubt familiar with our affective and emotional responses to
film. Although the kinds of emotions elicited by fictional film are similar to
those experienced in ordinary life, they are accompanied by an awareness of
the fictionality of what we are seeing (Plantinga 2009a: 77). In Almodóvar’s
All About My Mother (1999), for example, I feel shock, pain and sympathy for
Manuela [Cecilia Roth] as she cries out, reaching for the head of her dying
son Esteban, who has just been hit by a car; but I also know that I am seeing
a fictional scenario and that neither Manuela nor Esteban actually exist.
Nonetheless, I find myself choking with tears. How so?
The fact that we can experience emotional responses to fictional characters
has perplexed many philosophers. Does it confirm the traditional (Platonic)
philosophical suspicion of emotions as conflicting with reason? Are the
emotional responses we experience in response to fictions still ‘rational’? Are
these genuine emotional responses or ‘simulated’, pretend emotions? These
questions have become important for cognitivist film theorists, and
answering them has tended to track the so-called ‘paradox of fiction’ (how
can I be emotionally engaged with fictional characters that I know do not
exist?). We can state this paradox, first articulated by Colin Radford (1975),
as follows: 1) we respond emotionally to what we believe to be actual; 2)
fiction presents us with scenarios and characters that we do not believe to be
actual; 3) yet we nonetheless respond emotionally to such fictional characters
and scenarios. According to Radford, we cannot hold all three propositions
without falling into contradiction; hence our apparent capacity to respond
emotionally to fiction is ‘irrational, incoherent, and inconsistent’ (1975: 78).
 Cognitivism Goes to the Movies 99

Radford’s conclusion does not seem persuasive to many philosophers or

theorists of the arts. What purpose is served, other than to disenfranchise art,
by arguing that it is ‘irrational’ to respond emotionally to it? Whatever our
response to this question, our enjoyment of fiction does seem to present a
puzzle: if we do not believe that fictional characters exist, how can we be
moved by the depiction of their plight? Three competing responses have
emerged as ways of accounting for our emotional engagement with fiction:
‘pretence theory’, ‘illusion theory’ and ‘thought theory’ (see Carroll 1990: 60–
88). Kendall Walton (1990) is the best-known exponent of ‘pretence theory’,
which claims that we have ‘quasi-emotional’ responses to fictional characters,
where cinematic images serve as props within an elaborate game of fictional
‘make-believe’. In effect, Walton denies the third premise, namely that we do
respond emotionally to fictional characters or scenarios. If our emotional
responses were real, I would feel moved to take some kind of action in
response to an emotionally stirring scene. Since I do not, they are not.
This approach seems dubious from a phenomenological point of view,
relying again on the philosopher’s appeal to commonsense intuitions about
emotion and fiction. Walton’s paradigm case is the child’s game of make-
believe: when we play such a game, we pretend to be in a (genuine) emotional
state (the child pretends to be afraid of her father pretending to be a monster).
Likewise with fiction, Walton claims, which is the adult version of a game of
make-believe. The problem with this analogy, however, is that we enter into
and enact such games voluntarily. Our emotional responses to fictional
scenarios, however, are largely involuntary (unless I am acting, I cannot readily
will myself to laugh at a comic scene or cry at a tragic one). Do I really engage
in a game of make-believe, pretending to be ‘really’ sad, as I witness Manuela’s
crying grief for her dying son? Consider the affective and emotional responses
one experiences in witnessing a violent fight, a moral injustice or a sex scene:
do I merely pretend to be viscerally revulsed, morally indignant or erotically
excited? Can one be ‘make-believedly’ aroused? These kinds of ‘quasi-emotions’
do not account for the involuntary responses that we frequently experience
with fictional films (like horror). Nausea, disgust, revulsion and the ‘startle
effect’ suggest that, for some emotions, there are significant involuntary,
bodily-physiological responses that are not ‘make-believe’.4 Moreover, the idea
of ‘quasi-emotions’ seems peculiar, since it requires us to distinguish real from
fictional emotions, which seem to differ from each other principally in their
object. As Carroll argues, however, having a genuine emotional reaction to
someone telling us terrible news does not suddenly change into a fictional
emotion if it turns out that the person was telling us a lie (1990: 61).
100 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

‘Illusion theory’ denies Radford’s second premise, namely that fiction

presents us with characters and scenarios that we do not believe to be real.
Variants of this view include the traditional ‘suspension of disbelief ’ idea
(Coleridge), Freudian concepts of disavowal within psychoanalytic film
theory (Metz) and so on. This approach, not much in favour today, maintains
that we do come to believe (or partially believe) fictional characters or
scenarios to be in some sense real. The standard objection to this view is that,
if this were the case, even partially, what we take to be actual would move us
to act or react in some way, not to mention lose sight of the fact that we are
engaging with fictions. The fact that I do not feel moved to act on my belief
suggests that I do not literally believe the fiction or its characters are real.
However moved I may be by Manuela’s pain and her son’s fatal injuries, I do
not find myself calling for an ambulance.
The most promising response is to deny the first premise – that we
respond emotionally to what we believe to be actual – and that is the path
taken by the ‘thought theory’. According to this view, it is the thought of the
character in that particular situation that generates the relevant emotion,
rather than a belief that this might actually be the case (Carroll 1990: 79–87).
We do not need to believe in the literal existence of vampires in order to feel
frightened by the thought of Nosferatu bearing down upon his hapless
victim. Rather we can mentally represent this idea, entertain the unasserted
thought or propose in imagination the idea of a vampire; and that is all we
require in order to feel fear, dread, but perhaps also awe, at the shadow of
Nosferatu’s claws silhouetted in the dark.
A recent variant of ‘thought theory’ is Greg Currie’s account of ‘simulation
theory’, which maintains that the viewer mentally simulates, in imagination,
the relevant state of mind (beliefs, desires and so on) of the character within
that fictional scenario, and by allowing this simulation to (mentally) run, we
can arrive at an understanding of the character’s subjective states (Currie
1995). As Carroll put it, we simulate a character mentally by ‘being immersed
in a virtually continuous process of replicating the emotions and desires of
(especially) the protagonists’ (2008: 172). Simulation theory, however, seems
to imply a rather rigid alignment between viewer and character, such that I
need to simulate his or her attitudes and responses in order to experience an
appropriate affective or emotional response. This approach, however, does
not account for the variability of our engagement with characters, the fact
that we can have a different view or attitude to the situation than the character
or that we can sympathise with characters with whom we do not share
attitudes or beliefs. Nor does it deal well with the possibility that we can
 Cognitivism Goes to the Movies 101

interrupt this simulation in order to reflect on the character’s predicament,

or the actor’s performance, or the cinematic presentation, all of which
contribute to our affective and emotional responses to film.
Once again, we can question the kind of phenomenology of emotions
that ‘thought theory’ seems to assume. ‘Thought theory’ makes affective and
emotional response dependent on having the appropriate thought or belief,
which does not account well for affective responses in cases where such a
thought may be absent or obscure (when I cannot identify or readily name
what ‘thought’ is being expressed in one of the many anxiety-inducing
sequences in David Lynch’s films). Nor does it really address the bodily,
sensorial, visceral dimension of our affective engagement, which also
depends upon various non-conscious neuro-physiological processes (see
Robinson 2005). My feeling of helpless horror (in de Palma’s Carrie (1976))
as I watch fragile Carrie White [Sissy Spacek] about to be drenched with a
bucket of pig’s blood just as she is being crowned Homecoming Queen is not
simply a matter of entertaining the thought of such a scenario and finding it
unpleasant (although this also plays a role). Indeed, one of the virtues of this
scene is the manner in which it elevates a tawdry, clichéd teen flick scenario
– the thought of a nasty, humiliating prom night trick being played on a
vulnerable teen by the dominant ‘mean girl’ – to the level of devastating art
horror. Nor is it a matter of my simulating in imagination how I might feel,
standing on the stage, with a feeling of cautious pleasure, having finally
overcome my fear, shyness and religiously abusive mother, only to be
humiliated in the most abject and appalling manner. The scene is a good
example of how we do not have to be aligned with a character’s mental state
in order to feel a (moral) allegiance with them. We feel appalled about what
is about to happen to poor Carrie, who is unaware of the impending
catastrophe, as well as feeling sympathy for her friend, Sue [Amy Irving],
who does realise what is about to happen – painfully revealed in slow motion
– but is powerless to prevent it. My affective and emotional engagement with
a scene such as this involves, rather, a complex interplay of bodily, visceral
responses, moral sympathy and emotional attunement, hermeneutic
reflection on the narrative situation and aesthetic appreciation of de Palma’s
skilful heightening of tension and suspense. There is more at stake in my
emotional response to the film than the thought of the scenario alone.
To return to our earlier example, Almodóvar’s cinematic presentation of
Esteban’s death and Manuela’s grief is not simply a matter of the characters’
actions or narrative content. It depends as much on the aesthetic mood and
cinematic mode of presentation of the scene. There are a number of
102 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

significant elements here. We might list the pounding rain, the striking
colour palette, Esteban’s pleading expression against the car window, the
silencing of the underscore to heighten our affective attunement, the tilting
image from the perspective of the dying Esteban, the expressiveness of
Cecilia Roth’s face, Manuela’s harrowing cry of grief, the raw sound of her
pain. Our affective and emotional engagement with this scene cannot be
reduced to the thought being expressed, or to simulating the emotional
responses of characters, but involves sensuous, bodily and aesthetic elements
that heighten our receptivity to, and resonance with, the emotions portrayed
on screen.
These remarks suggest that the most promising way of resolving the
paradox of fiction is to question the assumption that we can only have
emotions towards what we take to be real. As Thomson-Jones remarks, we can
maintain that emotions are cognitive in nature, but question whether emotions
always require beliefs (2008: 108). We can have emotional responses to
imagined situations or events, as is readily attested by daydreams and fantasies,
not to mention fictional narratives. The cognitive dimension of emotions, we
might argue, involves having the relevant perceptual construals (Plantinga),
thoughts and beliefs (Carroll), and imagined responses, which relate to the
fictional character or scenario in question. Alternatively, we can deny that
emotions are cognitive, and argue that they are primarily bodily and
neurophysiological, priming us, through‘unconscious’ bodily and physiological
processes, for heightened perception and relevant action (Robinson 2005).
An attractive pluralist approach that combines elements of both these
strategies has been developed by Carl Plantinga (2009a), who likewise denies
that we can only have emotional responses to what we believe to be actual.
We can dissolve the paradox of fiction once we adopt a ‘moderate cognitivism’
denying that emotion depends on belief (Plantinga 2009a: 77). It may be that
we require some kind of evaluative belief concerning the specific
characteristics of the character or situation in question, for example that a
certain character is frightening, or fascinating, or pitiable (I have to entertain
the notion that vampires have frightening characteristics, even if I do not
believe that they actually exist). Nonetheless, if we can entertain ‘unasserted
thoughts’ concerning the character, as Plantinga argues, then we can resolve
the apparent paradox of our emotional engagement with him or her. Simply
put, we can imagine them and their situation, and respond emotionally to
these imaginings. If I imagine the character thus, I can respond emotionally
to him or her without being committed to any definite beliefs concerning
the character’s existence (I can find Hannibal Lecter both fascinating and
 Cognitivism Goes to the Movies 103

frightening without having to worry about whether he exists or not). The

so-called paradox of fiction is merely apparent; an indication of the confusing
assumptions we bring to our experience of emotion in response to fiction.
To return to our example, the emotional effect of Cecilia Roth’s
performance in All About My Mother is dependent upon my construal of her
situation perceptually, imaginatively, cognitively and aesthetically. I can
imagine or entertain various ‘unasserted thoughts’ concerning Manuela’s
character (thanks to Roth’s performance and Almodóvar’s direction), and
thus enjoy an affective and emotional engagement with her, independent of
any definite beliefs about her existence. Imaginative emotional engagement
thus offers one way of dissolving the paradox of being moved by fictional
characters that we believe do not exist.
More generally, we can extend Plantinga’s point and argue that the
phenomenological experience of emotional response is too complex to be
reduced to a simple cognitive stance (a propositional content, entertaining a
thought or belief, imagining that such and such is the case). Emotional
responses orchestrate different levels and layers of affective attunement,
bodily responsiveness, imaginative involvement and psychological cognition
(sympathy and empathy). The so-called paradox of fiction arises only if we
ignore this complex phenomenology and make the ‘intellectualist’
assumption that emotion either presupposes beliefs or does not. The
experience of affective attunement and emotional resonance that primes us
for and intensifies our aesthetic engagement with film shows us that we need
an appropriate phenomenology of emotions if we wish to better understand
the nature of our emotional engagement with movies.

Affect and Emotion

Although much debate on emotions in analytic-cognitivist philosophy of
film has been dominated by the so-called ‘paradox of fiction’, in recent years
the problem of emotion has become a central topic in cognitive film theory.
Cognitivist theories of emotion can explain many aspects of our emotional
engagement with more conventional forms of narrative cinema and enable a
sophisticated engagement with genre and its role in eliciting emotional
responses. They encounter their limits, however, in dealing with films that
thwart these more familiar kinds of cognitive mapping, and which open up
varieties of aesthetic experience that are not strictly ‘cognitive’ in the narrow
sense. Once again, recent work in cognitive theory has begun to explore
104 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

these challenges by focusing on the role of mood in art and on the importance
of ‘non-cognitive’ forms of affect in our broader emotional engagement with
cinematic narrative. I therefore turn now to explore the relationship between
cognitivist and phenomenological accounts of mood in film. I conclude with
some critical reflections on the challenges facing contemporary cognitivism,
namely how to avoid the twin extremes of intellectualism and aestheticism,
and how phenomenological approaches to cinema might provide some ways
of responding to these challenges.
It may seem obvious that narrative film works dramatically by eliciting and
modulating affect and emotion. Yet until recently, emotion was a relatively
neglected topic in film theory and philosophy of film. Today, however, studies
of emotion, affect, character engagement and genre have been flourishing (see
Coplan 2006, 2011; Coplan and Goldie 2011; Grodal 2009; Hanich 2010;
Laine 2011, 2015; Neill 2006; Plantinga 2009a, 2009b, 2018; Plantinga and
Smith 1999; Prinz 2011; G. Smith 2003; M. Smith 1995; Stadler 2008; Tan
1995). To ask an obvious question, why does emotion matter? Carl Plantinga
identifies five ways in which affect and emotion are essential for narrative
film: 1) Because of the pleasure, value or emotional significance (personal and
social) that they afford. 2) Because they provide narrative information by
drawing the spectator’s attention to salient features of the narrative situation,
creating sympathy and antipathy for various characters. 3) Because they
intensify the phenomenological experience of the film, both bodily
(accelerated heartbeat, tensing of muscles, laughing or moaning) and
aesthetically (lending significance, quality and imaginative power to particular
scenes). 4) Because they are connected with various cognitive processes, such
as inferences and evaluations, which are essential to the understanding of
film. And 5), because they have rhetorical and ideological significance,
influencing how we feel and think about the world and others (Plantinga
2009a: 5–6, 2009b: 86). The polymorphous pleasure in movies flows from a
combination of cognitive play (solving narrative problems, puzzles, enigmas),
visceral experience (thrills and spills), sympathy (for multiple, often conflicting
characters), narrative satisfactions (cueing emotional, visceral and cognitive
experience), and reflexivity (where cultural awareness of film genre, style,
history and so on meets social communication and sub-cultural belonging)
(Plantinga 2009a: 39).
What do we mean, then, when we talk of ‘affect’ and ‘emotion’ in film?
Although commonly used as synonyms, philosophers and psychologists
usually distinguish affect and emotion depending on whether these have a
definite object or cognitive content. Feeling nausea is an (unpleasant)
 Cognitivism Goes to the Movies 105

affective-bodily state; feeling pride in having accomplished a difficult task is

an emotional-cognitive state. Human emotions are complex phenomena,
but speaking generally we can define them as mental states accompanied by
physiological and autonomic nervous system changes, subjective feelings,
action tendencies (where emotional responses prime us towards certain
kinds of action) and outward bodily behaviours (facial expression, bodily
posture, gestures, vocalisations and so on) (Plantinga 2009b: 86). Affect, on
the other hand, we can broadly define as ‘any state of feeling or sensation’
involved in conscious cognition (Plantinga 2009a: 29). Affect differs from
emotion in being without a definite object, whereas emotions are directed
towards intentional objects (Gaut 2010; De Sousa 1987; Plantinga 2009a;
Roberts 2003). I feel the warmth of the sun and enjoy the sensation of water
as I swim; but I suddenly feel panic and fear at the dark submerged shape
moving rapidly towards me beneath the waves.
Arguments abound, however, over the precise nature of emotion. Carroll
(2008), for example, distinguishes between affects, which are structurally
more primitive, and emotions, which are affects with a complex structure
integrating feeling with ‘computation’ or a cognitive construal (Plantinga
2009b: 86). For a strong cognitivist like Carroll, emotions have a definite
cognitive content such as a thought or a belief; emotions are just affective
responses coupled with the relevant belief or thought. Emotions thus provide
important cognitive information concerning our environment by combining
feeling with cognitive appraisals (my anger at a reckless driver depends upon
my conviction that people should drive safely, that this driver has endangered
me, is a reckless driver and so on). For other theorists (like de Sousa 1987;
Plantinga 2009a; Prinz 2004; and Roberts 2003), emotions involve cognitive
appraisals but these do not have to be beliefs; emotions can involve concern-
based construals that are largely perceptual in nature (my anger expresses a
concern-based construal of a situation that I perceive as dangerous,
threatening or provocative). Finally, for some theorists, like Robinson (2005),
emotion is not necessarily cognitive, but it can be understood as primarily a
bodily, physiological phenomenon, activating a variety of neurological and
bodily processes priming us for responsive action.
Plantinga (2009a) offers a pluralist approach to emotion, arguing that
they are bodily-mental responses that span perceptual, affective and
cognitive registers. Cinematic emotions, in particular, are elicited by our
immersive (bodily, affective and cognitive) experience of narrative film.
Following Robert C. Roberts, Plantinga defines emotions as concern-based
construals (2009a: 55–56 ff.) that are at once perceptual and cognitive,
106 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

intentional and embodied. They can be understood as encompassing an

agent’s judgments or perceptions of ‘how a situation affects her or his
concerns’, where such construals are also relationally defined with regard to
those of other agents (Plantinga 2009a: 9, 49). Emotions, on this view, express
‘a mental state that is accompanied by physiological arousal’ (Plantinga
2009a: 54), a heightened perceptual, affective and cognitive receptivity
towards our situation as well as that of others.
So how do emotions figure in our experience of film? For many theorists,
mainstream Hollywood seems to offer an ideal opportunity for the study of
the relationship between emotion and cinema. On the one hand, as Plantinga
remarks, it is clear that Hollywood films are ‘packaged experiences,
commodities designed to engage audiences affectively and emotively’, yet they
also provide a clear case study of filmmaking practice specifically designed for
eliciting emotional engagement (2009a: 6). Hollywood is ‘a particularly
emotional cinema’, according to Plantinga, avoiding the distantiation or
intellectualism of much European and international art cinema (2009a: 7).5
Such films typically fall into three broad classes: 1) ‘robustly sympathetic films’
that encourage emotional congruence with sympathetic characters; 2) ‘action
films’ dedicated to eliciting sensation, excitement or spectacle; and 3)
‘humorously ironic’ films that replace distance with humour and irony
(Plantinga 2009a: 6–7). Mainstream narrative films typically emphasise
emotional engagement and strive to avoid boredom, whether through action
and spectacle or by sympathy and humour. They therefore display a variety of
visual and narrative techniques designed for eliciting and modulating affective
and emotional responses. These include the elicitation of sympathy for
characters, the elaboration of prototypical or ‘paradigmatic’ narrative scenarios
and ‘prefocused’ cueing of appropriate affective responses to stylised narrative
situations.

Emotional Engagement
How does our emotional engagement with character work? Film viewers
often describe their enjoyment of narrative film as a matter of ‘identifying’
with the characters. One common view is that films eliciting such
identification are absorbing and moving, whereas films that do not are
unengaging or even boring. A conversation between film fans might run
thus: ‘I loved All About My Mother; I could really identify with Manuela, but
also with Huma and Agrado!’ ‘Did you like Inception?’ ‘No, I couldn’t relate to
 Cognitivism Goes to the Movies 107

Cobb at all. He seemed more like a computer game avatar than a real
character, and his relationship with his wife Mal wasn’t very convincing’. For
the first speaker, it is all about emotional engagement with the characters; for
the other the problem is precisely the lack of such emotional engagement.6
How, then, do we account for this more familiar ‘folk’ sense of identification
as emotional engagement with characters?
As discussed above, many cognitivist theorists have criticised the concept
of ‘identification’ operative in psychoanalytic accounts. Some philosophers,
however, such as Gaut (2010), have argued that the concept of identification
at issue here requires refinement rather than rejection. Carroll, for example,
construes ‘identification’ as referring to an identity relation between viewer
and character; moreover, that the strong alignment, even fusion between
viewer and character that identification implies, cannot account for cases
where the viewer’s emotional attitude is at variance with that of the character.
The problem with Carroll’s overly literal construal of ‘identification’, however,
is that it underplays the role of imagination in our emotional engagement
with fictional characters. Carroll assumes that to ‘identify’ with a character is
to assume all of his or her relevant attitudes, beliefs, traits and responses,
which is far too demanding a conception of the term. On this view, call it
‘strong identification’, we are dealing with an empathising that encompasses
a multitude of relevant aspects at once. Construed in this fashion, Carroll
concludes that (strong) ‘identification’ is not only incoherent as a concept
but also untenable as a description of our emotional engagement with film.
We can address Carroll’s criticism, however, by pointing out that
‘identification’ is typically concerned with imagining oneself in a character’s
situation, rather than as sharing precisely his or her affective and emotional
responses. Such identification can be ambiguous and ambivalent; it may
involve feeling sympathy for a character, but then again it may not (it is
possible to identify with a character without feeling (much) sympathy for
him or her, while one can also feel sympathy for a character with whom one
does not identify). Moreover, as Gaut argues (2010: 258 ff ), if we construe
the process of identification as involving a plurality of aspects (perceptual
identification, affective identification, epistemic identification and so on),
which need not be activated all at once, then we can rehabilitate the term
theoretically in a way that accords with the folk sense of ‘identifying’ with
characters in film. All the same, it is clear that the concept suffers from a
superfluity of distinct senses, and that there are many aspects involved in
such processes of identification, which require further specification and
explication than the concept of ‘identification’ generally affords.
108 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

Structures of Sympathy
Murray Smith has taken up this problem of providing a more differentiated
conception of emotional engagement – what he calls the ‘structure of
sympathy’ (1995: 81–86) – as an alternative to undifferentiated ‘folk’ as well
as psychoanalytic concepts of identification. This model posits three levels of
engagement that comprise the structure of sympathy: recognition, alignment
and allegiance (Smith 1995: 81 ff.). According to Smith, recognition ‘describes
the spectator’s construction of character’, the way in which we individuate or
pick out characters with definite characteristics and a coherent identity. For
the most part, recognition occurs very readily in narrative film, being ‘rapid
and phenomenologically “automatic” ’ (1995: 82); yet there are cases where
films block or undermine recognition such that the viewer struggles to
identify a character as a coherent, individuated personage (Buñuel’s That
Obscure Object of Desire (1977) or Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), for example).
The second level, alignment, describes ‘the process by which spectators are
placed in relation to characters in terms of access to their actions, and to
what they know and feel’ (1995: 83). It refers to the way films focus attention
on, and grant us knowledge of, a character via two related processes: spatio-
temporal attachment (restricting the narrative to a character’s actions) and
subjective access (granting us access to the character’s subjectivity) (Smith
1995: 83). POV shots are one common way of doing this, but there are many
other devices used as well (POV shots, moreover, can also serve other ends,
for example concealing the identity of a character in a horror film) (Smith
1995: 83–84). As I discuss below, there are important issues to be explored
here concerning POV shots, cinematic emotion and imaginative engagement.
Finally, allegiance refers to ‘the moral evaluation of characters by the
spectator’ (Smith 1995: 84). This refers to the way that various narrative,
visual and aural cues grant us access to the character’s state of mind, allow us
to understand the context of his or her actions, and thus to morally evaluate
the character on the basis of this knowledge and understanding (Smith 1995:
84). Taken together, recognition, alignment and allegiance comprise a
‘structure of sympathy’ that enables us to discriminate between levels of
engagement. It can therefore help us to avoid the common confusion between
alignment with a character’s actions or state of mind and allegiance with the
character from a moral-evaluative point of view. In Demme’s The Silence of
the Lambs (1991), for example, we cannot be emotionally aligned with serial
killer Buffalo Bill (his mental state remains a mystery), even though we at
times share his point of view (watching, through his night vision goggles,
 Cognitivism Goes to the Movies 109

terrified Clarice Starling pointing her pistol blindly in the dark). We can,
however, be aligned with Clarice (share her state of abject fear) and feel
allegiance with her (finding her courage and determination morally
admirable). Distinguishing between alignment and allegiance with characters,
and how they may either overlap or conflict, is important for understanding
narrative as well as appreciating a film’s cinematic accomplishments.

In the Mood
Most cognitivist theories of emotion, narrative and genre tend to focus on
character engagement, narrative content and the cognitive processes of film
understanding. Carroll argues, for example, that we can explain the puzzle of
emotional convergence in film – that viewers will typically respond in
similar ways to particular movie scenes – by the ‘criterial prefocusing’ of
narrative cues that ensure that the appropriate affective/emotional responses
are elicited and directed (2008). Even theorists like Plantinga (2009a), who
emphasise the interplay of cognitive, emotional and generic factors, still
foreground the role of character, action and narrative content in their
analyses of affective and emotional engagement with film.
One could object, however, that this approach overlooks the broader
aesthetic and cinematic setting of narrative drama. It is not just character
action and narrative content that elicit emotion but the entire repertoire of
cinematic-aesthetic devices (lighting, composition, montage, rhythm, tempo,
colour, texture, gesture, performance, music and sound). Emotions in movies
are aesthetically elicited and communicated, not just cognitively identified
and understood. Indeed, we can question some cognitivist theories for
focusing exclusively on discrete (cognitively) focused emotions, rather than
on the background aesthetic attunement elicited by particular sequences or
even by the film as a whole. Movies do not simply present characters in
discrete emotional states in order to convey narrative information. Rather,
their aesthetic effect depends on the sensuous-affective background or
encompassing ‘mood’ against which our complex flow of emotional
responsiveness becomes manifest: the background against which we are able
to recognise, align and ally ourselves with particular characters within
specific narrative scenarios.
As an alternative to Carroll’s ‘criterial prefocusing’ approach, Greg Smith
(2003) has offered a different account of how film narrative works to achieve
emotional engagement: namely by the complex evocation or cueing of
110 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

moods rather than the triggering of discrete emotions based on objects or

character alignment and allegiance. Indeed, ‘the primary emotive effect’ of
cinema, Smith argues, ‘is to create mood’ (2003: 42). At the same time, mood
cues the background affective dispositions that enable us to experience
emotional engagement with characters in the narrative. More significantly,
mood provides a sustained, low-level, indeterminate ‘focusing’ of affective
attunement that is necessary for the successful ‘convergence’ of particular
viewer’s emotional responses to specific scenes or narrative sequences.
Expressed differently, mood provides the (phenomenological) background
of aesthetic attunement against which certain features of the narrative,
character or situation can show up as salient, dramatically charged or
emotionally significant. It is because of the mood of anxiety and tension
artfully evoked in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) (through aural, visual
and narrative cues) that the famous shower scene has such a powerful and
dramatic effect. Consider the preceding ‘parlour scene’ between Marion and
Norman sharing a sandwich, with its gloomy shadows, stuffed birds, stilted
conversation, Norman’s stammering speech, his denunciation of asylums
and the minor musical background score; all of these elements contribute to
cueing the relevant moods of anxiety and suspense that prepare for the
famous shower scene that follows. It is because of the anticipatory moods of
anxiety and suspense that her (morally) cleansing shower can suddenly
switch into a watery death trap in such a viscerally shocking and emotionally
devastating manner.
Smith’s account suggests that we should consider a richer
phenomenological approach to the ways in which emotions are keyed by
mood or affective dispositions that serve to disclose the narrative world in
particular ways. Mood attunes us to being receptive to specific emotional
cues and thus to the particular responses of characters that thereby take on
a heightened emotional significance. This approach is confirmed in recent
studies of mimicry (the way in which individuals tend to mimic each other’s
affective or emotional responses), affective contagion (the phenomenon of
group or shared affects, where individuals ‘catch’ the emotional responses of
others), and the affective basis of intercorporeal recognition (the way our
basic cognitive and psychological engagement with others is dependent
upon affective responsiveness) (see Coplan 2006; Grodal 2009: 181–204;
Laine 2011; Plantinga 2009a: 112–129; Smith 2003: 19–34). It also finds
confirmation in the way in which narrative film uses a multiplicity of
aesthetic elements and cinematic devices to cue mood in order to elicit and
enhance the viewer’s affective and emotional engagement.
 Cognitivism Goes to the Movies 111

Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000), for example, uses a haunting
refrain, ‘Yumeji’s Theme’ (composed by Shigeru Umabayashi), which
accompanies the repeated gestures, poignant expressions and balletic
movements of the main characters, the exquisitely elegant So Li-zhen [Maggie
Cheung] and dashing Chow Mo-wan [Tony Leung]. The recurring use of this
refrain, with its slow, sensuous sequences of everyday encounters between So
Li-zhen [Cheung] and Chow Mo-wan [Leung], evokes the romantic moods
of nostalgia and longing that make this poignant love story – achingly
sustained but never actually consummated – so aesthetically charged and
emotionally nuanced. The slowly unfolding temporal arc of the film is
prepared by its subtle and sustained evocation of a variety of harmonically
resonant moods. These moods are cued by Kar-wai’s artful use of colour,
décor, costume and music, and they are beautifully sustained by the graceful
movements and repeated gestures of the characters as they sojourn through
time and memory.
Another memorable mood sequence can be found in Almodóvar’s Talk to
Her (2002), a scene that Cavell might have described as a ‘nothing shot’; an
image or sequence that serves no particular narrative purpose other than to
evoke an aesthetic charge or affective mood. There is a brief musical interlude
in the course of the film that features a large gathering of people seated
together for an artistic social gathering, listening to a performer (Caetano
Veloso), accompanied by a guitarist and two cellists, singing a beautifully
plaintive song (Cucurrucucu Paloma).7 The scene, set in a delightful courtyard
on a warm summer evening, lingers on the singer’s performance, his expressive
voice and features, the pleasure on the faces of the audience, including the
lead characters. Everyone is enjoying the performance, which evokes a
languorous ambience, a romantic mood, a poignant sensibility registered on
Marco’s [Mario Grandinetti’s] melancholy face as he is moved, once again, to
tears (a recurring motif in the film). The scene has little narrative significance
other than as an occasion for Marco, the broken journalist, and Lydia [Rosario
Flores], the broken matador, to talk, recalling painful memories of Marco’s
past relationship. He leaves the performance, overcome with emotion (as we
have seen him do several times already), with Lydia following him, captivated
by his overflowing feeling, thus opening a space for their uneasy intimacy to
unfold. The scene is a mood-cue that uses music, song and our pleasure in
performance to imbue the narrative situation with affective intensity. It
expresses an aesthetic mood that celebrates the power and pleasure of
performance, whether musical, dramatic or cinematic, for no particular
narrative reason other than the aesthetic pleasure of watching narrative film.
112 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

In Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), mood-cueing is no longer a

background feature to guide our engagement with characters but a quasi-
independent element within the cinematic world. In the ‘Club Silencio’
sequence, Betty [Naomi Watts] and ‘Rita’ [Laura Elena Harring] listen to an
aching Spanish rendition of Roy Orbison’s song ‘Crying’, a performance that
turns out to be mimed, the singer [Rebekah del Rio] suddenly collapsing and
‘dying’ on stage. This extraordinary mood-evoking performance, however,
also communicates an intuitive affective or aesthetic understanding to both
characters and viewers (that we are witnessing a performance while in the
grip of cinematic illusion; and that the characters’ fantasised love affair is not
real but illusory). More ‘intellectualist’ strains of cognitivist theory often
overlook this complex cueing and evocation of mood, involving music, colour,
visual patterning, gesture and performance. Yet it clearly plays a vital role in
our aesthetic, imaginative and emotional engagement with narrative film.

Contemporary Cognitivism
and Cinema
As I remarked at the beginning of this chapter, the broad field of ‘cognitivist’
approaches to cinema, which spans many theoretical perspectives, can be
defined by its theoretical and methodological commitment to naturalistic
theorisation and ‘piecemeal’ modes of inquiry (see Carroll 2008; Nannicelli
and Taberham 2014; Plantinga 2018). It emerged as an alternative to the
prevailing paradigms of film or screen theory – so-called ‘Grand Theory’ –
that synthesised, often in an eclectic manner, semiotic, psychoanalytic and
structuralist/poststructuralist theory and philosophy, while remaining
committed to a critical (ethico-political) perspective on ideological structures
rather than empirical or explanatory approach to theorising cinematic
experience (Sinnerbrink 2011c: 13–27). Earlier generations of cognitivist
theory were influenced by computational theories of mind as well as work on
AI systems and empirical-experimental models (drawing on cognitive
psychology and the neurosciences). This research programme has since
broadened out to include evolutionary perspectives, bioculturalist models,
multimodal, network, distributed as well as 4E (embodied, embedded,
extended and enacted) theories of cognition (see Coëgnarts and Kravanja
2015; Nannicelli and Taberham 2014). As a naturalistic approach to theory
– namely that all relevant processes pertaining to cinematic experience can
 Cognitivism Goes to the Movies 113

be explained in terms of natural causal processes as analysed within

empirically grounded theories – cognitivism remains committed to providing
explanatory (rather than descriptive or hermeneutic) forms of theory. In
keeping with this commitment, cognitivists thus endeavour to produce
causally explanatory theories of perception, cognition and emotional
engagement with film, venturing also into questions concerning the aesthetics
and ethics of cinema.
Contemporary cognitivists, however, reject the traditional dualism
between reason and emotion, embodied versus mentalistic responses,
exploring instead the interaction and dependency of these processes in our
complex affective, emotional and cognitive engagement with moving images
(Nannicelli and Taberham 2014). They not only focus on the role of ‘top down’
or higher-order cognitive processes (reflection, inference-making,
hypothesising, practical reasoning) but on the important ‘bottom-up’ or
lower-order embodied and affective processes involved in cognition that
occur at sub-threshold, automatic or minimally conscious levels of awareness
(physiological, corporeal, affective and emotional-cognitive ‘priming’ effects).
Together these theories seek to provide explanatory accounts – drawing on
empirical theory and research – to explain the causal processes, mechanisms
and experiential components making up our complex experience of cinematic
engagement. More recent cognitive work ventures into film aesthetics and
ethics of film in order to apply cognitive theories and the neurosciences to
account for the aesthetic effects of cinematic form as well as the moral
significance of such forms in our engagement with audio-visual media (see
D’Aloia and Eugeni 2014; Nannicelli and Taberham 2014; Plantinga 2018;
Shimamura 2013; Smith 2018).
Two critical objections to cognitivist approaches have appeared in recent
years, which both focus on topics central to the psychoanalytic-semiotic-
poststructuralist paradigm of film theory (Sinnerbrink 2010). Can cognitivist
approaches provide robust forms of critical interpretation/aesthetic
evaluation of non-standard (‘parametric’) forms of cinema? (Call this the
aesthetic or ‘what about art film?’ objection). And can cognitivist approaches
account for the ideological-political effects of (popular) cinema? (The
symptomatic or ‘what about ideology?’ objection). To take the first, cognitivist
theories, from Bordwell and Carroll to Smith and Grodal, have offered
powerful explanatory theories that deal well with canonical forms of popular
narrative cinema. But how well do they deal with art cinema that eschews,
for example, ‘erotetic’ (question and answer), cognitive puzzle-solving or
PECMA (perception-emotion-cognition-motor action) flow models of
114 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

narrative engagement defining popular cinema? Cognitivist models of

narrative theory may work convincingly for genre films like Love Actually
(2003), Transformers: The Last Knight (2017) or Spider-Man: No Way Home
(2021), critics may claim, but less well for ‘parametric’ narrative cinema like
Le quattro volte (2010), The Turin Horse (2011) or Memoria (2021).
The second (the symptomatic objection) focuses on the question of
cinema and ideology, asking whether cognitivist approaches, due to their
commitments to scientific naturalism and empirical-scientific research, are
adequately equipped to grapple with the ideological dimensions of film.
Much of the work in so-called ‘Grand Theory’ – particularly feminist film
theory and Marxist critical theory approaches – focused on the ideological
structures shaping our engagement with (popular) cinema and the manner
in which it can serve as a powerful vehicle of ideological influence, especially
with regards to key aspects of personal identity (gender, ‘race’, class and so
on). Can cognitivist theories engage with these ideological dimensions of
cinematic experience without risking some version of the ‘naturalistic
fallacy’? It is important to explain the causal processes shaping general
features of our affective, emotional and cognitive engagement with film; but
we also need to address the question of how cinema contributes to the
ideological context of contemporary cultural practices, moral discourses
and social-political institutions.
We can respond to these two objections, the aesthetic and the ideological,
by saying that they remain inconclusive; moreover, that they are countered
by new work focusing precisely on film aesthetics and ethico-political
questions (ideology). To be sure, there are important issues pertaining to
how ‘parametric’ narrative films work, and how their particular aesthetic
strategies thwart ‘standard’ models of cognitive engagement. And there are
important questions concerning the ideological dimensions of cinema that
film theorists, whether cognitivist or phenomenological, would do well to
consider more directly and concretely. Here, however, we can point to
various attempts by cognitivist theorists to address both ‘art film’ and
ideology using the resources of cognitive theory. A number of theorists deal
explicitly with non-standard forms of narrative cinema, including
experimental cinema, from cognitivist, neuroaesthetic, even evolutionary
biocultural perspectives (Grodal 2012; Shimamura 2013; Smith 2018). Their
work shows how such approaches can provide us with the conceptual tools
to undertake sophisticated and illuminating critical interpretation and
aesthetic evaluation of challenging cinematic works. There are also attempts
to tackle the ethico-political question of ideology in contemporary cinema
 Cognitivism Goes to the Movies 115

drawing on the work of cognitive theory and phenomenology (Plantinga

2018, 2019; Sinnerbrink 2019c; Stadler 2008). Such work seeks to account
for how popular narrative film effectively captures audience attention and
solicits moral-ideological allegiance via affective-emotional as well as
cognitive-evaluative means (see Plantinga 2019 on Zack Snyder’s 300, for
example). In short, both phenomenological and cognitivist approaches can
be brought to bear on complex narratives and aesthetically challenging
works as well as examining the mechanisms and effects that make possible
the uptake of ideological meanings in our social-cultural engagement with
contemporary media.

The ‘Reductionism’ Objection

Both of these objections reduce, so to speak, to versions of the ‘standard’
objection to cognitivist approaches, what we could call the reductionism
objection: that cognitivist approaches, again due to their naturalistic
commitments, risk offering ‘reductive’ accounts of relevant aesthetic elements
pertinent to cinematic experience (the role of affect and mood, aesthetic
experience, non-cognitive forms of engagement and so on). This rather broad
and vague claim – it is not difficult to charge any theory with ‘reductionism’
given that most (piecemeal) theories target discrete phenomena or processes
– can be broken down into two more specific claims. First, the claim that
cognitivism ignores ‘non-cognitive’ affective processes that are central to
cinematic experience, so is reductive in being ‘too mentalistic’ in its explanatory
focus on ‘higher-order’ aspects of engaging with film. And second, the claim
that there are phenomena relevant to cinematic experience that just resist
cognitivist (naturalistic-explanatory) theorisation (the psychanalytic
conception of the unconscious, for example), and so cognitivism is ‘too
rationalistic’ in this respect. Such phenomena are taken as important to
account for our experience of ‘art cinema’ or non-standard, parametric forms
of narrative, so the challenge of art cinema remains.
In response, we can say that the first objection, once again, is countered by
the rise of ‘anti-mentalistic’ accounts of affect, emotion and cognition.
Although earlier forms of cognitivist theory tended to focus on higher-order
‘top-down’ forms of cognition, more recent approaches emphasise ‘bottom-
up’ processes in order to provide a richer, more adequate account of affective-
cognitive engagement (see Coplan 2006, 2011; Plantinga 2018; Plantinga
and Tan 2007; Stadler 2008). The recent emphasis on embodied cognition
116 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

and on situated accounts of cognitive experience – acknowledging the

essential role of social interaction, social-cultural learning, intersubjective
communication, socio-cultural ‘scripts’ and enactive/interactive engagement
with others in the world – brings cognitivist theory more into line with
phenomenological perspectives (see Coegnarts 2017; Coëgnarts and
Kravanja 2015; Fingerhut and Heinman 2017; Gallagher and Zahavi 2008).
The second objection depends on the validity of the claims made concerning
such phenomena as the Freudian/Lacanian unconscious, psychoanalytic
accounts of repression, fantasy and the ‘perverse’ character of cinematic
spectatorship. The danger here is that of conflating heuristic concepts with
empirical phenomena, treating ‘the unconscious’ not as a heuristically useful
notion to guide or generate theory, but as designating some putative
empirical entity within the human psyche, and arguing that theories that fail
to take this into account are failing to adequately describe, hence theorise,
their object (see Sinnerbrink 2019c).
In short, both versions of the ‘reductionism’ objection (the too mentalistic/
too rationalistic objections) are better understood as claims concerning
the need to provide rich and complex phenomenological descriptive
accounts of our objects of theoretical reflection. I would add that the
charge of ‘reductionism’ is actually a claim about the need for an adequate
phenomenology of the objects of cognitive theorisation. In other words,
before we proceed with higher-order cognitive (naturalistic and explanatory)
theory, we should first prepare the ground for such theorisation by ensuring
we have an adequate phenomenological description of our object in order to
better track its features and complexities. Such was the case with the (early)
cognitive theorisation of emotion and neglect of mood (because mood did
not fit the more intellectualist model of cognition, and was thus ignored
because of its apparently ‘non-cognitive’ character). As I discuss next chapter,
this suggests that phenomenology and cognitivism can, and indeed should,
be brought together in a complementary, even synthetic manner. It also
means that we should now consider phenomenological approaches to
cinema as the other dominant current in contemporary film-philosophy.8
 5
Body Double:
Adventures in Phenomenology

Chapter Outline
The Phenomenological Turn: Sobchack’s Contribution 121
Sobchack on Cinema as ‘Viewing Views/Viewed Views’ 123
Film Body 126
Frampton’s ‘Filmind’ 130
Phenomenology: Two Problems of Subjectivism 133
Two Responses to Subjectivism: Projection and Distribution 134
Bringing Phenomenology and Cognitivism Together 137

What is film phenomenology? As Christian Ferencz-Flatz and Julian Hanich

remark, providing a coherent overview of film phenomenology is no easy
task; it requires surveying a large and sprawling field, ‘the contours of which
seem to be as vague as the foggy landscapes in an Antonioni or Angelopoulos
film’ (Ferencz-Flatz and Hanich 2016: 1). One of the key challenges is simply
defining what we mean by ‘phenomenology’: if the definition is overly broad
(referring to any approach that focuses on subjective experience), then the
term becomes so inclusive that even structuralist approaches can count as
having a ‘phenomenological’ dimension. If the definition is too narrow or
strict (as in Husserl’s foundational descriptive science dedicated to
articulating universal, invariant structures of consciousness via the method
of the phenomenological reduction or epoche (bracketing) and detached
‘eidetic’ contemplation of ‘essences’ (Wesensanchauung)), then almost no
film theory would count as properly phenomenological in a strict sense
117
118 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

(Ferencz-Flatz and Hanich 2016: 1). Here I strike a middle course,

acknowledging that film phenomenology, on the one hand, refers a pluralistic
set of theoretical approaches, foregrounding subjective embodied experience;
that it is an essentially descriptive approach, moreover, focusing on detailed
or ‘thick’ description, interpretation and analysis of relevant aspects of
subjective cinematic experience. On the other, if phenomenology is to mean
more than merely cataloguing one’s personal or idiosyncratic impressions of
a film, then it ought to aim at shared structures or common features of our
embodied conscious engagement with cinema, providing a descriptively rich
interpretation and analysis of features of subjective phenomena that can
provide the basis for further (explanatory or contextualising) theorisation.
The relationship between phenomenology and film theory has, historically
speaking, been rather halting and interrupted. With the exception of Merleau-
Ponty’s occasional essays and remarks dealing with film,‘classical’ and existential
phenomenologists (Husserl and Heidegger) generally ignored or dismissed it.
Heidegger, for example, makes only a few remarks concerning cinema, equating
it with photography as a representational medium that mechanically reproduces
reality in image form as part of the reductive technological ‘enframing’ of being
(see Sinnerbrink 2014a). Merleau-Ponty pens a famous essay dedicated to ‘Film
and the New Psychology’, suggesting a productive parallel between cinema and
phenomenology, and nominating cinema as a privileged medium for exploring
mind-world relationships, but he does not go on to explore this connection
much further. Sartre loved cinema, and even wrote a screenplay for the John
Huston biopic, Freud: The Secret Passion (1962), but did not explicitly analyse
cinema in his existential work, preferring literature (the novel and theatre) as
the privileged artform for presenting and exploring consciousness and
existential freedom. French phenomenology (drawing on Husserl and
Heidegger but largely shaped by Merleau-Ponty and Sartre) was then brought
to bear on film by theorists such as Amédée Ayfre, Henri Agel and Jean-Pierre
Meunier, as well as individuals working within the interdisciplinary model of
the filmologie movement (see Ferencz-Flatz and Hanich 2016; Hanich and
Fairfax 2019). By the 1970s, however, their legacy was largely forgotten, despite
attempts to stir interest in film phenomenology within the Anglophone world
(see Andrew 1976: 242–253).1
In the Anglophone world, however, phenomenology gained traction only
in the early-1990s to mid-2000s, thanks to Vivian Sobchack’s groundbreaking
work (1992, 2004) (with a contribution from Alan Casebier (1991)). As
Frank Tomasulo remarks, in a prescient anticipatory discussion of the
affinity between phenomenology and cinema studies:
 Adventures in Phenomenology 119

phenomenology is a method for studying any phenomenon: the world, the

mind, or the cinema. Indeed, the cinema is a particularly apt subject for
phenomenological investigation because it is so dependent on the explicitly
visual experiences of time, space, perception, signification, and human
subjectivity.
Tomasulo 1990: 2

Tomasulo’s special issue of Quarterly Review of Film and Video on ‘Film

and Phenomenology’ (1990) marks an important milestone in this story. In
his Introduction, he identifies the value of phenomenology for theorising
cinema, introducing Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology to the
reader, offering a brief history of the French phenomenological film theory
and the Filmologie movement, along with introducing the new work in this
field by Casebier, Sobchack, Harold Stadler, Linda Singer and Gaylyn Studlar,
who all feature in the special issue.2 The philosophical motivation for the turn
to phenomenology, according to Tomasulo, concerns the dual development
in modernity to which Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and other
phenomenologists respond: ‘the transformation of the world into a picture
and the human being into a subject’ (Tomasulo 1990: 3). Film and media
theory, Tomasulo contends, struggling to move beyond a psychoanalytic-
semiotic paradigm, and grappling with theoretical problems concerning
subjectivity and (aesthetic) experience that poststructuralist ‘critiques of the
subject’ sweep aside, might well find phenomenology an important alternative
model of theorisation, especially concerning spectatorship and the subjective
and embodied dimensions of cinematic experience.
With the publication of Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye in 1992,
Tomasulo’s claims were realised. Indeed, the impact of Sobchack’s work has
been profound, with an entire strain of contemporary film theory/philosophy
of film drawing on and developing her work, and characterising itself
broadly as ‘phenomenological’. Sobchack’s approach, adopted and radicalised
by many of her followers, has always been eclectic, drawing on elements of
Husserl but mostly based on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, combining
concepts and approaches from both Merleau-Ponty’s earlier (primacy of
perception) and later (chiasmus and ‘the flesh’) phases of inquiry. This
eclecticism has become a hallmark of contemporary film phenomenology.
The latter not only draws on Merleau-Ponty but it often includes Deleuzian
and occasionally cognitivist elements. For the most part, however, it has
been shaped by the rise of ‘affect theory’ and Merleau-Pontian theories of
embodiment (e.g. feminist phenomenology) as applied to spectatorship
120 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

(Barker 2009; Chamarette 2012, 2015; Ince 2013, 2017; Laine 2011, 2015;
Lindner 2012; Marks 2000, 2002; Massumi 2015; Pisters 2012; Rutherford
2003, 2011; Shaviro 2010; Stadler 2011; Stephens 2012; Tuck 2011).
Within this eclecticism, which I shall discuss further below, it is worth
noting two critical points. The first is the risk of conflating conventional and
technical senses of ‘phenomenology’: on the one hand, the conventional
sense of ‘phenomenology’ as providing broad, even personalist accounts of
particular subjective experiential processes (describing the ‘phenomenology’
of our experience of watching a horror movie, for example). On the other,
the more technical sense of ‘phenomenology’ as a thick description,
hermeneutic interpretation and formal analysis of particular structural or
essential aspects of consciousness, of embodied perception or of our shared
‘being-in-the-world’ (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger) (see Hanich and
Ferencz-Flatz 2016). One can do the former without the latter (e.g. in analytic
aesthetics) but also do the latter without engaging much in the former (in
many ‘affect theory’ approaches to cinema, e.g. Shaviro 2010). This eclectic
approach also runs the risk of offering first-person experiential ‘evidence’ as
though this would suffice for phenomenological demonstration. One
recurring complaint concerns the ‘personalist’ or ‘impressionistic’ tendencies
of many phenomenological accounts of cinema, where the author’s personal
experience is taken as providing phenomenological ‘evidence’ justifying
broader theoretical claims.3 As Eugenie Brinkema observes, ‘[h]owever
thrilling it may be to write and even read the personal accounts of any
theorist’s tremulous pleasures and shudderings, it is a signature of work on
affectivity that must be resisted, for it tells us far more about being affected
than about affects’ (Brinkema 2014: 32).
It is worth recalling, however, that ‘classical’ phenomenology always
aimed at invariant, universal features of consciousness; in recent film
phenomenology, by contrast, there is typically a particularist focus on ‘the
body’, affect, emotion, spectatorship, interpretation, evaluation, coupled with
‘symptomatic’ readings of film as reflecting these ‘particularist’ theoretical
emphases (Ferencz-Flatz and Hanich 2016). Whatever its theoretical
provenance, however, film phenomenology has always emphasised the
importance of a descriptive account of situated but also differentiated
experience of embodied spectators always already embedded within a
meaningful social and historical world. It also focuses on corporeal, affective,
aesthetic and ‘ethical’ aspects of film experience from a ‘bottom-up’ rather
than ‘top-down’ point of view and does so with an acknowledgment of the
role of social situatedness or active embeddedness within a pre-interpreted
 Adventures in Phenomenology 121

world. The application of theoretical models, moreover, is typically

subordinated to experiential description and interpretation, coupled with
critical analysis and reflective evaluation of this experience.
The other related difficulty is the tendency to cite theoretical descriptions or
accounts of experience as though this were to do phenomenology per se.
Quoting Merleau-Ponty on perception or ‘the flesh’ and applying this theoretical
interpretation to a film scene, however, is not the same thing as providing a
thick phenomenological description or interpretative analysis of cinematic
experience more generally. As remarked, contemporary film phenomenology
is defined by diverse (and sometimes inconsistent) strands of modern thought:
Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, Heidegger; (Deleuzian) affect theory; theories of
corporeality, embodied spectatorship; aesthetics of ‘touch’ (hapticity); gender
and queer theories, intersectional approaches, ‘new materialisms’ and so on
(Chamarette 2012, 2015; Laine 2011; Rutherford 2011; Walton 2016).4
Whatever the particular theoretical or practical commitments, however, it is
worth noting that ‘applying’ a pre-existing theory or assumed concepts to an
example or case study is not the same as practicing phenomenology in the
proper sense. If nothing else, phenomenology maintains a commitment to
some kind of theoretical ‘bracketing’ or suspension of presupposed theoretical
concepts or frameworks in order to deal descriptively with phenomena or ‘the
things themselves’, while remaining mindful of the partial and contextual (i.e.
hermeneutic) conditions of possibility defining any kind of phenomenological
investigation. At the same time, it is possible to find original theoretical
elaboration of concepts accounting for cinematic experience in ways that are
more than merely descriptive and which enable us to not only capture and
comprehend but to critically reflect upon and transform our ‘natural attitude’
towards cinematic spectatorship.

The Phenomenological Turn:

Sobchack’s Contribution
It is hard to overestimate the scope and impact of Vivian Sobchack’s
contribution to philosophical film theory. Published in 1992, her
groundbreaking study, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film
Experience, introduced and developed a complex phenomenological account
of spectatorial experience. As Ferencz-Flatz and Hanich point out, moreover,
it extended phenomenological inquiry to the domain of cinematic experience
122 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

in ways that were original and productive (notably, the innovative idea
of a ‘film body’). Sobchack’s turn to phenomenology – an eclectic combination
of Husserlian intentionality coupled with Merleau-Ponty’s account of
embodied perception, the reversibility of perception and expression, and
his later chiasmatic account of the intertwining of body and world via the
‘flesh’ – is motivated by a dissatisfaction with Lacanian psychoanalytic
theories of subjectivity and Marxist-structuralist theories of the ‘apparatus’.5
The latter theories constituted an imposing paradigm, still regnant in the
early 1990s, encompassing ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ poles of cinematic
experience, construed as the always already manipulated and constructed
effect of unconscious desire, processes of ideological interpellation, and
power effects of ideological (state) apparatuses. Against the reifying effects
of this ‘Grand Theory’ model, Sobchack called for a return to cinematic
experience starting from the phenomenologically grounded claim that
cinema, ‘more than any other art of human communication’, as she observes,
‘makes itself sensuously and sensibly manifest as the expression of experience
by experience (Sobchack 1992: 3). Echoing accounts of consciousness found
in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, Sobchack stresses the inherently reversible or
relationally ‘doubled’ character of cinema. She articulates moving images as
‘viewing views/viewed views’ – that is, as both the expression of perception
and the perception of expression, as both seeing and seen, hearing and heard
– which is to say, cinema as reflecting the reflexive relationality of
consciousness itself, enfolding viewer and film in a relationally reversible
and reflexive whole. Instead of assuming a subject-object representational
model of cinematic experience – a viewing subject positioned in relation
to a detached world of represented objects – Sobchack proposes an
intertwining of embodied mind and sensuously revealed cinematic world;
a phenomenologically grounded model that articulates the reversible,
relational and reflexive character of cinematic experience as a holistic
phenomenon. Echoing a minor tradition of thinkers who have explored the
film/mind parallel, Sobchack develops an original phenomenological model
of cinematic experience that encompasses the simultaneous perception and
expression of a moving image world in relation to an embodied and
sensuously engaged viewer. What is more daring and original in her account,
however, is to take the further step of suspending the distinction between
viewer and film, replacing this implicitly dualistic model with a
phenomenological reversible account of the embodied perception and
cinematic body that together enfold the viewer in a synaesthetic and
embodied form of immersive engagement.
 Adventures in Phenomenology 123

Sobchack on Cinema as ‘Viewing

Views/Viewed Views’
Why turn to Merleau-Ponty for a phenomenology of film experience? For
Sobchack the answer is twofold: 1) Merleau Ponty’s emphasis on the ‘primacy
of perception’, namely, that our cognitive experience is grounded in our
perceptual engagement with the world. And 2) the ‘reversibility’ between
perception and expression, subject and object – what the later Merleau-
Ponty called ‘the flesh’, the relational ‘intertwining’ (or ‘chiasm’) of mind and
world, our embodied experience of the sensuous texture of a meaningful
world. For Merleau-Ponty, our perceptual engagement with the world
provides the foundation for understanding and knowledge, including
abstract theorisation. This means that we should begin phenomenology by
describing our embodied perceptual experience, the intertwining of mind
and world, in order restore the ‘engaged knower’ – or embodied viewer – to
our ways of theorising cinematic experience. In this respect, art, and
especially cinema, has a privileged role in revealing how embodied mind
and sensuous world have a reversible relationship. As Merleau-Ponty remarks
in ‘Film and the New Psychology’, film is ‘peculiarly suited to make manifest
the union of mind and body, mind and world, and the expression of one in
the other’ (1964: 58). Indeed, film seems to embody, according to Sobchack,
this ‘reversibility’ between perception and expression. It offers a reversible or
‘doubled’ view, spanning ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ poles, or what she calls a
‘viewing view’ and ‘viewed view’ combining perception and expression: ‘A
film is an act of seeing that makes itself seen, an act of hearing that makes
itself heard, an act of . . . movement that makes itself . . . understood’
(Sobchack 1992: 3–4).
Sobchack takes this claim as her phenomenological starting point,
focusing on the ‘lived-body’ as the origin of cinematic modes of signification.
She underlines the way film experience (the reversibility of perception and
expression) is grounded in ‘lived-body experience’: ‘the activity of embodied
consciousness realising itself in the world and with others as both visual and
visible, as both sense-making and sensible’ (Sobchack 1992: 7). Her aim,
more specifically, is to articulate, in phenomenological terms, the general
structures of cinematic signification that ‘always emerge particularly and
contingently as the entailment of the lived-body and the world in cinematic
acts of perception and expression’ (Sobchack 1992: 8). This is a
phenomenology of film experience, however, that not only aims to describe
124 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

and analyse our subjective embodied engagement with film but also
articulates the ‘reversible’ or doubly perceptual-expressive character of
moving images. We can grasp the latter as ‘viewing views’ and ‘viewed views’
that relate embodied viewer and film-world in a ‘chiasmatic’ or intertwined
manner.
So what is our phenomenological experience of cinema? For Sobchack, it
is a sensuous perception of an image-world: a perception that is also a sense-
making; a sensing that is also a ‘making sense of ’ or understanding of what we
perceive visually and aurally, but in ways that also engage our other senses
synaesthetically (for example, touch). What are we ‘making sense of ’ in film?
From a phenomenological perspective, the images and sounds we encounter
compose an image-world as viewed or revealed from (and even with) a
particular point of view; the film experience is an immersive involvement in
a meaningful world that addresses us as ‘the expressed perception of an
anonymous, yet present, “other” ’ (Sobchack 1992: 9). Again, Sobchack
emphasises the point that viewer and film form a whole; I view the image-
world of the film, where this image-world is also the ‘perceived-expressed’ of
an anonymous ‘other’, a ‘subject-world’ that is the source of the ‘viewing
views’ that we perceive.
As we shall see, Sobchack will take a further (indeed controversial) step in
positing the film as perceiving-expressing itself in ways that correspond to our
spectatorial embodied perception of the film-world. Here we encounter a well-
known distinction that is given a decidedly phenomenological slant: that
between the eye/I and the camera (or better the film, since we do not actually see
a camera in (most) narrative films): what I (my eyes) see of the film and what the
camera/film ‘sees’ or shows us in the film. We recognise here a phenomenological
version of the problem of cinematic narrators that I discussed in Chapter 3,
now articulated in relation to the film/world (rather than a narrator or narrative
point of view) as ‘source’ of the intentionality (or expressive directedness) of the
moving images we see. Sobchack emphasises, in this context, how there is a
‘double seeing’ that occurs in film experience: 1) what I see in the film images, or
what is represented, and 2) what the film shows, or what is presented or ‘seen’ by
it in showing certain images in certain ways to us. My embodied seeing (1) and
what is ‘seen’ by the film (2) enter into a reversible exchange while remaining
distinct. Sobchack articulates this relational intertwining of viewer and film via
the notion of the ‘viewing view/viewed view’ but also, as I discuss presently, via
the idea of a ‘film body’ (presumably as analogous to Merleau-Ponty’s use of the
concept of ‘flesh’ to describe the reversible relationality between embodied
mind and sensuous world).
 Adventures in Phenomenology 125

In the cinematic experience, ‘we can see the seeing as well as the seen,
hear the hearing as well as the heard, and feel the movement as well as see
the moved’ (Sobchack 1992: 10). At the risk of personification, we can
describe this reversibility or exchange between my perception and the film’s
perception as the ‘double seeing’ of film: the interplay between my seeing and
what is seen by the film. This ‘double seeing’ points to the shared ‘language’ of
perception common to filmmaker, film and viewer. In this way, Sobchack
argues that our perception of film parallels our perception of the world.
There is a primordial unity between perception (the world as having sense)
and expression (the way it appears as meaningful to us). Film theory forgets
this unified experience of existence, fragmenting it into a theory of the image
and an analysis of meaning or signification. It assumes, but passes over, the
pre-theoretical lived experience of cinema – its doubled vision as both
perceptual-expressive – that Sobchack’s ‘phenomenology of film experience’
attempts to describe and articulate in a unified or holistic manner.
From an historical perspective, film theory, according to Sobchack, has
tended to follow one of three approaches, defined by the familiar metaphors
of the picture frame, the window and the mirror (1992: 14 ff.). These
correspond to the well-known accounts of realism (window), expressionism
or formalism (the frame) and the modern reflexive film (the mirror), which
we could take as the ‘synthesis’ of these opposing poles, a ‘self-conscious’
reflection of (realist) perception and (significant) expression. The prevailing
assumption of these ways of theorising film, however, is that we are dealing
with the image as a static object: a rectangular ‘framed’ view related to an
observing subject viewing a ‘detached display’ (to use Carroll’s term). This
relationship is subsequently theorised either in terms of cinematic perception
(realism), or in terms of cinematic expression (expressionism/formalism, i.e.
meaning-making).6 Film theorists have therefore tried to ‘synthesise’ these
two approaches, which has often resulted in conflating perception and
expression: the distinction between them is collapsed and their reversibility
ignored in ways that treat the viewing experience as detached and ‘reflective’
rather than embodied and immersive. Film theory, moreover, has tended to
enshrine this approach by emphasising and promoting reflective theories
that analysed the psychological and ideological mechanisms ‘capturing’
viewing subjects’ consciousness and thereby manipulating the meanings
that might be derived from the film (in psychoanalytic, linguistic/semiotic
and neo-Marxist approaches).
The phenomenological character of the viewing experience played little role
in such accounts. More recently, perceptual realism has been strongly
126 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

emphasised again in cognitivist film theory. The latter has superseded

psychoanalytic and semiotic theories of ideological analysis in favour of
empirical psychology and cognitive science, but has often done so at the
expense of phenomenological description and hermeneutic analysis. Indeed,
all of these approaches (psychoanalytic, semiotic analysis, cognitive theory)
presume that we are dealing with a static object (the image) that is represented
for an observing subject, but in doing so they ignore or downplay the
phenomenological character and basis of our lived experience of moving images.

Film Body
Having outlined Sobchack’s phenomenological account of the embodied
experience of cinema and her critique of prevailing approaches in film
theory, I turn to the more provocative dimension of her work, the fascinating
but contentious notion of the ‘film body’. Although contemporary film
phenomenologists do not quote Sobchack’s book in detail, the idea of the
‘film body’ has had an extraordinarily productive reception. Indeed, it has
inspired recent accounts of the tactile or haptic quality of cinematic
experience, focusing on affect in relation to the theorisation of the cutaneous
character of the film body or even its dermic, musculoskeletal and visceral
dimensions (see Barker 2009; Laine 2011, 2015; Marks 2000, 2002).7 So what
is the film body? Sobchack insists that it is not metaphorical but real: it refers
to the functional qualities of a perceiving-expressive cinematic ‘body’ that
includes both perceptual-expressive and material-technical aspects. Rather
than talk of the ‘film’ or ‘camera’ as having expressive power and agential
capacities, we can talk of the ‘film’s body’ as intertwined with that of the
embodied viewer, where both viewer and film are taken to be animated by,
and responsive to, a cinematic intentionality, and where the notion of ‘body’
at issue is both functionalist and non-anthropomorphic.8 Just as we can
experience cinematic movement, compositional style and mise-en-scène as
expressive of a (perceptual) point of view, so too we can take the film’s body
– encompassing both the material-technical dimension of the ‘camera’ and
the perceptual-expressive dimension of moving images – as the source and
agential focus of the images we experience when immersively engaged with
a film-world.
What is novel but also controversial is Sobchack’s claim that this
functional and material-technical account is also expressive of an intentional
consciousness; that the film’s body is a way of describing a cinematic ‘body-
 Adventures in Phenomenology 127

subject’ whose experiences become intertwined with ours when we watch a

film. As she writes:
Not only was the film seen to implicate an objective (if generally invisible)
body – an instrumentality through which the visible behaviour of an intending
consciousness is expressed; it was seen also to implicate a visual body-subject,
an agent who autonomously, introceptively, and visibly perceives the visual
behaviour of others . . . The film is not, therefore, merely an object for
perception and expression; it is also the subject of perception and expression.
Sobchack 1992: 167

Here again Sobchack is referring to moving images as deriving from,

and expressing, an ‘embodied’ agential point of view ascribed neither to a
character, narrator or ‘camera’/director, but rather to the ensemble of
relations – perceptual, expressive, technical and embodied – defining, so to
speak, the film-spectator assemblage.
As remarked, we recognise here a similar issue that arose in the context of
cinematic narration, where successive models of explicit narrator, implied
narrator and ‘film itself ’ as expressing an impersonal narrative point of view
were explored (see Chapter 3). Sobchack’s account differs in attributing a
functional material-technical body and perceptual-expressive intentionality
to the ‘film itself ’ such that it can be itself regarded as a materially embodied
‘quasi-subject’. The film itself, in short, is ‘the intentional “terminus” of an
embodied and seeing subject, as an intentional activity irreducibly correlated
with an intentional object’ (Sobchack 1992: 204). In other words, we can
describe film or cinema as a relational structural whole that links the
embodied perceiving viewer with a perceptual-expressive film-world via
the technical mediation of the cinematic apparatus. Why not simply describe
the film itself as the presentation of a ‘narrative perspective’ or, more
conventionally, as the expression of the director/filmmakers’ vision?
Sobchack’s response is to stress, on phenomenological grounds, that we do
not actually perceive any such ‘narrator’ or camera or the director/filmmaker
(unless they appear as ‘characters’ or personages within the film), hence we
should not posit them as part of the ensemble of ‘functional’ relations
constituting film’s body. Rather, we should ‘bracket’ these presuppositions and
focus on the quasi-independent world of the film as integrating the viewer
into a relational whole. Within the latter, moving images are regarded as both
viewing views (perception) and viewed views (expression) that together
constitute a correlational structural whole (the ‘film body’).
From this point of view, the primary function of the technological aspect
of the film’s body is ‘to enable acts of introceptive perception and their
128 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

expression’; that is, to animate embodied perception and existential

expression or lived meaning primarily through movement, whether
expressed within, between or across moving images (Sobchack 1992: 205–
206). Sobchack sides here with those other philosophers of film who take the
movement in moving images to be real movement – from a phenomenological
point of view – despite the ‘artificial’ or illusory manner by which such
images are mechanically or technically produced (Sobchack 1992: 207–208).
She also aligns her phenomenological account with those philosophers who
have sought to articulate the nature of the film/mind analogy, albeit
understood here in the sense of the film body’s embodied perception and
imagination (Sobchack 1992: 209 ff.), where zooms and tracking shots are
taken to be expressive of forms of perceptual attention, motility and
awareness.9 Once again, however, the emphasis falls on the ‘bodily’ aspect of
this experientially immersive mode of engagement. Instead of a ‘film-world’
being selectively shown or revealed from an impersonal narrative point of
view, we have an embodied ‘film-subject’ (implicitly embedded within a
film-world) whose perceptual-expressive intentionality animates and
‘directs’ (in both ordinary and technical senses) the sense, order, style and
meaning of the images we experience together.
How might such an approach work in practice? Sobchack’s one extended
case study is a long and complex discussion of the film-noir crime drama,
The Lady in the Lake (Montgomery 1946), which, as Sobchack remarks, ‘has
become the paradigm for posing the hermeneutic problem of the film’s body’
(1992: 230). The film’s (infamous) attempt to present the narrative entirely
from the embodied viewpoint of the protagonist Philip Marlowe (Robert
Montgomerey), is often cited as an example demonstrating the ‘impossibility’
of presenting a direct embodied point of view perspective in cinema (where
traditional point of view shots are generally treated as an imaginative
approximation). The famous ‘failure’ of the experiment to present an
embodied subjective point of view only serves to underline the artefactual,
non-veridical character of cinematic point of view (namely, that it involves
approximated forms of perceptual and cognitive perspective-taking that at
the same time involve imaginative projection and fictional construction).
Sobchack’s claim is that the anomalous character of the film is due to its
offering a direct presentation of the perceptual activities and expressive
qualities of the film body that are attributed to a single individual with his
own embodied consciousness or singular point of view. At the same time,
this individual (Philip Marlowe) is presented as having a dominant
perceptual perspective on the world, but one in which the simultaneous
 Adventures in Phenomenology 129

‘objective’ or object-like character of his embodiment (how one appears

from the viewpoint of the Other) is presented only partially and indirectly
(e.g., through mirror reflection shots). The confusion here between the film
body and the body of a single human protagonist is at the core of the
‘hermeneutic problem’ of the film: whose or what perspective are we seeing,
when not all that we see in a film-world can be attributed to one character
alone? Consider the frustrating viewing experience of trundling along with
the camera/Marlowe as he ‘walks’ into an office, addresses a secretary, walks
to another door, reads the sign, turns the knob, enters the office of a crime
story editor. We see her face as he talks with her, as she lights a cigarette, and
then follow his gaze as he visually tracks the secretary who enters then leaves
the office, gazing back at him in turn, as he then continues his conversation
with the editor, who wryly comments on his wandering attention – all in one
continuous long take. For Sobchack, this conflation of film body and
protagonist’s body is the fundamental cause of the ‘strange discomfort,
alienation, and disbelief experienced by the film’s spectator’ (1992: 231). The
incongruencies evident in one’s experience of The Lady in the Lake, which
have prompted the ire of many critics (Sobchack cites Bordwell, Amengual,
Branigan and Mitry, among others), point to the disjunction between human
perceptual experience and cinematic perceptual expression, or between our
bodies and the film body. In this respect, the film offers a ‘negative’ case study
in distinguishing the film body from human embodied perception, and the
manner in which the intelligibility of cinematic expression differs from
human perceptual experience.10
At the same time, Sobchack’s description of the film body, despite its
apparent differences from human perception, cannot help but be understood
on analogy with human embodied perception, even as it distinguishes itself
from it (what other model could we use?). Moreover, the phenomenological
character of Sobchack’s analyses, which in keeping with phenomenological
method are rooted in the description and analysis of subjective or lived
(human) experience, cannot be readily applied to the ‘experience’ of the film
body except insofar as the latter is experienced, on analogy with, and from the
perspective of, a (human) film spectator. Apart from the ‘impossible’ points of
view readily available in cinema (say, a shot of a spaceship hurtling through
the void), the experientially ‘owned’ and perspectivally ‘positioned’ film-
subject’s ‘perception’ cannot but be rendered through an anthropocentric
frame. Much like Kant’s ‘thing in itself ’ or being/reality as it is independent of
any human perspective, a purely ‘non-human’ perspective on ‘the world’ (itself
only intelligible in human terms, in the ways that Heidegger showed) is an
130 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

intellectual abstraction (hence inextricably related to our capacity for thought)

rather than a phenomenological experience. Much like her example of The
Lady in the Lake, the merging of film body and embodied perception creates
difficulties for Sobchack’s phenomenological model of the cinematic
experience. One major difficulty is that the concept of the ‘film body’ appears
to be imported and imposed on film experience, rather than being derived
from describing and analysing the ‘film’s own experience’ in phenomenological
terms, which would be an impossibility.11 Phenomenological method requires
a bracketing of theoretical abstractions and conceptual presuppositions, in
order to allow the phenomena and their underlying structures to be described,
interpreted and analysed. Applying a theoretical concept – or as I suggest
below, a productive heuristic – to the phenomenological experience of cinema
is to violate one of the fundamental precepts of the phenomenological
method. Indeed, one could apply the whole problematic of the Other here to
the putative ‘film-subject’, whose perception or experiential ‘point of view’
cannot but help be thought from the ‘egoistic’ perspective (in the Husserlian
sense) of a human subject.12

Frampton’s ‘Filmind’
Daniel Frampton’s (2006) concept of the ‘filmind’ extends but also inverts
Sobchack’s emphasis on the ‘film-body’, adapting elements of her
phenomenological approach to the cinematic experience but also criticising
her phenomenological model as too anthropocentric. On the one hand,
Frampton models the cinematic thinking expressed by the film – and described
in non-technical terminology attributed to the film – as though it belonged to
a quasi-human (embodied) subject. On the other, Frampton resists any such
attribution of ‘anthropocentric’ thinking and takes the radical step of doing
away with the functional-material aspect of Sobchack’s ‘film-body’ with its
phenomenological grounding in the lived (embodied) experience of the
spectator. Instead, he posits a ‘filmind’ – an intending mind that organises its
thought-images into a coherent film-world – as both source and object of the
filmgoer’s immersive aesthetic experience of the film13 (an account that is
curiously neglectful of the role of imagination in cinematic engagement). At
the same time, Frampton’s approach draws on the history of philosophical
reflections on film. Figures both well-known (like Eisenstein, Cavell, Deleuze)
and obscure (like the ‘mysterious early French theorist Yhcam’ (Frampton
2006: 3)) are assembled in a novel genealogy of film-philosophy, focusing on
 Adventures in Phenomenology 131

the various attempts to draw parallels between, or sometimes even equate, film
and thinking. As Frampton points out, from its inception film has been
compared with the mind, ‘whether through analogy with human perception,
dreams or the subconscious’ (2006: 15). Film has been understood, for example,
as ‘a recording of the brain (Edward Small, Parker Tyler), a visualisation of our
thoughts and memories (Henri Bergson, Germaine Dulac, Pierre Quesnoy),
or similar in form to our subconscious (Emile Vuillermoz, Ricciotto Canudo)’
(2006: 16). Others have explored how film depicts the subjectivity of characters’
thoughts (Antonin Artaud, Bruce Kawin), whether film is a ‘subjective’ or
‘objective’ medium (Hugo Münsterberg), or how film might in fact reveal a
unique form of cinematic thought (Jean Epstein, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, Béla
Balázs) (Frampton 2006: 16).
While Frampton draws inspiration from these approaches, he criticises
the fundamental anthropomorphism of the film-mind parallel. Film-
thinking, he argues, is modelled on human thought (which restricts what
can be shown by means of image, sound and narrative), while film images
and image sequences are modelled on human perception (a questionable
parallel, since film editing and standard tracking shots, midshots or closeups,
for example, do not correspond with bodily locomotive or visual saccadic
movements). Instead, Frampton proposes, we should consider whether film
has its own unique kind of thinking, which is poetic, affective and intuitive
but also expressive of an ‘organic intelligence’. This would be a ‘film thinking’
that provides, he claims, a more appropriate form of phenomenological
description that better captures our lived experience of cinema. Several
questions arise at this point. If not on analogy with human thought, on what
is film-thinking modelled? What is this thinking about? Who or what is
doing the thinking?
Frampton’s responses to these questions are striking and original. Film-
thinking is thinking concerning a film-world: a virtual cinematic reality with
its own rules and consistency. Film does not simply reproduce reality, as per
representationalist theories; rather, Frampton claims, film constitutes ‘its own
intentions and creativities. Cinema is the projection, screening, showing, of
thoughts of the real’ (2006: 5). How to conceptualise the composition of film?
Frampton’s response is that we should posit the viewed film-world as the
creation of a filmind that is the (non-human) intending agency animating,
deciding and organising the film’s various cinematic, aesthetic and dramatic
elements. The ‘source’ of the film’s sounds and images is no longer an auteur,
or the apparatus, or a putative grand imagier (George Wilson) but rather the
intending filmind. Why not posit the director/filmmaker as source of the
132 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

film’s images, or else construe them as providing impersonal narrative

perspectives or points of view? The phenomenological answer, as with
Sobchack, is that this is to impose an external theoretical construction on the
immersive experience of film, and furthermore, this entrenches the
‘anthropocentric’ model of conceptualising film experience that privileges
human perception and experience in ways that blind us to the novel experience
of cinema. Instead of narratological models (which cannot account for the
creation of film-worlds) or phenomenological approaches (which tend to
model film too strictly in terms of human perception), Frampton’s filmosophy
posits a filmind as part of ‘an organic philosophy of film’ (2006: 7).
Experientially open filmgoers – rather than passive ‘spectators’, deaf ‘viewers’
or overly literary ‘readers’ – are thus encouraged to take up the filmosophical
perspective in order to better articulate their multifarious experiences of film.
As remarked, Frampton draws on Sobchack’s phenomenological approach,
but is also inspired by Deleuze’s provocative reflections on cinema and
thought; not only in the sense that there can be cinematic ‘thought-images’ (as
in Hitchcock’s work) but also that cinema – especially in experimental and
modernist film – is capable of enacting a ‘shock to thought’, a provocation to
think. He also takes a strongly critical stance on prevailing analytic-cognitivist
and narrativist approaches to cinema. The former, Frampton argues, is too
rationalistic and thus loses sight of the aesthetic dimensions and broader
cultural point of film; the latter is too reductivist as well as insensitive to the
cinema’s visual, aural and temporal aspects. Such a critique creates the
expectation that Frampton’s own reflections on particular films will showcase
the aesthetic acumen and philosophical cogency of his filmosophical approach.
Because of its avoidance of technicist and hermeneutic discourse, however,
Frampton’s filmosophical interpretation ends up being impressionistic and
quasi-formalistic, offering brief descriptive accounts that eschew narrative
content or stylistic analyses.14 As we shall see, phenomenological approaches
thereby run the risk of offering formalist and impressionistic, overly
subjectivised or personified accounts (which attribute affect to the film
itself).15
In the case of both Frampton and Sobchack, however, we can ask at what
point phenomenological description gives way to theoretical imposition. To
describe, as Sobchack does, the experiential ensemble composed by the
spectator and moving images nexus as a ‘film-body’ is to provide a rich and
illuminating theoretical heuristic that can help us conceptualise and understand
the phenomenological character of spectatorial experience. That is not the
same thing, however, as positing, on phenomenological grounds, that there
 Adventures in Phenomenology 133

really is a film-body or cinematic ‘body-subject’ whose experiential perception

and agential intentionality is actually animating and giving meaning to the
film. As remarked, both Sobchack and Frampton adopt a phenomenological
descriptive-interpretative approach to conceptualising cinematic experience;
at the same time, they apply heuristic concepts or theoretical frameworks (the
concept of the ‘film body’ or theses concerning cinema and thought) to these
experiences, which risks violating the phenomenological injunction to bracket
theoretical presuppositions and focus on descriptive analyses and evaluative
interpretation. This brings us to the key objections that critics have traditionally
raised against phenomenological approaches, and the ways in which we might
critically respond to such critiques in order to defend and refine how we should
understand film-phenomenology and put it into practice.

Phenomenology: Two Problems of

Subjectivism
The ‘classic’ objection to or difficulty facing phenomenological approaches,
whether in pure or applied terms, is that of subjectivism: the privileging of and
focus on first-person perspectives inevitably raises the question of the warrant
or justification of the theoretical claims made on the basis of a descriptive
account of such experience. It also raises questions about how far
phenomenological approaches can acknowledge the role of contextual (social,
cultural and historical) factors. Phenomenological approaches are essentially
descriptive but include both interpretation and analysis of subjective
phenomena, aiming to reveal their shared structures and communicable
meanings. This suggests that phenomenology is particularly suited to
illuminating our aesthetic experience of film but not well suited to providing
explanatory accounts of the causal processes underlying such experience.
Two related issues are raised as criticisms of phenomenological approaches
to cinematic experience. The first is the charge of aesthetic subjectivism:
offering a personal, first-person subjective (aesthetic) response as providing
evidence supporting interpretative or even theoretical claims. We do of course
experience cinema from a first-person perspective but one’s own idiosyncratic
responses do not provide, of themselves, adequate evidence supporting
stronger theoretical claims (and only a moderate basis for aesthetic claims).
The second is epistemic subjectivism: the use of anecdotal (‘just so’/ad hoc)
evidence to support theoretical claims, without offering adequate conceptual
134 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

argumentation or theoretical justification. In some cases, this can be

compounded by a dogmatic reliance on presupposed theoretical or conceptual
frameworks, which clearly violates, as remarked, one of the cardinal precepts
of phenomenological inquiry (encapsulated in Husserl’s motto, ‘to the things
themselves!’). Because phenomenology is focused on a descriptive account of
subjectivity, it inevitably courts the risk of subjectivism, whether aesthetic or
epistemic, which is why phenomenologists have insisted on the anchoring of
phenomenology in shared ‘universal’ structures or features of human
consciousness or ‘being-in-the-world’. Phenomenological descriptive theory
provides the basis for all sorts of theorisation but does not constitute an
explanatory theoretical account in its own right.
Indeed, as a corollary to these twin charges of subjectivism, there is the
related risk of reverting to speculative theory, which arises when one makes
‘theoretical’ claims based solely on phenomenological evidence. As remarked,
the use of heuristics and conceptual-metaphorical models (‘cinema as brain’,
‘skin of the film’, the ‘filmind’) can guide theoretical practice in an illuminating
way; but such practices do not themselves constitute theoretical claims in
the strong sense supported by empirical evidence. Rather, the heuristic use
of guiding metaphors/concepts for the purpose of generating, developing
and transforming theoretical problems and debates soon becomes
speculative and ungrounded if taken as part of a theoretical model with
explanatory aims.

Two Responses to Subjectivism:

Projection and Distribution
Film theorists influenced by phenomenology implicitly recognise the
problem of subjectivism, but generally reject the classical phenomenological
response of focusing on the disclosure of shared ‘structures of consciousness’
(Husserl) or ‘existential structures’ of Dasein or being-in-the-world
(Heidegger). Instead, alternative strategies have emerged in order to deal
with this problem, what we could call the projection and distribution
responses. We can ‘desubjectify’ affects – lived bodily responses to the
affordances of our world – by projecting them onto non-human objects,
events or environmental states of affairs. Deleuzian affect theory, for example,
drawing on a distinctive conception of affect deriving from Spinoza, Bergson
and Nietzsche – where affect is defined impersonally in relation to bodily
 Adventures in Phenomenology 135

capacities to affect and be affected, the differential and relational variation of

bodily intensities – projects affect beyond the ‘subjective’ sphere such that
objects, landscapes and even nature itself can be described as expressing
‘affect’ in this corporeal-relational sense (see Boljkovac 2013; Del Rio 2008;
Shaviro 2010).
In a related manner, we can also distribute these affective states across a
plurality of related objects, creating a ‘distributed’ or pluralised affective state
encompassing a relationally defined composite body. Accordingly, shared
affects are no longer primarily ‘subjective’ but dispersed or distributed across
a range of different bodies forming a relational composite whole. On this
account, affects are no longer defined primarily in relation to the experiencing
human subject but as ‘desubjectified’, free-floating intensities attributable to,
or expressed by, the ‘assemblages’ formed by human and non-human bodies,
artefacts, things and objects, natural environments and so on (Massumi
2015; Shaviro 2010). They can even be attributed to, and expressed by, film
form itself, independently of any putative anchoring of affects in a ‘body’,
whether corporeal or ‘filmic’ (Brinkema 2014). This projective-distributive
approach attributes affective states encompassing a plurality of related
objects and bodies, creating ‘shared’ affects that are distributed across
different bodies, and escaping subjectivism via heterogeneous, distributed
forms of affective expression.
Recent versions of this approach echo the idea of distributed cognition;
they posit an embodied response to moving images projected/distributed so
as to incorporate the film itself, deploying, for example, the ideas of a ‘film
body’, ‘filmind’, ‘skin of the film’ or disembodied affects constituted by and
expressed as cinematic form (Brinkema 2014; Del Rio 2008, 2016; Frampton
2006; Marks 2000, 2002). Brinkema (2014), for example, goes further than
Sobchack’s ‘film-body’, Marks’ ‘skin of the film’ or Barker’s ‘tactile eye’, and
does away with the link between affects and the (human) body altogether.
Rather, she posits affect as the self-referential expression of form that is
attributed to the ‘film itself ’, understood as a configuration of textual form,
rather than being attributable to any embodied viewing subject or putative
filmic body. In a remarkably bold claim, she posits that affects just are
disembodied, non-subjective, self-referential expressive forms:
Affect, as I theorize it here, has fully shed the subject, but my argument goes
a step further and also loses for affects the body and bodies. This book regards
any individual affect as a self-folding exteriority that manifests in, as, and
with textual form.
Brinkema 2014: 25
136 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

The result, however, is a conflation of affect as a human dispositional

response and affect as an expressive quality of works of art. Or, to use Carl
Plantinga’s (2012) terminology, it risks blurring the distinction between
human moods and art moods, which are distinct but complementary ways
of understanding affect and mood in cinema (the expressive qualities of the
film-world can be described as having a certain mood or affective quality,
which is distinct from, but complements, the affective states of characters).
In Brinkema’s radically ‘autonomous’ conception of affect, however, human
moods or subjective affective states are attributed to the images or formal-
compositional structures of the film itself. The result is an extreme projection
and automisation of affect, now construed not only as ‘textual form’ but as
intentional quasi-subject: ‘Thus, it is not a knee-weakened subject who
grieves but an undialectical image through which the dimension of grief
moves as something that is painful for form’ (Brinkema 2014: 93). As
Dominic Lash asks, what does it mean to say that a sequence is ‘painful for
form’? (2018: 2) We could take this as a metaphorical attribution of pain to
the film itself, perhaps as an expression of background mood of grief and
suffering that accentuates the grief of a character or the sympathetic response
of the spectator. As Hanich observes, perhaps Brinkema’s approach echoes,
but also radicalises, that of Susanne Langer, for whom there is ‘a similarity
between the dynamics of an art form and the dynamics of emotional life’
(2015: 114). As Hanich remarks, however, Brinkema’s postulation of affect as
the autonomous expression of form goes much further:

She does not only maintain that filmic structures resemble the structures of
affects – she maintains that specific filmic structures resemble specific affects
like joy or disgust. And even this formulation does not exhaust her
intervention. She even claims that certain filmic structures are these affects.
Or, to put it differently, the way a certain film is structured is an affect itself.
Hanich 2015: 114

Taken at face value, these are contentious claims: affect is no longer

understood as a subjective bodily state, or as an expression of feeling,
atmosphere or mood designed for aesthetic effect, but rather as the aesthetic
manifestation of (textual) form. On the other hand, we could take this claim
as a productive heuristic, treating ‘affect’ metaphorically and impersonally as
though it were a qualitative aesthetic feature directly manifested via cinematic
(or ‘textual’) form, precisely in order to allow us to reconceptualise affect so
as to emphasise its relationship to the formal aesthetic features of cinema. To
engage in metacinematic ‘pathetic fallacy’ as an intentional use of a productive
 Adventures in Phenomenology 137

heuristic, however, is something quite different from claiming that form itself
has or is an affect (that it ‘grieves’). Much like Frampton, the result is to offer
deconstructivist analyses of film sequences that bracket or suspend narrative
content, character situation and contextual meaning in favour of a radically
formalist and metaphysically speculative account of ‘autonomous’ affects
expressing the (presumed) intentionality/subjectivity/agency of the ‘film
itself ’.16
As critics argue, however, it is not clear what is to be gained by such
speculative and hyperbolic claims, which personify or ‘facialise’ the film
‘prosopopoeiacally’ (via personification); that is, by projecting and attributing
affective states to it in ways that bracket or ignore more obvious forms of
narrative meaning (and subjective spectator responses to the latter). However
suggestive and illuminating these theoretical speculations may be, they are
heuristic forms of theorisation that draw on phenomenological techniques
and suggestive metaphorical models in order to help us rethink how we
conceptualise cinematic experience. They do not constitute, however, either
a ‘phenomenological’ descriptive account of subjective experience (since
they are applying presupposed theoretical ideas) or a theoretical explanatory
account of the processes underlying such experience (since they purport to
revise and reconceptualise such experience), however much theorists may
insist that they do.

Bringing Phenomenology and

Cognitivism Together
A common source of theoretical confusion and misunderstanding in
contemporary philosophy of film concerns the different methodologies that
film phenomenologists and cinematic cognitivists draw upon. We could
roughly describe these as descriptive/experiential versus empirical/explanatory
approaches. The role of heuristic strategies or reasoning protocols, which can
include the use of cognitive shortcuts, illuminating analogies, synthetic
concepts, hypothetical thought experiments or productive metaphors, differ
widely in these two approaches. By theoretical heuristics, I mean exploratory
ideas or theoretical framing perspectives that can enable us to ‘see’ or articulate
a phenomenon more clearly, make theoretical or conceptual connections,
draw productive parallels, test theoretical or empirical claims, including
counterexamples, compare competing perspectives, or develop theories
138 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

creatively and critically. The idea of the mind/brain as an information-

processing device (computer) or of cinema as a phenomenologically articulated
‘film-body’ are two influential theoretical heuristics in philosophical film
theory that have enabled productive inquiry but have also generated certain
theoretical confusions. For every productive connection or insight gained
thanks to a suggestive parallel or analogy, however, there are also misleading
inferences and deceptive disanalogies that we need to take into account in our
philosophical work with film.
This means that we need to be methodologically reflective or self-critical in
our use of theoretical heuristics, being mindful of the temptation to take them
to designate empirical realities or provide theoretical evidence (neither of
which they necessarily do). The mind/brain differs in many ways from a
computer (computers are neither embodied nor socially, culturally and
historically embedded, for example, a point that both phenomenologists and
4E cognitive theorists take seriously). The ‘film-body’, like our own bodies, is
embedded within a relational world articulated through practical engagements
and shaped by shared horizons of meaning. This is an aspect curiously
underplayed in most haptic or ‘embodied’ modes of phenomenological film
theory, which assume a ‘world-poor’ approach to their descriptions of cinematic
engagement, focusing on the subpersonal level of corporeal affective responses
but paying little attention to the dramatic, contextual, and aesthetic features of
a cinematic world – or its narrative events – to which such responses are due.
Both phenomenological and cognitivist approaches use heuristics that
are productive and useful for practices of film theorisation, but they would
also benefit from further critical self-reflection on the methodological and
epistemic benefits and drawbacks of using such devices as ways of
bootstrapping the construction of theories. We should remain mindful of
the methodological need to combine ‘thick’ description of phenomena with
empirical explanatory accounts of the causal processes underlying these
phenomena. It is important to acknowledge the productive role of theoretical
heuristics and heuristic perspectives, but also not to confuse heuristic
approaches or devices with descriptive or explanatory approaches as such.
What this suggests is the need to develop adequate descriptive and
explanatory accounts of cinematic experience if we are to do justice to its
complex character.17 A dialectical approach – identifying limitations or
inadequacies in existing theoretical models and supplementing or correcting
these by way of synthetic theory construction – offers one way to combine
phenomenological and cognitivist approaches in order to better describe
and track, interpret and analyse, conceptualise and explain diverse but
 Adventures in Phenomenology 139

related dimensions of cinematic experience. This would enable us to develop

descriptively rich and empirically grounded explanatory models of the
relevant aesthetic and ethical aspects of cinematic engagement. To do this,
however, would require theoretical reflection on the methodological
characteristics and theoretical specificities of heuristic, descriptive and
explanatory modes of theory. It also demands theoretical vigilance to avoid
conflating levels or types of theoretical inquiry, to avoid theoretical
reductionism, and to avoid the temptations of speculative ‘pseudo-theory’.
What we might call a ‘dialectical synthetic’ approach offers the possibility of
combining ‘thick’ phenomenological description of cinematic works and
aesthetic experience with empirically grounded, cognitivist explanatory
accounts of the causal processes behind such phenomena (see Sinnerbrink
2019c). There is a productive and exciting space of interdisciplinary inquiry
opening up where the attention to subjective experience, aesthetic
engagement and the close analysis of form intersects with theoretical models
of explanation grounded in empirical research. In this way, we can do justice
to both the experiential and aesthetic richness and complexity of cinema
and offer explanatory models that promise to make modest but important
contributions to explaining how these works achieve their powerful aesthetic
and ethical effects.
140
 6
Bande à part:
Deleuze’s Cine-Philosophy

Chapter Outline
Deleuze’s Cine-Philosophy 142
Movement-Image 146
Crisis of the Action-Image 148
Italian Neo-Realism and the French nouvelle vague 149
Beyond the Movement-Image (Italian Neo-Realism) 152
The Time-Image 155
Thought and Cinema 159
Deleuze’s Existential Imperative: Belief in This World 162
‘Two Ages’ of Cinema? 165
Questioning Deleuze’s Cine-Philosophy 168

One important question less addressed in either phenomenological or

cognitivist approaches is why film matters to us. What is at stake in our
aesthetic engagement with film? Is film just a clever cognitive puzzle to
amuse a distracted public? Or a stimulating aesthetic way of thinking about
embodiment? Or a way for philosophers to argue about ethics? Can films
respond to cultural anxieties or existential concerns? Can cinema deal with
philosophical issues such as scepticism and nihilism? These are some of the
deeper questions animating the projects of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley
Cavell, two of the most important and influential of film-philosophers. If
Bordwell and Carroll are the founders of the analytic-cognitivist approach,
Cavell and Deleuze are paragons of the film-philosophy approach.
141
142 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

What they share, beneath superficial differences, is a concern with why

film matters philosophically. Their responses take different but related paths.
For Deleuze, (modern) cinema is a way of inventing reasons ‘to believe in
this world’, a response to the problem of philosophical nihilism via the
invention of new images (like the time-image). For Cavell, film is an implicit
response to epistemic and moral scepticism that enacts a retrieval of the
ordinary, and thus provides an image for what philosophy strives to overcome
but also sometimes struggles to express. To be sure, scepticism and nihilism
differ in certain ways (scepticism about knowledge of reality or the
subjectivity of the Other does not always entail nihilism, whereas nihilism
can encompass not only philosophical critiques of morality but forms of
moralism that remain independent of moral scepticism). Nonetheless,
cinema is philosophical, for Deleuze and Cavell, because of the ways in
which it can respond to the problems of nihilism and scepticism, and the
manner in which it can revalue the ordinary, question our settled beliefs and
foster the creation of new perspectives or modes of existence.
Rather than presenting a detailed philosophical commentary on
Deleuze and Cavell’s respective projects, of which there are many excellent
examples (see Deamer 2016; Rodowick 1997; Rothman and Keane 2000;
Shaw 2019; Wheatley 2019), in the following two chapters I shall explore
their overlapping responses, at once creative and critical, to the related
philosophical and cultural problems of nihilism and scepticism, both of
which concern different dimensions of the crisis of meaning. In particular, I
shall focus on how film can contribute to philosophical thinking, exploring
how Deleuze’s cine-philosophy addresses problems that are both
metaphysical and moral, above all the problem of nihilism and the need for
‘belief in the world’. Deleuze will claim that such problems can be thought
through in cinematic terms, expressed through movement- and time-
images, which thereby offer new ways of rethinking and reanimating the
problems of movement and time, of nihilism and belief, and the relationship
between thought and images.

Deleuze’s Cine-Philosophy
The primary philosophical inspiration behind Deleuze’s Cinema books is the
French vitalist philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson’s metaphysics of life and
of time understood as duration [durée], and his philosophy of matter
(conceived as co-extensive with images) and memory (conceived as
 Deleuze’s Cine-Philosophy 143

accessing different layers of time) provides a metaphysical and conceptual

framework for Deleuze’s cinematic philosophy (or cine-philosophy).1
Deleuze adapts Bergson’s vitalist ‘process metaphysics’ of movement and
time and develops a novel philosophical typology and analysis of cinematic
movement. He also brings to cinema a Peircean semiotics (rather than
Saussurean semiology), an approach that yields a complex typology of
movement-images (and time-images) that compose cinematic narratives as
open-ended wholes.2 This account of cinema applies whether we are dealing
with movement-image narratives governed by a ‘sensory-motor schema’
linking perception, affection and action or with a ‘crystalline’ regime of time-
image narrative, constituted, as I discuss further, through non-localised
links, ‘irrational’ cuts, disparate temporal flows and aberrant movements.
Deleuze adopts three central theses from Bergson’s process metaphysics that
emphasise the primacy of movement (and centrality of time as duration),
the shift from fixed to mobile conceptions of movement in relation to time
and that articulate how cinematic movement-images, when composed into
a whole, simultaneously express a whole which goes beyond them. Let us
consider each briefly in turn.

1) Movement Is Distinct from

the Space Covered
Bergson’s first thesis, according to Deleuze, holds that movement as such is
qualitative, and so cannot be divided up without changing qualitatively
(1986: 1). Space, on the other hand, is quantitative and so can be divided
indefinitely. Space is homogeneous, movement heterogeneous (Deleuze
1986: 1). Contra Zenoian paradoxes of movement, this implies that
movement cannot be recomposed out of individual positions in space or
instants in time; static sections (positions and instants) can only be
synthesised in succession to create an ‘illusory’ movement. This is what
happens in cinema, according to Bergson, which synthesises static images,
passing in rapid succession, in order to generate a ‘false movement’: the
illusionistic impression of movement on screen. However, what we
experience in film, Deleuze claims, is a ‘mobile section of duration’: a
‘movement-image’ that moves in itself, enabling genuine movements to be
captured and extended over time through the cinematic devices of framing,
editing, cutting, montage and so on (1986: 2–3).
144 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

2) Ancient versus Modern Conceptions

of Movement
According to Deleuze/Bergson, there are two ways of composing ‘illusory’
forms of movement (that is, recomposing movement from static instants or
‘poses’).3 For the Greeks, movement was composed via intelligible elements
or eternal Forms; for the moderns, following modern science, movement
refers to generic temporal instants or what Deleuze calls the ‘any-instant-
whatever’ (1986: 3–4). Time is construed as an independent variable, which
allows movement to be measured and quantified. Cinema inherits this
quantitative conception of movement and of time, and so it can therefore be
defined as ‘the system which reproduces movement by relating it to the any-
instant-whatever’ (Deleuze 1989: 6).

3) Movement Expresses a Qualitative

Change in the Whole
According to Bergsonian/Deleuzian process philosophy, what we take to be
temporal instants are only ‘immobile sections’ of movement; movement
itself, on the contrary, is a ‘mobile section’ expressing qualitative change in a
larger Whole (Deleuze 1989: 8). From this holistic perspective, movement is
an expression of qualitative change; it is an expression of what Bergson
famously called duration [durée]. What we take to be static images are ‘frozen’
movements or ‘immobile sections’ of movement, fixed segments of durée
(Deleuze 1989: 8–9). As we shall see, a key distinction comes into play here:
that between mobile sections of duration, which Deleuze calls movement-
images, and direct images of duration (time-images) in which time is no
longer subordinated to movement.
What is the metaphysical background to this account? According to
Bergson, the world perceived through everyday perception is a world
conditioned by habit and the necessity of action: it is a selective field of
perception, oriented towards action, that ‘spatialises’ movement as real change.
The world of natural perception, for Bergson, is organised (but also distorted)
according to our interests and needs: distinct bodies are carved out in
perception, change is projected into spatial figures, and movements between
bodies are represented as quantitative movements between points. Movement,
as a real, dynamic, qualitative process, is transformed into quantitative
distance, the numerical distance between points, which also relies on the idea
of time as a series of abstract static moments – time as an empty form in
 Deleuze’s Cine-Philosophy 145

which abstract processes are supposed to occur. According to Bergson, real

time, however, means duration: the generation of difference and newness via
real qualitative change (where no instant is the same as the next) in which
physical movements express qualitative changes in the Whole. Bergson’s final
metaphysical picture is therefore dualistic; the true world is a world in motion,
in continuous flux, a world of qualities in constant interaction with others:
‘Matter thus resolves itself into numberless vibrations, all linked together in
uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other, and traveling in every
direction like shivers’ (Bergson 1994: 208).
What follows from these Bergsonian theses concerning movement and
time? For Deleuze, Bergson’s metaphysics provides a powerful way of
understanding film’s presentation of movement and time. Bergson’s central
claim – that we erroneously ‘spatialise’ movement and time – is directly
applicable to the cinema. What position does film occupy, given the dualism
between movement and time that Bergson sets up? Does it provide us with
access to real qualitative change, that is, real movement unfolding in duration?
Or does it merely present an abstract spatialisation or ‘reification’ of real
movement? Interestingly, despite his evident interest in the cinema, Bergson
argued that everyday perception is akin to what he called the ‘cinematographic
illusion’: the representation of abstract or illusory movement based on the
recomposition of static moments or poses. This is because cinema, in a
technical or mechanical sense, seems to be doing exactly what the
mathematical representation of movement does: it presents a series of fixed
images freezing a reality that is actually in constant motion, projecting at
regular speed in such a way as to generate the illusion of motion. In this sense
cinema seems to work in the same way as everyday perception: fixed or static
images, linked through empty moments in time, to generate a pragmatically
directed perception of movement oriented towards action.
Does this mean we should accept Bergson’s scepticism towards the
cinema? Not necessarily – such scepticism, as Deleuze points out, actually
runs counter to what Bergson claims in his earlier work Matter and Memory
(published in 1896). Indeed, Deleuze challenges Bergson’s critique of the
way that cinema composes an ‘illusory’ movement out of a series of static
images. Like contemporary cognitivists, Bergson underlines the selective
and interest-driven character of perception; the way our brains select out
cognitively salient objects or features of our environment that are relevant to
our immediate practical ends or goal-directed actions (see Grodal 2009;
Plantinga 2009a). As a vitalist process-philosopher, however, Bergson claims
that the selective nature of perception shows how we thereby distort the
146 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

processual, dynamic character of reality. As for the cinema, Bergson (like

Gaut and Carroll) takes an illusionist view of cinematic movement: since the
impression of movement is generated by the animation of a series of
static images or poses, cinematic images can only reveal an illusory movement
that remains dependent on ‘real’ movement (like of the film strip through
the projector).4 Deleuze, however, in a manner echoing Currie, argues that
this Bergsonian criticism confuses the mechanistic process that generates
movement with the immediate movement perceived in the image.5
Rather than reduce the immanent movement in the image to an
illusory representation, Deleuze argues that the movement-image depicts
movement directly without being reducible to the mechanical process that
generated it.
Despite Bergson’s own critique of cinema as producing a ‘false’
representation of movement, Deleuze argues that Bergson’s conception of
the movement-image – which presents a direct image of movement ‘in itself ’
rather than an indirect representation of it – offers a way to develop an
alternative ontology of moving images (Deleuze 1986: 1–11). The moving
image is not simply a representation of movement but rather a ‘movement-
image’: an image that expresses real movement, which is to say, as qualitative
change occurring in duration. Applying Bergson’s theses on movement to
the cinema yields the following claims: 1) cinema produces movement-
images depicting movement within the image; 2) film expresses movement
between composed images (montage); and 3) this composed series of images
expresses duration across the whole of the film and beyond it (i.e. a change in
the Whole or world-context) (Deleuze 1986: 11). These three Bergsonian
theses on movement provide Deleuze with a conceptual framework for
analysing and classifying cinematic images (namely as varieties of
movement-image and time-image).

Movement-Image
Deleuze’s ontological project, in short, is to define the specificity of cinema
as depicting movement in relation to generic instants (the ‘any-instant-
whatever’), which allow for the measuring of movement against a succession
of equidistant temporal instants (t1, t2, t3, . . .). As we saw, Deleuze follows
Bergson in arguing that movement cannot be deduced from pre-existing
‘transcendental poses’, static positions or privileged moments (1986: 4).
Rather, cinema is a mechanical system of animating images that enables the
 Deleuze’s Cine-Philosophy 147

reproduction of movement ‘as a function of the any-instant-whatever’

(equidistant temporal instants), which are selected and combined in order
‘to create the impression of continuity’ (Deleuze 1986: 5). Once the technical
apparatus of creating movement-images via generic instants is adapted ‘as a
machine of synthesis for purposes of art and entertainment’, we have,
according to Deleuze, the cinema (1986: 6).
More specifically, once an image is related to a ‘static’ point of view – what
Bergson calls a ‘centre of indetermination’ in the image nexus – we have a
perception-image, which can take ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ forms (the
establishing shots that open many films, or the shot-countershot
format depicting dialogue, respectively). Perception, however, is linked with
action, both in the sensory-motor schema of human cognition and in the
image nexus composing narrative film. Once an image is related to a
perception-image and to an encompassing milieu, we have the action-image;
the familiar medium shots, for example, of characters expressing their
perception of a situation through action (like the Mexican standoff scene in
Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) or the famous opening gunfight scene in
Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)).
The link between perception and action, however, is a complex rather
than reflex movement. The ‘gap’ or ‘interval’ between perception and
action – whether in cognition or in narrative film – is filled by affect or
affection (the ways in which our bodies are affected by movement).
This yields the affection-image, which expresses bodily affect or emotion
but also qualities and powers in an ontological sense (as pure singularities).
Affection-images are most familiar as the close-up of the face or of
affectively charged objects, which express affect but also qualities by sensuous
means (the ‘dancing bag’ sequence in Mendes’ American Beauty (1999),
or the bright pool of blood that so fascinates Ricky Fitts [Wes Bentley] in
the same film). Affection-images gain intensity, moreover, when the
perception-action nexus is interrupted, thereby opening up an affective
space for the expression of pure qualitative states or ‘non-subjective’ affects.
For Deleuze, affects are not simply the expression of a subjective feeling or
sensation on the part of a human subject; rather, they express ‘pure qualities’
manifested between subjects, in relation to objects or even via places and
landscapes.
Again following Bergson, Deleuze takes this perception-affection-action
circuit to articulate the basic mechanism of action-driven narrative film. The
latter is governed by the ‘sensory-motor action schema’ (Deleuze 1986: 155
ff.): the linking of perception-, affection- and action-images within an
148 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

encompassing milieu. The action-image is typically associated with realism,

which Deleuze defines via the relationship between a milieu and behaviour: a
milieu that actualises various qualities and powers, and modes of behaviour
expressing individuated responses to this milieu (1986: 141). Realist action-
image cinema is defined by two major forms: the ‘large form’ (Deleuze 1986:
142 ff.), found in genres such as the documentary, the Western, psycho-social
drama, film noir and the historical drama, in which an initial situation (S)
leads to action (A) that modifies the situation (SAS1). And the ‘small form’
(Deleuze 1986: 160 ff.), in which action (A) discloses a partially obscure
situation (S), which leads to new action (ASA1), found in genres such as
melodrama and comedy.

Crisis of the Action-Image

Although it is clearly one of the most recognised theoretical claims
in both Cinema volumes, Deleuze offers not one but three related versions of
the ‘crisis of the action-image’ and its philosophical and ethico-political
implications (call these the aesthetic, historical and ethical versions
of the ‘crisis’).6 The first or ‘aesthetic’ account can be found in the final chapter
of Cinema 1, the conclusion to the overall analysis of the varieties of
movement-image set out in the first volume (Deleuze 1986: 197 ff.).
Deleuze sets out this crisis as an aesthetic, rather than cultural-political,
problem. The chapter commences with a discussion of C. S. Peirce’s
concept of ‘thirdness’, which refers, in this context, to images depicting
mental relations. Indeed, Deleuze suggests that the ‘classical’ narrative
cinema – based on the sensory-motor action schema of perception, evoking
affection and leading to action – culminates in a cinematic exploration of
mental relations, notably in Hitchcock’s films (1986: 200 ff.). Not only
does Hitchcock introduce the ‘mental image into the cinema’ (Deleuze 1986:
203), taking mental relations as the object of cinematic presentation
(inference, deduction, abduction and so on), he is one of the first to
fully implicate the spectator in the film (Deleuze 1986: 205), while turning
characters into ‘viewers’ or spectators (like ‘Jeff ’ [James Stewart] in
Rear Window). At the same time, however, Hitchcock’s ‘completion’ of
classical narrative or action-image cinema in ‘mental-images’ opens up
the exploration of time and thought beyond the action-image by
precipitating a fully-fledged ‘crisis of the traditional image of cinema’
(Deleuze 1986: 205).
 Deleuze’s Cine-Philosophy 149

Italian Neo-Realism and the French

nouvelle vague
The second or ‘historical’ version of the crisis appears in relation to Deleuze’s
discussion of the emergence of post-war time-image cinema. Despite
Deleuze’s emphasis on the change in European cinema that occurred during
and after WWII, the ‘crisis of the action-image’, as Deleuze remarks (1986:
205) has always accompanied the cinema, from the early days of pre-
narrative cinema to the ‘purest action films’ of today. Indeed, for Deleuze, the
two key aspects of this ‘crisis’ – the presentation of an open totality, which
breaks open the sensory-motor action circuit, and capturing the event ‘in the
course of happening’, which opens up a sense of duration – are integral to
cinematic art and ‘part of the profound Bergsonianism of the cinema in
general’ (Deleuze 1986: 206). From this point of view, time-images and non-
standard (‘crystalline’) forms of narrative are a part of cinema, even though
they have played a secondary role in relation to dominant forms of imagery
and narrative composition.
Nonetheless, Deleuze claims that there is a specific sense of ‘historical’
crisis emerging in the wake of WWII with profound effects on European
cinema and Hollywood. Here the emphasis shifts to the historical, cultural
and social factors that have contributed to the crisis in inherited forms of
cinematic narration. As Deleuze describes:
We might mention, in no particular order, the war and its consequences, the
unsteadiness of the ‘American Dream’ in all its aspects, the new consciousness
of minorities, the rise and inflation of images both in the external world and
in people’s minds, the influence on the cinema of the new modes of narrative
with which literature had experimented, the crisis of Hollywood and the old
genres . . .
Deleuze 1986: 206

The aftermath of WWII, the post-war shifts in social, cultural and

political attitudes, as well as aesthetic shifts in classical cinema, all contribute
to the crisis of the action-image. The latter phrase, for Deleuze, designates an
‘undoing’ of the ‘system of actions, perceptions, and affections on which
cinema had fed up to that point’, a caesura in the history of film which
opened up ‘the soul of cinema’ to new forms of thought (Deleuze 1986: 206).
Deleuze summarises this polyvalent crisis as one in which the link between
perception, affection and action becomes attenuated, a profound development
which begins to loosen, in a broader cultural sense, our meaningful links
150 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

with the world. Taking both aesthetic and historical versions into account,
the ‘crisis of the action-image’ can be described as both a cultural-historical
and aesthetic-psychological condition. As Deleuze observes: ‘We hardly
believe any longer that a global situation can give rise to an action which is
capable of modifying it – no more than we believe that an action can force a
situation to disclose itself, even partially’ (1986: 206).
As I discuss below, the third or ‘ethical’ sense of the crisis of the action
image refers to this generalised crisis of belief in narration and representation
– the attenuation of links between situation and action, in short, a weakening
of ‘the sensory-motor links which produced the action-image’ (Deleuze
1986: 206) – that underlies the broader shift from movement-image to time-
image cinema. It is also, however, a productive ‘crisis’ that signals the
emergence of new cinematic signs, including the new kinds of image and
narrative styles that would appear in post-war cinema. Deleuze identifies a
number of distinctive cinematic traits characterising the crisis of the action-
image that gives rise to the new cinema of time (1986: 207–210). First, there
is the shift from globalising or synthetic to dispersive or elliptical situations
with multiple characters, weak interferences, no single principal character or
defining narrative arc (Deleuze 1986: 207). Second, there is a loosening of
the causal thread linking actions and events within a given spatio-temporal
milieu. Situations are presented as elliptical, reality itself as dispersive;
relations or connections between people, actions and events are weak,
random or contingent, protagonists are seemingly disconnected from the
events that happen to them (Deleuze 1986: 207). Third, action-driven,
sensory-motor narratives are replaced by meandering, episodic forms of
narration (which Deleuze describes as the ‘voyage’ or ‘stroll’ [ballad] form).
Journeys feature strongly, devoid of definite destinations, and occur in an
indeterminate, nondescript, generic space: the ‘any-space-whatever’, such as
‘the marshalling yard, disused warehouse, the undifferentiated fabric of the
city’ (Deleuze 1986: 208). Fourth, this dispersed and contingent world,
lacking ‘totality or linkage’, is held together by ‘floating images, . . . anonymous
clichés’ (Deleuze 1986: 208). Cinematic clichés, for Deleuze, are ‘sensory-
motor images’ of a thing, or habituated audio-visual schemata that add a
semblance of instrumental meaning to objects in the world. This romanticist,
sceptical critique of the banality of modern life is a constant temptation, one
for which Deleuze criticises various auteurs (mostly American), who
contribute to the nihilism they would seek to critique (1986: 209). Finally, an
alternative way of securing meaning appears via the theme of conspiracy, a
hidden order of causality behind appearances that gives the world its fragile
 Deleuze’s Cine-Philosophy 151

or ambiguous meaning (Deleuze 1986: 210). This is another trope in the

romantic pessimism that Deleuze criticises in American independent
cinema, which receives short shrift compared with his more considered
discussions of post-war European cinema (Italian neo-realism, the French
nouvelle vague, and New German cinema).
This is not merely an aesthetic judgment, but a critical diagnosis of the
‘crisis of the American dream’. Deleuze’s five characteristics of the ‘new image’
– ‘the dispersive situation, the deliberately weak links, the voyage form, the
consciousness of clichés, the condemnation of the plot’ (1986: 210; italics in
original) – reflect both a crisis in the action-image and a crisis in post-war
American culture. It is not entirely clear, however, whether this dual sense of
cinematic and cultural-historical crisis means that cinema is reflecting
certain underlying historical-ideological processes or that cinema is an
independent expression of these processes but remains irreducible to them.
Does the crisis of the action-image represent a deeper historical-cultural,
even philosophical shift, or a novel aesthetic development in cinema that
remains independent of these historical and cultural processes? Whatever
the answer, the relationship between cinema and politics, as elsewhere in
Cinema 2, remains an intimate and involved one. The sceptical questioning
of the sensory-motor action schema in cinema, but also in American culture
and politics, reveals the possibility of an alternative order of images. Such an
order, however, would require a meaningful narrative framework and
accompanying form of practice – ‘an aesthetic and political project capable
of constituting a positive enterprise’ (Deleuze 1986: 201) – in order to be
fully realised or culturally expressed. Lacking such a positive project, the
result is sceptical irony, romantic pessimism or ‘postmodern cynicism’, which
marks, for Deleuze, the limits of both American cinema and of the ‘American
dream’ more broadly (1986: 210).
In a narrative familiar from discussions of postmodernism in the 1980s,
Deleuze points to the exhaustion of the devices of classical narrative cinema
and the problem of cinematic cliché. Indeed, in keeping with critiques that
one can find in Jameson (1991) and others (Foster 1983), Deleuze criticises
American auteurs such as Altman and Scorsese for their nihilistic repetition
of clichés, loss of conviction in artistic possibilities and their romanticist
indulgence in an ironic pessimism that remains unable to constitute new
forms of (cinematic and cultural-political) creativity. One can certainly
dispute Deleuze’s sweeping dismissal of new American cinema as well as
American cultural-political creativity, relying as it does on a slender selection
of cinematic examples and a vague parallel with the waning of American/
152 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

Western ‘grand narratives’ since the 1970s. Nonetheless, the key point is that
Deleuze’s diagnosis of the ‘crisis of the action-image’ is as much about a
condition of cultural nihilism as it is about the history of cinematic art.

Beyond the Movement-Image

(Italian Neo-Realism)
The ‘great crisis of the action-image’, Deleuze claims, took place in Italy
immediately after WWII (1986: 211), namely with the appearance of
Rossellini’s important post-war trilogy, Rome Open City (1945), Paisan
(1946) and Germany Year Zero (1948), followed by his 1950s trilogy,
Stromboli (1950), Europa ‘51 (1952) and Journey to Italy (1954). Deleuze
alludes to further social and historical factors explaining why Italy became
the flashpoint for the development of neo-realism (the experience of defeat,
the occupation by Germany, widespread urban destruction, poverty,
corruption, a cinema industry and institutions that had managed to survive
fascism and ‘a resistance and popular life underlying oppression, although
one without illusion’ (1986: 211)). This distinctive cultural-historical
situation required new images and stories that could communicate ‘the
elliptical and unorganised’ experience of the post-war world (Deleuze 1986:
211). A new cinema was needed, one not only capable of capturing this
ambiguous and uncertain reality but of ‘questioning afresh all the accepted
facts of the American tradition’ (Deleuze 1986: 212).
The result was Italian neo-realism, which articulated the aforementioned
five characteristics of the shift beyond the movement-image. Rossellini’s
Rome, Open City and Paisan, for example, ‘discovered a dispersive and
lacunary reality. . . a series of fragmentary, chopped up encounters’ (Deleuze
1986: 212), which could no longer be accommodated within the sensory-
motor schemata of the action image (what Deleuze calls the SAS or
Situation1–Action–Situation2 form of action movie genres such as the Western
or the War movie). De Sica’s films, on the other hand, shattered the ‘A SA form’
(the Action1–Situation–Action2 schema found in genres such as melodrama
or comedy, where a small action discloses a partially hidden or concealed
situation, leading to further actions). They showed how events lose their co-
ordinated causal links with each other within an attenuated, loosely-unified
world-context, how events are governed now more by contingency and
chance than social or historical necessity: ‘there is no longer a vector or line of
 Deleuze’s Cine-Philosophy 153

the universe which extends and links up the events of The Bicycle Thief’
(Deleuze 1986: 212). Insignificant events, which no longer cohere within a
meaningful whole, take on significance for themselves, as in de Sica’s Umberto
D. (1952), with its microdramas of the pregnant maid Maria [Maria Pia
Casilio] or the melancholy, everyday struggles of Umberto D. [Carlo Battisti]
to maintain his room, his dog and his dignity. Such a world, Deleuze remarks,
curiously enough, is already held together by clichés, the universal ascendancy
of the ‘reign of clichés, internally and externally, in people’s heads and hearts
as much as in the whole of space’ (Deleuze 1986: 212). Curious, since neo-
realism is supposed to have found new images in response to the problem of
clichés, rather than deploying these for new artistic and ethical ends.
The second version of the ‘crisis of the action-image’, centring on the
historical factors shaping post-war European cinema, appears in the opening
chapter of Cinema 2, where Deleuze resumes the ‘beyond the movement-
image’ story with a brief but explicit discussion of Italian neo-realism (1989:
1–24). Taking his lead from Bazin’s formal aesthetic definition, Deleuze
again emphasises the ‘new form of reality’ in these films, which is ‘dispersive,
elliptical, errant or wavering, working in blocs, with deliberately weak
connections and floating events’ (1989: 1). This social and historical reality,
however, is not presented transparently; rather, it is an ‘always ambiguous, to
be deciphered real’ that is ‘aimed at’, rather than recorded, and thus requires
a ‘new type of image’ (like Bazin’s ‘fact-image’) (Deleuze 1989: 1). Where
Deleuze parts company with Bazin is over the question of ‘reality’, questioning
Bazin’s claim that neo-realism’s attempts to capture the new reality of post-
war Europe, whether in social-historical, ‘formal or material’ terms (Deleuze
1989: 1). On the contrary, Deleuze asks whether it is a question of thought
rather than ‘reality’ at issue in the new cinema:

If all the movement-images, perceptions, actions and affects underwent such

an upheaval, was this not first of all because a new element burst on to the
scene which was to prevent perception being extended into action in order to
put it in contact with thought, and, gradually, was to subordinate the image to
the demands of new signs which would take it beyond movement?
Deleuze 1989: 1

Neo-realism displays a ‘philosophical’ trajectory, reflecting that of modern

(European) cinema: the discovery and composition of new cinematic signs
(pure optical and sound situations), new images and forms of narration
(time-images and crystalline narration), culminating in the emergence of a
new kind of cinema ‘beyond the movement-image’.
154 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

Indeed, Deleuze’s philosophical reinterpretation of neo-realism clearly

accords with his thesis concerning the modern (post-Kantian) philosophical
reversal of the subordination of time to movement (see Deleuze 1984),
coupled with his Bergsonian re-inscription of ‘the essence’ of cinema as re-
conceptualising the relationship between thought and time, achieving its aim
of expressing thought in images.7 Not only does the social content of neo-
realism disappear, so too does Bazin’s affirmation of cinema’s vocation to
reveal a transfigured sense of reality. Instead, Deleuze gives neo-realism a
philosophical cast as that revolutionary moment in modern cinema when
film begins to ‘think’ cinematically in grappling with the expression of
duration and of thought. Also curious in Deleuze’s account of neo-realism is
the minor role played by social-political factors or historical-ideological
context. It is an account that foregrounds, rather, the aesthetic problem of
images in response to the attenuated post-war sense of a meaningfully
organised or coherent social reality. Indeed, the principal problem facing
post-war cinema, according to Deleuze, is the breakdown of the old (sensory-
motor) paradigms of narrative composition and the corrosive effects of the
reign of cultural-cinematic clichés. It is only out of this disrupted sense of
world with its discredited forms of representation that a new image might
arise from the ashes of cliché. Italian neo-realism sensed the problem (‘in-
itself ’), but such a problem becomes self-reflexive (‘for-itself ’) only later
within the French nouvelle vague, with its ironic treatment of the sensory-
motor action schema in response to the crisis of cliché (Deleuze 1989: 8–9 ff.).
The American response to this crisis, as remarked, is criticised for lapsing
into romantic pessimism and empty parody. In either case, the problem
remains that of ‘finding an image’ amidst the morass of clichés without lapsing
into sterile repetition (Deleuze 1986: 214). The way out, Deleuze argues, is to
turn to thought and time (1986: 215): the mental image (reaching its Hollywood
highpoint with Hitchcock) has to become time-image (reaching its apogee in
European cinema with Resnais). As we shall see, Deleuze’s teleological history
of post-war cinema moves from the crisis of the sensory-motor action schema,
to the discovery of pure optical and sound situations and the emergence of
‘crystalline’ (parametric, to use Bordwell’s term) narration, which heralds a new
cinema capable of restoring our ‘belief in this world’.
This theme is announced in Cinema 2 by the shift from the problem of
cliché (with which Cinema 1 concluded) to the ‘pure optical and sound
situations’ defining the new sense of reality in post-war European cinema.
Deleuze cites a number of canonical scenes from classic neo-realist films:
the pregnant maid Maria making coffee and quietly considering her bleak
 Deleuze’s Cine-Philosophy 155

future in Umberto D.; the suicide of the boy Edmund [Edmund Moeschke]
in Germany Year Zero, who ‘dies from what he sees’ (Deleuze 1989: 2). Karin’s
[Ingrid Bergman’s] devastating revelation of the horrors of everyday reality
in Stromboli; the conversion of grieving Irene [Ingrid Bergman] in Europa
‘51, who is transfigured by her visions of the poor and experience working in
a factory. Or the shattering experience of the female tourist Katherine
[Bergman again] in Journey to Italy [Viaggio in Italia] (1954), whose
experience of images and visual clichés is one in which ‘she discovers
something unbearable, beyond the limit of what she can personally bear’
(Deleuze 1989: 2). Neo-realism, with its pure optical and sound situations
that no longer extend into action, becomes ‘a cinema of the seer and no
longer that of the agent [de voyant, non plus d’actant]’ (Deleuze 1989: 2). It
inaugurates a new kind of cinema – centred on the experience of time, the
trauma of memory, the disorientation of space and the collapse of agency –
by introducing a new regime of images and signs.
Such is Deleuze’s second version of the ‘beyond the movement-image’
thesis, which emphasises the emergence of pure optical and sound situations
with Ozu, neo-realism and the French New Wave. It is no longer the problem
of the cliché that matters but that of responding – culturally and artistically
– to a dispersed, disorganised world where sensory-motor action schemas
have become ineffectual or inoperative. Unlike the first version, it is what
defines Italian neo-realism (the proliferation of purely optical and sound
situations), as distinct from the sensory-motor situations of the action-image
within older forms of realism (Deleuze 1989: 2). Spectator identification with
characters gives way to the presentation of characters as spectators; the
sensory-motor situations falter and give way to pure optical and sound
situations that outstrip the motor capacities of characters, who now appear as
visionary seers rather than motivated agents. The main characteristics of the
crisis of the action-image – the ‘voyage’ or trip/ballad narrative form, the
multiplication of clichés, characters indifferent to the events that befall them,
the relaxing of sensory-motor relations – are now presented as the preliminary
conditions for the post-war appearance of pure optical and sound situations
that herald the new time-image cinema.

The Time-Image
How can cinema present time directly? Can the moving image express
dimensions of time other than the present? Deleuze’s ‘sequel’ volume, Cinema
156 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

2: The Time-Image, examines this question in depth and proposes an account

of the time-image and its varieties. Drawing again on Bergson, Deleuze
points to the role of ‘aberrant’ (decentred) movements in disrupting the
sensory-motor schema and reversing the subordination of time to
movement:
What aberrant movement reveals is time as everything, as ‘infinite opening’,
as anteriority over all normal movement defined by motivity [motoricité]:
time has to be anterior to the controlled flow of every action. . . If normal
movement subordinates the time of which it gives us an indirect
representation, aberrant movement speaks up for an anteriority of time that
it presents to us directly, on the basis of the disproportion of scales, the
dissipation of centres and the false continuity of the images themselves.
Deleuze 1989: 37

It is worth noting the allusion to Bergson’s conception of time and

movement in the phrase ‘infinite opening’, that is, to the idea of time as
presupposed by ‘normal’ or centred forms of movement understood as
intentional and rational (defined by ‘motivity’). We should also note Deleuze’s
emphasis here on the role of ‘aberrant movements’: decentred or irrational
movements that do not appear to obey the laws of a given system.8 In
astronomy, for example, if we assume a geocentric model, the orbits of the
planets will appear ‘aberrant’ in that they contradict predictions based on
such a model (a model reversed, so to speak, by Copernicus and Kant).
‘Normal’ movements, in contrast, are defined by ‘the existence of centres’,
which define a frame of reference in relation to which the movement of
bodies becomes intelligible. Centred movements take many forms: ‘centres
of the revolution of movement itself, of equilibrium of forces, of gravity of
moving bodies, and of observation for a viewer able to recognise or perceive
the moving body, and to assign movement’ (Deleuze 1989: 36). Normal
movements correspond to the ordinary world of ‘perception-action’ (in
Bergson’s sense) in which we distinguish individuated bodies and regard
movements between them as causally ordered with respect to a given frame
of reference. Aberrant movement occurs when these centres are absent or
lacking; decentred movements can no longer be attributed to causally
ordered bodies within a given frame of reference. Such ‘irrational’ movements,
according to Deleuze/Bergson, have the effect of disrupting the orderly
subordination of time to movement, destroying the quantitative sense of
time (taken as the ‘number’ of movement). For how, one might ask, could
there be a rational order or measure for a movement that is inherently
unpredictable or ‘aberrant’?
 Deleuze’s Cine-Philosophy 157

Far from destroying time, however, Deleuze argues that aberrant

movements destroy only the (abstract) quantitative account of time as the
‘number of movement’; such movements liberate time from its subordination
to movement, opening up the possibility of a direct ‘time-image’. Following
Bergson, Deleuze posits a shift from abstract time as dependent on movement
(movements conforming to the laws of human action), to open up a real or
concrete sense of time as pure duration (time as qualitative change). Deleuze
brings this Bergsonian thesis concerning time to the cinema, an art of
movement and time that has always been replete with aberrant movements
that disrupt centred movements with fixed frames of reference (strange
perspectives, unusual angles, discontinuities between shots, ‘impossible’
spectator positions and so on). Aberrant movements are the key to defining
a new type of moving image capable of presenting time directly, as expressing
time as duration (qualitative change): the time-image.
In Bergsonian terms, this shift towards time-image cinema is signalled by
the disconnection of movement and action. With the shift away from action
and its constraints, the ‘sensory-motor schema’ defining the circuits of
perception-affection-action begin to break down. Movement in the abstract
quantitative sense becomes pure movement decoupled from action, that is,
movement as expressing qualitative change or time as duration. We can
understand this shift, moreover, from the movement-image to the time-
image in two ways: aesthetically and historically. From an aesthetic point of
view, we see the emergence of a new regime of signs, moving images no
longer defined via the sensory-motor action schema but rather by ‘pure
optical and sound situations’. These refer to pure audiovisual descriptions
that are no longer centred or explained by an assumed frame of reference
organised by ‘normal’ processes of perception and action. From an historical
point of view, according to Deleuze, although cinema was always capable of
aberrant movement – early cinema is rife with striking examples, and so in
principle could have developed direct time-images – this possibility becomes
explicitly thematic only with ‘modern cinema’.9
Curiously, Deleuze refers here principally to post-war European directors’
or auteur cinema, identifying this important shift in modern cinema history
as marking the definitive ‘break’ inaugurating a new kind of image and
narrative regime. Commencing with Italian neo-realism, followed by the
French nouvelle vague, a new kind of cinematic image appears (the time-
image) with a corresponding transformation in narrative style and structure.
This shift continues with post-war German cinema (during the 1970s),
American independent cinema (in the 1970s and into the early 1980s) and
158 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

concludes, by Deleuze’s reckoning, in the mid- to late-1980s (tracking

Deleuze’s comments on recent film in Cinema 2, published in 1985). The
‘crystalline’ regime of time-image cinema is defined by a number of features:
a shift to loosely organised, meandering narrative, with an episodic structure;
psychologically opaque characters who observe their environment rather
than reacting to it; the prevalence of indeterminate milieus (‘any-space-
whatever’) rather than clearly identified, determinate locations; random,
contingent links between events, rather than causally ordered processes; a
reflexive consciousness of clichés; and characters expressing malaise as a
response to something ‘intolerable’ in reality. These are films, in short, that
express a loss of conviction in the world: a failure of received narrative
frameworks or systems of belief to organise action by psychologically
motivated characters. This shift is grounded in a number of processes: the
uncoupling of the links between perception-affection-action and a reversal
of the primacy of movement (the ‘sensory-motor scheme’) such that
perception is no longer extended into action, affection gives rise to thought
and movement is no longer subordinated to time.
Deleuze summarises his theses on time-image cinema as follows:
What has happened is that the sensory-motor schema is no longer in
operation. It is shattered from the inside. That is, perceptions and actions
ceased to be linked together, and spaces are now neither coordinated, nor
filled. Some characters, caught in certain pure optical and sound situations,
find themselves condemned to wander about or go off on a trip. These are
pure seers, who no longer exist except in the interval of movement. They are
given over to something intolerable, which is simply their everydayness itself.
Deleuze 1989: 90

We can see this ‘crisis’ in the sensory-motor schema and uncoupling of the
links between perception, affection and action in many examples of post-war
cinema. Such films are defined by the prevalence of pure optical and sound
situations and a loose, unstructured narrative form, where time is no longer
subordinated to movement (think, for example, of The Rules of the Game,
Citizen Kane, Bicycle Thieves, Tokyo Story, Breathless, Easy Rider, Alice in the
Cities, Badlands, My Own Private Idaho and so on). Although time-image
cinema never became the dominant mode of cinematic art, it constitutes a
tradition that continues today in independent art cinema and contemporary
‘slow cinema’. It is not confined to any particular cultural or historical tradition
of cinema, and is arguably more prevalent in contemporary strains of ‘world
cinemas’ where slow or contemplative cinema has flourished (see de Luca and
Jorge 2015). This still accords, in many ways, with Deleuze’s central thesis,
 Deleuze’s Cine-Philosophy 159

notwithstanding his ‘Eurocentric’ biases; namely that time-image cinema

tends to emerge under conditions of historico-political crisis and/or social-
cultural transformation, where prevailing narrative and ideological structures
start to disintegrate (see Martin-Jones 2006, 2011).
Unlike Cavell, as we shall see, Deleuze stresses the ‘intolerability’ of the
everyday, as articulated in post-war European cinema. Why is everydayness
‘intolerable’? At one level, it is because of the traumatic experiences and
upheavals of WWII, which have left traditional moral frameworks, political
worldviews and ideological narratives shattered. At another, it is because the
modern world reveals itself as ‘in-human’: as no longer responding to
conventional humanist moral frameworks but also presenting itself as alien,
dehumanising, bereft of meaning, a world that no longer provides a familiar
or tractable sense of world. In a more metaphysical register, the world itself
comes to be viewed as pure change, as indifferent to our ordinary human
interests, as having temporal dimensions that escape us. The crisis of the
sensory-motor image reveals, on the one hand, that we have lost a sensory-
motor connection with the world, but on the other, that we have also found
new ways of experiencing it. The attenuation of the link between perception
and action opens up different forms of affect, of reflection, indeed a different
experience of time. In short, the advent of time-cinema cinema, for Deleuze,
opens up a new experience of thought.

Thought and Cinema

Deleuze’s most explicit treatment of the cinema-thought relationship is in
Chapter 7 of Cinema 2: The Time-Image, although elements of this account
recur throughout his work (1989: 156–188). Deleuze refers here to French
actor, author and filmmaker Antonin Artaud as well as to the theoretical
work of Sergei Eisenstein, both of whom stressed the capacity of moving
images to enact a sensuous and affective ‘shock’ capable of provoking
thought. Drawing Jean-Louis’ Schefer’s The Ordinary Man of the Cinema
(2016), he develops the concept of the ‘spiritual automaton’ (the subject of
logical thought, according to Spinoza and Leibniz), which is applied to our
‘involuntary’ cinematic experience of being subject to the concatenation of
images as they appear in film (see Vaughan 2012; ffrench 2017). The ‘logical’
subject of rationally connected thoughts is transposed into the ‘inhuman’
cinematic subject of temporally connected moving images (movement-
images composing a film), images that offer an indirect expression of ‘the
160 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

Whole’. Deleuze emphasises here the power of cinema, with its imposition of
an ordered sequences of images, to create a circuit between moving images
and the brain/subjectivity of the viewer, a circuit with the power to induce a
perceptual-affective ‘shock’ that provokes thinking.
Jean Epstein and Eisenstein also believed in the power of cinema to
provoke a shock inducing thought (its power to induce a transformation of
experience or a revolutionary consciousness), but this ‘modernist’ idea of an
expanded cinema soon gave way to disappointment. Far from bringing
about revolutionary change, the transformational power of cinema was
used, more often than not, to support fascism, distraction and ideological
manipulation, the unholy alliance between the forces of fascism and those of
mass entertainment, or the bringing together of ‘Hitler and Hollywood,
Hollywood and Hitler’: ‘The spiritual automaton became fascist man’
(Deleuze 1989: 164) . What did remain viable, however, was the idea of the
cinematic sublime as an expression of a shock that forces thought: the
collapse of the imagination as it is pushed to its limit ‘and forces thought to
think the whole as intellectual totality which goes beyond the imagination’
(Deleuze 1989: 157).
Deleuze’s example here is Eisenstein’s account of intellectual montage:
there is the perceptual shock from moving image to conscious thought
(percept to concept), then from concept to affect, which returns, via an
affective shock, from thought to the image (1989: 158). This experience of
cinematic ‘sublimity’ links intellectual cinema to emotional intelligence: it
expresses a non-verbal ‘internal monologue’ or ‘primitive language’
articulated through the concatenation of images, where the whole film is
now understood as a ‘spiritual automaton’ – or non-human quasi-subject –
expressing thought and affect through image montage (Deleuze 1989: 159).
The third moment of this dialectic between image and concept is the
‘identity’ of concept and image: a dialectical combination of image and
thought or an action-thought that expresses our relationship to the world
and nature more generally (Deleuze 1989: 161). For Deleuze, Eisenstein’s
dialectical model of the relationship between thought and cinema is
paradigmatic for the movement-image regime of narrative cinema (defined
by the sensory-motor action schema linking perception, affection, with
action). It offers an active conscious expression of the three relationships
between film and thought that are most common in movement-image
cinema: ‘the relationship with a whole which can only be thought in a higher
awareness, the relationship with a thought which can only be shaped in the
unconscious unfolding of images, the sensory-motor relationship between
 Deleuze’s Cine-Philosophy 161

world and man, nature and thought’ (Deleuze 1989: 163; italics in original).
From this point of view, cinema is capable of communicating an action-
oriented mode of thought aiming at a revolutionary transformation of
consciousness and of the world itself.
Such utopian revolutionary hopes, however, were soon dashed, as the
harsh realities of 20th century history and totalitarian politics shattered the
faith of early filmmakers and utopian theorists in the transformative power
of cinema. Deleuze thus turns to Artaud in order to explore the post-war
transition from the movement-image regime to that of time-image cinema
(images that subordinate movement to time, that disrupt the action-oriented
sensory-motor schemata and rational, causally organised montage in order
to express time directly). Like Eisenstein, Artaud explores the movement
from image to thought via a ‘shock’ or vibration acting directly on our
nervous system, and then the movement from thought to image again via
visual ‘figures’ articulating an ‘internal monologue’, expressed through
images, which gives rise in turn to an affective shock. Unlike Eisenstein,
however, Artaud recognises the impotence or ‘powerlessness of thought’ that
cinema is also apt to express: the inherent passivity of the cinematic
experience, the inability of thought alone to directly motivate action or to
actively transform consciousness in the manner that Eisenstein envisaged.
This shift, which anticipates the shift from movement-image to time-
image cinema, is linked to the breakdown in the idea of an organic unity or
totality expressing the Whole (the breakdown in the sensory-motor regime
of action-thought). Artaud emphasises cinema’s potential to enact an
experiential revelation of the disruptive failure or ‘impower’ of thought that
nonetheless calls forth thought – through the perceptual-affective shock of
images acting directly on our nervous system – and that fosters the indirect
presentation of the Whole as a disruptive experience of cognitive breakdown
(via what Artaud calls the ‘crack’ or ‘fissure’). What cinema reveals is not that
we are capable of thinking the Whole but, on the contrary, ‘the fact that we
are not yet thinking (Heidegger)’ (Deleuze 1989: 167) – an allusion to
Heidegger’s famous dictum that what is most thought-provoking in
modernity is that we are not yet thinking (about the meaning of Being). Like
Maurice Blanchot in regard to modern literature, moreover, Artaud points to
modern cinema’s revelation of the impower [impouvoir] of thought, its
failure to comprehend a disarticulated and disintegrated form of existence
definitive of a fragmented and dispersed modernity: ‘the figure of
nothingness, the inexistence of a whole which could be thought’ (Deleuze
1989: 168). Indeed, cinema’s essence, Deleuze concludes, ‘has thought as its
162 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

higher purpose, nothing but thought and its functioning’ (1989: 168), even
where this cinematic thought remains incapable of encompassing any
organic unity, whether of human beings and nature or of the individual and
society.
Artaud offers a challenging account of the disruptive experience of
thought in modern cinema, an experience of the impotence or failure of
thought to effectuate action, an experience of a crisis in agency following the
breakdown of the sensory-motor/action-image regime. The sensory-motor
break, which disrupts the link between perception, affect/reflection and
action, is a response, Deleuze contends, to the traumatic experiences defining
modernity (especially the impact of WWII but also, presumably, the failure
of revolutionary communism). At the level of culture, it is expressed in a new
kind of cinema that ‘makes man a seer who finds himself struck by something
intolerable in the world, and confronted by something unthinkable in
thought’ (Deleuze 1989: 169). The intolerability of the world results in a
failure to think in respect of a meaningful world or indeed for us to think at
all (beyond cliché and stereotype). It precipitates a crisis in experience that
transforms us from actors to seers; it shifts the task of cinema from satisfying
our need to know the world to acknowledging the need for an existential
‘belief in the world’.

Deleuze’s Existential Imperative:

Belief in This World
Deleuze adopts what we might call a more ‘existentialist’ ethical register in
the third aspect of his account of time-image cinema: the problem of belief
in the world, which results from the breakdown of prevailing representational
or even ideological frameworks (the sensory-motor schema applied to
narratives of historical meaning and political emancipation). In other words,
it is the ethical problem of cinema and nihilism that now becomes the focus
of cultural-philosophical attention: the need to renew our ‘reasons to believe
in this world’ in the face of a loss of belief in the world, lack of conviction,
brutality and violence, the dissipation of revolutionary hopes and aspirations
for radical transformation.10 Deleuze’s modernist wager is that cinema can
diagnose, respond to and perhaps overcome nihilism: it provides an ethical
experience of meaning – via images exploring time and thought – in
response to the crises of meaning afflicting the post-war world. We might
 Deleuze’s Cine-Philosophy 163

call this a cinematic ethics of immanent conversion: an existential affirmation

of the world through its aesthetic re-enchantment, an experience revealed
through, and given expression by, the cinema.
For Deleuze, the task of thinking in modern cinema (for which we might
read ‘modernist cinema’) is to affirm our existential belief in ‘a link between
man and the world, in love or life, to believe in this as the impossible, the
unthinkable, which none the less cannot but be thought’ (Deleuze 1989:
170). Amidst the nihilistic aftermath of war, the loss of conviction in
prevailing moral narratives and political frameworks, we need an existential
affirmation of our bodily/corporeal connection with the world, an aesthetic
experience of shock or cognitive disorientation through which we might
learn ‘to discover the unity of thought and life’ (Deleuze 1989: 170). Much
like Cavell, cinema can still show us the link between humanity and world,
according to Deleuze, even though we may be suffering from a nihilism
today in which ‘we no longer believe in this world’, a broken world that
appears to us as though it were a ‘bad film’ (1989: 171). Deleuze describes
here a cinematic version of the Nietzschean problematic of nihilism: the loss
of belief in inherited, prevailing sources of normative value and social-
cultural meaning in modernity. The central ethical question, for Deleuze, is
whether cinema can give us ‘reasons to believe’ in a world mediated by
manipulative or stereotypical images, especially where cinema’s power to
elicit conviction has waned. The task of art is to reanimate the existential-
vitalist belief in the link between human beings and the world, in the
immanence of thought and life, the creation of a thinking-in-images that
finds its highest expression in modern cinema. Philosophy can thereby join
forces with film as cultural practices with the power to reveal possibilities of
existence and provide reasons to maintain fidelity with this shattered world.
Deleuzian cinematic ethics thus concerns the relationship between
cinema and belief: how does the moving image elicit conviction for us? What
can cinema do when inherited paradigms of representation (what Deleuze
calls sensory-motor action schemas) or prevailing ideological narratives
break down or lose their credibility? Can cinema restore a sense of belief in
the world as an assemblage of images in which we no longer quite believe?
Deleuze poses these questions most explicitly in the following oft-quoted
passage:
The link between man and the world has been broken. Henceforth, this link
must become an object of belief: it is the impossible which can only be
restored within a faith. Belief is no longer addressed to a different or
transformed world. Man is in the world as if in a pure optical or sound
164 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

situation. The reaction of which man has been dispossessed can be

replaced only by belief. Only belief in the world can reconnect man to what
he sees and hears. The cinema must film, not the world, but belief in this
world, our only link. . . Restoring our belief in the world – this is the power of
modern cinema (when it stops being bad). Whether we are Christians or
atheists, in our universal schizophrenia, we need reasons to believe in this
world.
Deleuze 1989: 171–172

Deleuze describes nihilism here as a ‘cinematographic’ experience of the

world: it involves a loss of belief, a disconnection between perception,
affection and action, a reduction of the world to one in which images saturate
our experience, yet evacuate the world of meaning, leaving its horizons
indefinite and opaque. Transcendent sources of belief or mythic beliefs in
progress (religion and ideology) no longer justify the world; rather, the world
itself has become ‘a bad film’ in which we no longer really believe (or know
how to act). The ‘pure optical and acoustical situations’ that defined post-war
cinema have mutated, in our present context, into an all-pervasive, cognitively
distracting audiovisual culture defined by a fragmented state of atomised
immersion and incessant proliferation of enervating image clichés, ‘fake’
news and commodified informational resources.
What can film do in the face of such crises in meaning? This is the central
ethical question of modern cinema: can it give us ‘reasons to believe’ in a
world mediated by images, where cinema’s power to elicit conviction has
waned? Can we construct an ethics and politics of the image that could
respond to the ‘destruction of experience’ (Benjamin) – shared, historically
meaningful experience – within a fully mediatised modernity? Such
questions provide a motivation for Deleuze’s existential wager, which bets on
cinema as a creative response to the moral-cultural nihilism undermining
the contemporary conditions of social-political agency – a condition that
cinema can exacerbate or to which it can respond creatively by eliciting
thought. As a response to nihilism, we require a reanimation of existential-
vitalist belief in the link between human beings and the world, in the
immanence of thought and life. As Deleuze remarks:
Which, then, is the subtle way out? To believe, not in a different world, but in
a link between man and the world, in love or life, to believe in this as in the
impossible, the unthinkable, which nonetheless cannot but be thought. . . It is
this belief that makes the unthought the specific power of thought, through
the absurd, by virtue of the absurd.
Deleuze 1989: 170
 Deleuze’s Cine-Philosophy 165

Deleuze advocates here an existential affirmation of the immanent link to

the world, a link articulated in thought and expressed through cinema – in
cinematic thinking – one that might enable us to retrieve the ethical
relationship between thought and life. Philosophy can join with cinema as
cultural media with the power to invent forms of life and provide reasons to
maintain fidelity with the world. More specifically, this means rethinking
what it means to be human, beyond the body/mind dualism that, through its
opposition between a corrupted material-sensuous realm and an unattainable
ideal-metaphysical realm, inevitably leads to scepticism. Our salvation in
response to such scepticism, Deleuze claims, in a rather neo-romantic
manner, lies in ‘simply believing in the body’ as the ground of our existence,
‘before discourse, before words’ (Deleuze 1989: 172–173), creating art that
enables us to reconnect with the world in a sensuously embodied, creative
and inventive manner. As we shall see, both Cavell and Deleuze thus
emphasise the potential of cinema to serve as a means of evoking ethical
experience, as an aesthetic response to cultural scepticism or moral nihilism,
whether via creative self-transformation or an existential affirmation of our
embodied being-in-the-world.

‘Two Ages’ of Cinema?

As a number of critics have noted, there seems to be a tension between
Deleuze’s conceptual taxonomy of image types, and his recourse to an
historical account of the shift to time-image narrative.11 Jacques Rancière
(2006: 107–123), for example, argues that Deleuze’s attempt to contrast ‘two
ages’ of the cinema – a classical movement-image cinema, and a ‘modern’
time-image cinema – is untenable, for it posits a ‘fictive’ distinction between
movement-images and time-images, and relies on questionable ‘allegorical’
interpretations of selected film examples to support these historical-
ontological claims. For Rancière, there are two key questions for Deleuze’s
analysis: 1) How to explain the relationship between ‘a break in the art of
images and the ruptures that affect history in general?’ (2006: 108); and 2) how
to recognise, in actual films, the evidence of this break or shift between these
two image-regimes, as well as the distinction between the movement-image
and the time-image in specific cases? Rancière’s critical response is twofold: to
question Deleuze’s reliance on an historical account to explain a shift of a
conceptual order; and to argue that the distinction between movement-images
and time-images collapses once we submit it to critical scrutiny.
166 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

To take the latter point first, the distinction between movement-image

and time-image begins to blur within the course of Deleuze’s analysis. The
affection-image, for example, already expresses pure qualities that articulate
a virtual power of the image independent of sensory-motor narrative
(Dreyer’s silent masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), is hardly
‘sensory-motor’ action cinema, being one of the finest examples of affection-
image/time-image film). Moreover, this blurring of the distinction between
movement- and time-images appears in the very examples that Deleuze
adduces in order to show the differences between them. Bresson, for example,
is praised for his use of the affection-image to construct any-spaces-whatever
(Deleuze 1986: 108–111), an account of Bresson that is more or less repeated
in Cinema 2 in relation to the theme of ‘thought and cinema’ (Rancière 2006:
112). The same film examples (say Dreyer or Bresson) can be used either to
illustrate the role of affection-images, or to exemplify the breaking of the
sensory-motor link that defines time-image cinema (Rancière 2006: 112).
This equivocation renders doubtful Deleuze’s firm distinction between
movement-images and time-images, and his corresponding claims for the
historical break with sensory-motor action narrative and transition to post-
war time-image cinema.
Moreover, Deleuze supports his claims concerning the shift from sensory-
motor action to time-image cinema by adducing film examples that function
allegorically: films whose narrative content provides the ‘evidence’
demonstrating the crisis of the action image. Rancière cites a number of
pertinent examples here: Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), with its
immobilised photographer-protagonist ‘Jeff ’ Jeffries [James Stewart], and
Vertigo (1959), with its famous shot of Scotty [Stewart] hanging over the
abyss by his fingertips; Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar (1966), with its linking
of hands caring for, working with, or exploiting and abusing the eponymous
donkey. Or there is Pickpocket (1959), whose thieves caress, rather than seize,
their booty; and Tod Browning’s silent film The Unknown (1927), with its
circus performer who fakes having his arms amputated until being forced to
do so in reality (2006: 114–119). The immobilised observer, obsessive
detective, caressing thief and self-amputating performer all serve as
allegorical figures – dependent on narrative content as much as the aesthetic
features of the image – for the general ‘crisis in the action-image’.
Rancière thus questions the validity of Deleuze’s allegorical examples,
whose narrative content is supposed to illustrate a generalised ‘paralysis of
action’, as evidence justifying the claims made concerning the transition to a
distinctively ‘modern’ time-image cinema (2006: 116–117). For Rancière,
 Deleuze’s Cine-Philosophy 167

this ambiguity between image-type and narrative content suggests that the
distinction between movement-images and time-images is artificial; a ‘fictive
rupture’ (2006: 119) that cannot be sustained in the face of cinema’s complex
dialectic between intentional and automatic elements, narrative and
spectacle, representational form and aesthetic experimentation. Indeed,
what Deleuze presents is less a shift from one discrete image regime to
another than a ‘dual perspective’ model in which the same images/films can
be analysed either from the perspective of movement-image or from that of
time-image cinema (Rancière 2006: 114).
Echoing other critics of ‘medium essentialism’, Rancière too argues
that cinema has no medium-specific ‘essence’ that could be read off a
metaphysically grounded ontology of images or teleological historical
narrative culminating in the ‘modern’ cinema of time (2006). The (Deleuzian)
story of film, Rancière concludes, is thus a thwarted one, much like the ‘film
fables’ defining cinema, forever divided between the competing vectors of
narrative content and visual spectacle that undo each other continuously
(2006: 1–18). Deleuze’s ‘fictive’ opposition between the ‘two ages of cinema’
(classical and modern) does not do justice to the hybrid character of film; it
rests, moreover, according to Rancière, upon an ‘essentialising’ ‘ontology of
the cinema argued for with bits and pieces gleaned from the entire corpus of
the cinematographic art’ (2006: 5).12
Paola Marrati (2008) has responded to Rancière’s critique of Deleuze by
dismissing the claim that there is a genuine contradiction between a
conceptual taxonomy or ‘natural history’ of images (1986: xiv) and an
historical account of the emergence of time-image cinema in the post-war
context. Indeed, the tension between these two positions is ‘so obvious’,
Marrati observes, ‘that it would be hard, even for Deleuze, not to notice it’
(2008: 64). Marrati argues, however, in a counter-intuitive manner, that the
appearance of contradiction is dissolved once we see that the Cinema books
articulate Deleuze’s political philosophy (Marrati 2008: x). Deleuze proposes
not merely a conceptual taxonomy and semiology of cinematic images but
an analysis of the relationship between ‘forms of action and agency’ (2008, x),
and a response to the ‘problem of the broken link between humans and the
world’ following the collapse of revolutionary political hopes (whether
American or European) (2008: 5). Deleuze’s account of the crisis of the
action-image is at the same time an analysis of the crisis of History. Any clash
between the conceptual taxonomy of images and the historical ‘two ages of
cinema’ is therefore merely apparent. Indeed, Deleuze’s ethico-political
thought, Marrati argues, is concerned rather with cinema as an artform
168 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

giving us ‘reasons to believe in this world’; restoring our belief in the latter
through an ‘immanent conversion of faith’ (Marrati 2008: 85–87). From this
philosophical point of view, the Cinema books are aesthetic-political treatises
on the problem of nihilism: the loss of belief in the world defining our
contemporary cultural-historical malaise. Here we find unexpected common
ground with Cavell, who approaches film in a similar spirit, namely as an
artistic response to the problem of scepticism.
Marrati’s ‘allegorical’ reading of Deleuze’s Cinema books as works in
political philosophy is ingenious. However, even if we accept Marrati’s
reading (which places a heavy burden on the few passages where Deleuze
gestures towards history and politics), the problems identified by Rancière
remain: how to explain the link between the aesthetics of cinematic images
and this historical crisis in agency? And what to make of the ‘allegorical’
readings of films Deleuze adduces to support this link between aesthetics,
history and politics? (Especially given Deleuze’s rejection of
‘representationalist’ accounts of cinema.) Marrati’s defence of Deleuze’s
project does not address Rancière’s basic criticism, namely that Deleuze’s
Bergsonian ontology of images attempts to secure, in one stroke, an ‘essence’
of cinema that would allow the philosopher to conceptualise image-regimes,
narrate the end of cinema, and rescue philosophy’s vocation in relation to
history, art and politics. We can add to this critique a contemporary
observation: the appearance of hybrid forms of narrative cinema in which
sensory-motor action and pure optical time-image narrative become
‘indiscernible’. Deleuze’s historicist thesis looks doubtful given the flourishing
of cinema that affirms the play of mythos (narrative) and opsis (spectacle),
classical action-narrative and ‘modern’ optical and sound situations, in
culturally diverse and aesthetically hybrid forms.13

Questioning Deleuze’s
Cine-Philosophy
There are three difficulties that arise in response to Deleuze’s cine-philosophical
account of the relationship between thought and cinema. The first is an
ambiguity in the meaning of ‘thought’ itself, which refers both to the conventional
sense of cognitive engagement and to Deleuze’s non-representationalist account
of thought attempting to conceptualise ‘difference in itself’ (see Deleuze 1994).
Attempts to think ideas like the ‘unity of man and nature’ are not the same as
 Deleuze’s Cine-Philosophy 169

attempts to think a non-representationalist notion of difference via the

disruptive shock experience of a modernist cinematic encounter. ‘Thought’,
moreover, as Deleuze uses it appears to be ambiguous between the creative
positing of (non-representationalist) concepts and an agentless or subjectless,
even ‘inhuman’, activity, even though it is only through mediating ‘thinkers’ –
which is to say, articulated conceptual discourse, linguistic expressions or
artistic works – that such thought can be at all expressed.
The second is that Deleuze’s account of the essential link between cinema
and thought remains wedded to a certain discourse of ‘political modernism’
that many might find implausible today (the critical transformation of
consciousness and emancipation of subjectivity through revolutionary
forms of art). His account of the manner in which cinema ‘thinks’ retains a
belief in the power of cinematic art to effect a transformation of experience
or alteration of consciousness, which is itself put under question by the kind
of scepticism or nihilism defining contemporary Western cultural-historical
sensibilities (see Sinnerbrink 2016a: 64–69). Can we still believe in the power
of cinema to restore belief in the world and overcome or restore the ‘broken
link’ between human beings and the world? And on what basis should we
accept the idea of such a ‘broken link’, or that the best response to nihilism
involves positing existential ‘reasons to believe in this world’? Indeed, the
idea of the transformative power of cinema – in the tradition of a
revolutionary transformation of consciousness or reinvention of the ‘human’
– may well be one of the beliefs that has become questionable in our sceptical
age. This is not to deny the possibility that cinematic art might still play this
redemptive or transformative role in modernity; but to make this the
essential task of modern cinema is to overlook the myriad other ways films,
whether time-image or movement-image cinema, can contribute to
philosophical understanding and ethical experience.
The third is to ask whether Deleuze’s existential wager – affirming belief
in the world through our aesthetic engagement with the immanent
possibilities of embodied experience – is enough to overcome contemporary
forms of nihilism. How does this existential-aesthetic wager deal with the
very concrete cultural-historical dimensions of the contemporary ‘crisis’
afflicting moral, social-political and ideological narratives? Can a film-
philosophy committed to the idea that cinema can offer an aesthetic remedy
to nihilism and scepticism respond to the ethico-political dimensions of this
crisis? It is hard to see how a time-image cinema devoted to contemplative
seeing and the aesthetic-existential affirmation of existence, however
important in other ways, can at the same time offer an adequate response to
170 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

the ethical and political demands of our current normative crises (see
Bernstein 2012; Sinnerbrink 2016a: 72–76).
Deleuze’s conception of the possibilities afforded by a ‘cinematic thinking’,
the idea that film itself ‘thinks’ or that thought can be expressed through
moving images, continues a tradition of film-philosophical thinking
stretching from early cinema to the present. It offers a productive contrast
with the other major philosophical engagement with cinema that has shaped
contemporary film-philosophy, namely Stanley Cavell’s claim that film offers
a ‘moving image of scepticism’, a challenge to philosophy and site of ethical
engagement to which I now turn.
 7
Now, Voyager:
Cavell as Film-Philosopher

Chapter Outline
Viewing Worlds: Cavell 172
Why Does Film Matter? 173
Audience, Actor, Star 178
Screen ‘Types’ and Film Genres 180
Cinematic Mythmaking and the ‘End of the Myths’ 182
Film and Moral Perfectionism 182
Moral Perfectionism and Remarriage Comedy 185
Romantic Love and Moral Imperfectionism: Carol as
Melodrama of the Unknown Woman 188
Forking Paths: Cavell and Deleuze on the ‘End of Film’ 194

Stanley Cavell’s unique approach to cinema has put the relationship between
film and philosophy at the centre of philosophical inquiry into film.1 Cavell
was the first major Anglophone philosopher of note who dedicated a major
part of his work to cinema. As he remarks in Contesting Tears: The Hollywood
Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (1996), film has the capacity to alter
‘everything philosophy has said about reality and its representation, about art
and imitation, about greatness and conventionality, about judgment and
pleasure, about skepticism and transcendence, about language and expression’
(Cavell 1996: xii). Although some have taken Cavell’s remark as a provocation,
prompting criticisms of film’s philosophical pretensions and defences of its
philosophical contributions, it has rich implications for rethinking the

171
172 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

relationship between cinema and ethics. As D. N. Rodowick observes, Cavell

is ‘undoubtedly the contemporary philosopher most centrally concerned
with the problem of ethics in film and philosophy, above all through his
championing of an Emersonian moral perfectionism’ (Rodowick n.d.: 1–2).
Cavell’s cinematic ethics raises not only the question of scepticism and belief
but also that of the relationship between cinema, ethical self-transformation
and prevailing values within a given cultural-historical context.
In the following chapter, I consider Cavell’s unique and influential
contribution to film-philosophy: his claim that cinema offers an exemplary
case of staging and traversing scepticism, and his exploration of (Emersonian)
moral perfectionism, as enacted in particular cinematic genres, notably the
‘remarriage comedy’ and the ‘melodrama of the unknown woman’. Such
films, which Cavell interprets in detail, offer a response to (cultural and
moral) scepticism via their emphasis on open-ended, creative, individual as
well as collective self-transformation. I explore the ethical significance of
cinema as a response to scepticism, most vividly portrayed in the genres of
remarriage comedy and melodrama of the unknown woman, as a film-
philosophical engagement with the problem of modernity. It is not only the
successful pursuit of moral perfectionism that marks the ethical contribution
of these films, but the thwarting, breakdown or impossibility of realising this
path thanks to the normative context within which characters find
themselves. The latter tension or ambiguity, moreover, finds expression in
melodrama’s well-known aesthetic of ‘excess’ but also serves as a provocation
to critical reflection. The limits of Cavell’s moral perfectionist cinematic
ethics – namely, framing moral perfectionism via its communal and
democratic conditions, and thus making explicit the relation between ethics
and politics – shall be addressed by way of a contemporary ‘melodrama of
the unknown woman’ that is also a queer romantic drama: Todd Haynes’
Carol (2015). In this way, we can reflect upon the possibilities as well as the
limitations of Cavell’s film-philosophical engagement with varieties of
epistemic and moral scepticism. In conclusion, I explore parallels and
contrasts between Cavell and Deleuze on the question of cinema, belief and
how to respond to scepticism and nihilism.

Viewing Worlds: Cavell

Cavell is the other major thinker, along with Deleuze, who is credited with
motivating the contemporary philosophical turn in film theory (Elsaesser
 Cavell as Film-Philosopher 173

2019: 20–21; Elsaesser and Hagener 2010: 8–12; Sinnerbrink 2011b: 4–5). For
both thinkers, philosophy and film engage with problems – in particular,
scepticism and nihilism – that cut across cultural, aesthetic and ethico-
political domains. Both thinkers also argue that philosophy cannot merely be
‘applied’ to film as its object; rather, film and philosophy enter into a
transformative relationship that opens up new ways of thinking. As Rodowick
observes, Deleuze’s work on cinema (like that of Cavell), is concerned with a
single question: ‘how does a sustained meditation on film and film theory
illuminate the relation between image and thought?’ (1997: 5) From this
perspective, Deleuze and Cavell exemplify two distinctive paths for film-
philosophy: conceptualising cinema in response to the historico-philosophical
problem of a ‘loss of belief in the world’ (Deleuze); and acknowledging but
also responding to scepticism, both epistemic and moral, via the encounter
between film and philosophy, and showing how film can pose questions to
philosophy that philosophy is called upon to address (Cavell).

Why Does Film Matter?

First published in 1971, Cavell’s The World Viewed (1979) is a landmark
work in Anglophone philosophy of cinema, being one of the first
philosophical studies dedicated to the question of film ontology. Why is this
encounter between film and philosophy so important? Cavell’s answer is
simple: the experience of film affords us a way of contending with scepticism
– arguably, the problem of modern thought – thereby helping to restore
meaning in a culture that still struggles with philosophy’s disenfranchisement
of the ordinary. With the scientific revolution, transition to secularism, and
Enlightenment emphasis on rational autonomy, the ancient problem of
scepticism takes on a renewed urgency in the modern age. Modern
scepticism – the view that we can have no certain knowledge of the world;
that we remain metaphysically isolated from reality/Being – has troubled
philosophy since at least Descartes. Modern philosophy has of course tried
to vanquish scepticism by showing that objective knowledge is possible
(mathematics, logic, science); that we can approach certainty in some
respects about ourselves and the world, but that such claims always remain
open to sceptical doubt. Despite the success of modern rationalism in
conquering epistemic scepticism, the knowledge that really matters to us –
about the self, morality or our relations with others – remains frustratingly
uncertain.2
174 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

Film, for Cavell, literally (cinematically) ‘stages’ this sceptical concern.

The mystery of film is how it can present a visual world of movement and
time that captures aspects of our experience of reality but which also remains
intriguingly distinct and separate from it; a world that is present to me, that
I perceive and experience, but from which I am absent or disconnected. Film
shows or displays, moreover, the interplay of presence and absence in the
image; making present objects, figures and events that are absent, yet which
enjoy a ghostly presence in the image-world. It also shows, however, that this
image-world – which Cavell calls ‘the world viewed’ – is nonetheless
meaningful; a restoring of the sundered link with the world that has been
lost in modernity. From this point of view, Cavell argues, we can view film as
‘a moving image of skepticism’ (1979: 188). Echoing Bazin, the cinema,
whatever other enjoyments it affords, is motivated by our desire for
metaphysical connection with the world; it expresses ‘the wish for selfhood’,
like all art (Cavell 1979: 22). Yet it also shows us that we can find this retrieval
of meaning only in ordinary experience, however ambiguous or uncertain it
may be and however much the spectre of scepticism still haunts it.
Following the tradition of classical film theory, The World Viewed
commences with an inquiry into the ontology of the cinematic image. Unlike
traditional studies, however, Cavell opens with an autobiographical reflection
on his motivation for writing the book: to account for the shift from his
lived experience of the movies to his philosophical interest in their nature
(1979: 3–15). The movies matter to us, perhaps more than any other artform;
yet philosophy has hitherto ignored them, regarding them as trivial
entertainments (suggesting that philosophy has not yet been properly struck
by the provocation to thought that movies enact). Hinting that movies have
changed since the 1960s, Cavell situates his own reflections as an attempt to
marry philosophical reflection with aesthetic experience. He thus offers a
way of thinking about how film, like other arts, now exists ‘in the condition
of philosophy’ (1979: 14), having entered into a condition of modernism. The
latter, for Cavell, refers to the way that film seeks to renew itself by relating to
its own past; the way films seek ‘to invite and bear comparison’ with past
achievements of cinematic history (1979: 216).
So what is film? Inspired by the realism of Panofsky (1977 [1934]) and
Bazin (1967), who claimed that the medium of movies refers to ‘physical
reality as such’, or that it ‘communicates by way of what is real’ (Bazin 1967:
110), Cavell considers the ontological relationship between photography
and film. What Panofsky and Bazin mean, Cavell explains, is that the medium
of film has a photographic basis, and that photographs are of a world (1979:
 Cavell as Film-Philosopher 175

16). When applied to film, their question becomes: ‘What happens to reality
when it is projected and screened?’ (Cavell 1979: 16) This question is linked
with the question of how we experience reality more generally, not only how
we perceive it but how we interpret, remember or imagine it. As any filmgoer
will attest, we recollect films as well (or as poorly) as we do events in our
past, or even our dreams. Images from films seen many years past can still
haunt me; some images, scenes or characters can become more familiar and
significant to us than other people or even one’s own memories. So what are
we experiencing when we watch a film?
Unlike painting – which represents something in the world – photography
and film, for Cavell, do not represent so much as ‘capture’ things; they present
us,‘we want to say, with the things themselves’ (Cavell 1979: 17). We recognise
here Cavell’s version of what we earlier discussed as the ‘transparency thesis’:
that cinematic images are not representations but presentations of what they
depict, a view based on the claim that (pre-digital) photography is a realist
medium that retains an ontological link between image and referent. Now, a
photograph of a landscape is clearly not the same thing as a landscape
painting. A portrait of me is a likeness or visual representation; but a
photograph is of me (not just like me). I don’t say, ‘That’s a good likeness of
me in front of the Sydney Opera House’; I say, ‘That’s me in front of the
Sydney Opera House’ (likewise for the Opera House). Should we then say
that photographs present us with ‘the thing itself ’? But a photo of the Opera
House is no building. So what is the ontological link between a photograph
and what it depicts? It is not a likeness nor is it like a replica, according to
Cavell; it is something more ontologically mysterious – a trace of the past, of
a presence that is no longer present for us. In a photograph, an image with its
own aura or magic, we see things that are not present. What does this mean?
The photo is present to me; but what it depicts is not. Cavell draws a
parallel with sound recordings: when I hear, say, Billie Holiday singing
‘Stormy Weather’, am I hearing her voice, or merely the sound of her voice?
The distinction might seem spurious. It would not matter whether I was
attending a live performance or watching a filmed recording of her, you
might reply, I would still be hearing the sound of Holiday’s voice. When I
listen to a recording of Billie Holiday, I am listening to a transcription of her
voice at the time when it was recorded. What I hear, however, is a trace of the
past, a singular performance (Billie Holiday performing ‘Stormy Weather’ at
a particular time, in a particular performance), now reproduced in the
present (as I listen with pleasure on my stereo). So there is no problem saying
that audio recordings reproduce the sound of something that is no longer
176 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

present (an instrument, a voice). Can we say the same of photographs?

Cavell argues that photographs do not reproduce a ‘sight’ (or ‘look’) of
something no longer present; rather, they present something that is hard to
name, for which a word appears lacking in our language (1979: 19). Objects
do not have ‘sights’ in a way that would account for their likeness in an image
(though Plato may disagree). Nor can we say, as some philosophers might,
that photos reproduce ‘sense-data’ (my visual sensation of something). For in
that case we could no longer distinguish between the photo and the thing
photographed. Is a photograph, as Bazin suggests, therefore like a ‘visual
mould’ of an object? Not really, because the original, Cavell observes, remains
present in the image. Photographic images, to be sure, are manufactured or
‘constructed’ images of the world; but what they capture, mechanically and
automatically, is the world itself, not a mere likeness of it. It is this mechanism
or automatism in photography’s capturing and reproduction of images that
finally satisfies, as Bazin put it, ‘our obsession with realism’ (quoted in Cavell
1979: 20).
Against contemporary philosophers of film, whose concerns (alas!) are
still primarily epistemic and ontological, Cavell, like Bazin, points to the
existential human need that motivates our creation of images (whether in
painting, photography or film). Photography, Cavell remarks, satisfied a
wish, growing in the West since the Reformation, ‘to escape subjectivity and
metaphysical isolation – a wish for the power to reach this world, having for
so long tried, at last hopelessly, to manifest fidelity to another’ (1979: 21).
After the advent of nihilism or what Nietzsche called ‘the death of God’,
painting and photography – and later, film – aimed to re-establish our sense
of connection with the world. These arts aim at a sense of presentness; not
just of the world’s presence to us, but more pressingly, a sense of our presence
to it (Cavell 1979: 22). During the course of Western modernity, despite or
perhaps due to the rise of science and technology, consciousness became
estranged from reality, interposing ‘subjectivity between us and our
presentness to the world’ (Cavell 1979: 22). When subjectivity became what
is most properly present to us, individuality became metaphysical isolation.
Hence the route taken to connect with the world was via subjectivity. This is
the path of romanticism, whether in art/literature (Blake, Wordsworth) or in
philosophy (Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein); a movement that Cavell
sums up as ‘the natural struggle between representation and the
acknowledgment of our subjectivity’ (1979: 22).
Here Cavell shows his allegiance with the romanticist response to
scepticism or nihilism. Visual art, for Cavell, is precisely a response to
 Cavell as Film-Philosopher 177

scepticism, a human expression of selfhood against metaphysical isolation,

and thus a way of revivifying our sundered sense of connection with the
world. Photography overcomes subjectivity in a manner unavailable to
painting, namely through automatism, which is to say, ‘by removing the
human agent from the task of reproduction’ (Cavell 1979: 23). It maintains
the presentness of the world by removing us from it; the reality of a photo is
present to me whereas I remain absent from it. Photos depict a world that I
can know and see but to which I am not present; and such a world is a ‘world
past’, a past world (Cavell 1979: 23). Film or the art of moving images inherits
and projects this world; a screened world or ‘world viewed’ that is present to
us but for which we are not. With this insight into the modern condition –
the age of the ‘world-image’ (as Heidegger puts it) or ‘the world viewed’ (as
Cavell does) – we have an answer to the question as to why movies matter
philosophically.
Cavell develops further this contrast between film and photography by
considering the different relationships that painting and photography bear
to reality. It makes no sense to ask what lies behind an object in a painting,
whereas one can always do so with a photograph. A painting, in this regard,
encloses or delimits a world; the limits of the painting (its frame) are the
limits of its world (to paraphrase Wittgenstein). Photographs, on the other
hand, do depict an aspect of the world; we can always ask what lies beyond
the limits of the image, beyond its frame, since the cropping of the image by
the camera cuts out aspects of the world that could nonetheless have been
photographed (Cavell 1979: 24). A painting is a world (J. W. Turner’s ocean);
a photograph is of the world (Ansel Adam’s landscape) (Cavell 1979: 24).
Photographs imply the existence of a world beyond the image, whereas
paintings depict a world within the image-frame.3
Moving pictures, moreover, screen photographic images of the world: a
world that is screened, supporting nothing but a projection of light, which
Cavell takes in at least two senses. The silver screen both ‘screens’ me from
that world (I am not present to it); and it ‘screens’ the world from me (removes
its physical existence) (Cavell 1979: 24). Unlike a photographic frame, the
screened world has no frame or border. Rather, from a phenomenological
point of view, the film-world has indefinitely extendible and flexible
boundaries, thus allowing filmmakers to avail themselves of all the devices of
‘variable framing’ (indexing, bracketing and scaling) (Carroll 2008: 124 ff.).
The camera, for Cavell, can extend the ‘frame’ of the film in many ways; it can
focus on some aspects or objects, calling attention to salient aspects of
objects, events or characters within the film-world, or it can just ‘let the world
178 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

happen’ (Cavell 1979: 25). As far as defining the medium is concerned, Cavell
proposes the descriptive definition of film as ‘a succession of automatic world-
projections’ (1979: 72; italics in original): film captures movement (and time)
in the world, within the image and between images composing a film
(‘succession’), and it does so ‘automatically’, without direct human
intervention, that is, mechanically, thanks to its photographic character. Film
captures the ontological reality of a ‘world’, even a fictional one, by presenting
it to us, who remain absent to it, photographically. And it does so via a
‘projection’ on screen, projecting human figures in a world from which we
remain forever absent, thus creating a phenomenological and aesthetic
rupture, as well as continuity, with experience (Cavell 1979: 73).

Audience, Actor, Star

As Panofsky noted back in 1934, cinema introduces important differences
not only in theatrical versus cinematic performance but also between theatre
and cinema audiences (1977). In the theatre, we are not present to the actors
but they are present to us; actors are of course aware of the audience but
must, by convention, ignore their existence in order to maintain the theatrical
illusion (unless breaking ‘the fourth wall’). In the cinema, however, we are
‘mechanically absent’ to the film actors (Cavell 1979: 25), thanks to the
manner in which cinematic performance is captured on film. I am present,
not to something happening (on the stage), but to something that has
happened, which I can now absorb (like a memory or a dream) (Cavell 1979:
26).
All the same, film actors can still address the camera; direct address is not
uncommon, whether in modernist or comic film (Bergman’s Summer with
Monica (1953), Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962), The Marx Brothers in Duck
Soup (1933) or Frank Underwood [Kevin Spacey] in House of Cards (2013–
2018)). In these cases, however, we remain ‘mechanically absent’ from the
world of the film even if the screen performer appears to address us ‘directly’
(it is ‘any-viewer-whomsoever’ being addressed, rather than me specifically).
Is this just because theatre viewing involves ‘live’ performance, in the
presence of real actors, rather than a cinematic performance of actors
recorded on film? Although Bazin claimed that we are in the presence of
actors on screen, as though seeing him or her via a relay of mirrors, for
Cavell the situation is more subtle and complex (live television is probably
closer to Bazin’s ‘prosthetic image’ or ‘relayed mirrors’ scenario). Cinematic
 Cavell as Film-Philosopher 179

images depict human figures; but what does this mean? Projected images of
human beings – of ‘a human something. . . unlike anything else we know’
(Cavell 1979: 26) – raise ticklish (ontological) questions specific to the
medium of film.
Take Bette Davis as Margo Channing in Mankiewicz’s All About Eve
(1950). She is clearly, even vividly, present to us on screen; but we are not
present to her, for ontological and mechanical reasons. So what (or rather,
who) is thus present to us? Is it Margo Channing or Bette Davis? ‘Both’, one
wants to say. This mysterious coalescence of character and actor in cinematic
performance is, however, far from obvious. Carroll claims that moving
images depict actors performing characters, where such characters are
projections (cinematic, aesthetic and dramatic, we might say) based on the
actor’s performance. We see Bette Davis on screen and at the same time
behold Margo Channing warning us about the bumpy night ahead. But are
things so clear cut? The paradox of cinematic performance, if you will, is
how actor and character can be co-present within a cinematic performance:
how can I be engaged by Margo Channing, yet also perceiving Bette Davis, a
‘doubling’ that might appear to interfere with my immersive involvement in
the fictional world? On the other hand, if actors were merely living visual
props for viewers to imagine characters for themselves, as Walton (1990) and
others have argued, then we would not identify screen actors and characters
as closely as we do. Imagine, for example, Joan Crawford playing Margo
Channing; would it still be ‘Margo Channing’ that we are imagining?
(Assuming that what we know of ‘Margo Channing’ of course depends on
what we experience in watching All About Eve). That Margo Channing (one
wants to say ‘the Margo Channing’) is indissociably linked with Bette Davis’
stunning performance (as ‘Mildred Pierce’ is indissociably linked with Joan
Crawford). Joan Crawford as ‘Margo Channing’ would not just be a different
actress, hence a different performance; she would be another embodiment
of ‘Margo Channing’, a different character than the one we currently know.4
Cavell argues that stage actors work themselves into a role and eventually
‘yield’ to the character; the actor ‘incarnates’ the character, playing a role that
is analogous to a position on a chessboard or in a sporting game (1979: 27–
28). The film actor, by contrast, ‘takes on’ a character, drawing on his or her
temperament, skills, endowments and previous acting roles, but only
accepting ‘what fits’ for the purposes of a particular cinematic performance
(1979: 28).5 The screen performance is the projection of a character ‘study’ in
which the actor’s presence continues to ‘show through’ his or her performance.
The character is not fully ‘incarnated’ but subordinated to the actor’s screen
180 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

presence. As much as I enjoy Margo Channing’s antics, I am always conscious

of Bette Davis’ performance, and her cinematic presence is what charges
Margo’s character with such dramatic brio. Cinematic performance involves
a complex aesthetic interplay between actor and character (and the actor’s
previous cinematic roles), which is why a film actor’s physiognomy and
gestures, his or her capacity for expressive cinematic ‘projection’, are far more
important than traditional stage-acting craft.

Screen ‘Types’ and Film Genres

The film ‘star’ thus differs from the stage performer in a number of ways. We
follow successive incarnations of the screen actor (rather than his or her
characters) from film to film (not repeated performances of a dramatic
character, as on the stage). As Cavell observes, after The Maltese Falcon, ‘Bogart’
means ‘the figure created in a given set of films’ (like The Maltese Falcon (1941),
Casablanca (1942) or The Big Sleep (1946)). Had those films not been made,
Bogart as we know him would not exist (even if he had made other films) and
the name ‘Bogart’ would not mean what it does (Cavell 1979: 28). Film stars,
unlike stage actors, exist essentially for the camera, hence for our appreciation
of them on screen; the creation of a (screen) performer, moreover, is also the
creation of a recognisable character ‘type’ (the vamp, the hard-boiled detective,
the criminal mastermind, the action hero, the romantic heroine, the alienated
anti-hero and so on). Screen acting is thus inseparable from the great cycles of
screen narrative that we call genres (Cavell 1979: 29 ff.). Of all the possible
aesthetic paths it might have taken, why did film develop into conventional
narrative cycles (genres)? We cannot explain this by simply referring to the
technical or material properties of the medium (as Bazin claimed). Nor is it a
matter of a cultural or ideological determinism that dictated the hegemonic
rise of Hollywood-style narrative; after all, the ‘Hollywood style’ has been
hybridised and transformed in multifarious ways (Bollywood, for example).
Rather, the medium, Cavell maintains, has to be created or invented artistically
by making various possibilities of the medium significant, that is, by discovering
new ways of making meaning via the inheritance and transformation of
cinematic traditions (1979: 68 ff.).
From this point of view, the medium of film comes into its own when the
possibilities of screen acting in conventional narrative become explicitly
articulated. Indeed, screen actors embody an individuated type: an
individuality that is distinctive from, but also representative of, the ordinary
 Cavell as Film-Philosopher 181

individual with his or her dominant social role; and an individuated

expression of the ‘myth of singularity’, the narrative fantasy of an individuality
that could withstand fate, social circumstance, the materiality of the world
itself (Cavell 1979: 35–36). Such types feature in, and support, the enactment
and propagation of cinematic genres; secular expressions of mythic narrative
cycles, genres constituted a founding artistic discovery, which is to say
invention, of the medium of movies.
Indeed, the emergence of narrative cycles as genres populated by types
is an expression of the democratising tendency of film, its inherent
egalitarianism (Cavell 1979: 34–35): the visual equivalence between human
figures, objects and settings appearing on the screen (see also Rancière 2006:
8–11). The invention of the medium of film means developing genres
expressing types that exploit the various affordances or ‘automatisms’ of film
in artistically satisfying ways. Does Cavell fall foul here of Carroll’s rigid ban
on ‘medium essentialism’? Not quite; there is a relationship between the
medium of film and its artistic possibilities, but this is a relationship of
creative invention, of ‘finding as founding’ in an Emerson spirit, rather than
any specious ontological determinism or rigid aesthetic teleology.
As illuminating examples, Cavell cites two classic cinematic comic types
(Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton), whose cinematic artistry relies on two
essential features of cinematic medium. These features together comprise
what he calls ‘the world viewed’: 1) the projection of the human image upon
the screen (the screening of the actor as type or individuality rather than as
a particular character); and 2) the ontological equivalence of the human figure
in relation to its physical environment (in relation to the world of inanimate
objects, of nature and of larger social forces). Both features of the medium
make visual comedy possible on screen. Chaplin uses the ‘projected visibility’
of the human image to fine aesthetic effect, his comic tics and gestures
expressing ‘the sublime comprehensibility of his natural choreography’; and
he uses the ontological equality between people and objects to great comic
effect, a levelling that permits ‘his Proustian or Jamesian relationship with
Murphy beds and flights of stairs and with cases on runners on tables on
rollers’ – a Nietzschean heroism of survival, of tightrope walking across the
abyss (Cavell 1979: 37). Keaton, too, artfully exploits this projected visibility
and ontological equality in his daring comic escapades; his predicaments
imbue his melancholy countenance with a ‘philosophical mood’, while also
expressing the ‘Olympian resourcefulness of his body’, qualities that together
render Keaton perhaps ‘the only constantly beautiful and continuously
hilarious man ever seen’ (Cavell 1979: 37).6
182 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

Cinematic Mythmaking and

the ‘End of the Myths’
Unlike many contemporary philosophers of film, for whom science holds
the key to understanding cinema, Cavell readily acknowledges its ‘mythic’
quality; its enduring fascination with the creation of images of human
beings, and its role as the modern, secular expression of a cultural desire for
mythmaking.7 Despite their disagreements over the medium, Cavell accepts
Bazin’s account of the ‘myth of total cinema’ (Bazin 1967: 17–28). This myth
expresses the ‘idea of and wish for the world re-created in its own image’
(Cavell 1979: 39), which film achieves ‘automatically’ through the automatisms
of the moving image (the artistic realisation of the various possibilities
afforded by the medium). Film fulfils the mythic dream – evident in Plato’s
Ring of Gyges as much as in Freud’s voyeur – of invisible visibility (being
able to see all, yet not being seen by others). It satisfies this wish or desire,
moreover, without any involvement on our part; I do not have to do anything,
yet my wish is automatically satisfied, by magic, as it were (Cavell 1979: 39).
Cinema grants us a power of seeing all while absolving us of responsibility
for this power. This magical-technical realisation of the myth of invisible
visibility, film’s ironic inversion of modern scepticism, thereby becomes ‘an
expression of modern privacy or anonymity’ (Cavell 1979: 40). The ‘world’s
projection’ through movies thus parallels, but also questions, our modern
sceptical orientation; our ‘inability to know’ ourselves, others or the world
(Cavell 1979: 40–41). Film ‘screens’ the fact that we experience ourselves as
‘displaced’ from the world, ‘naturalising’ this condition of existential
displacement from our environment, rendering it meaningful, even
pleasurable.

Film and Moral Perfectionism

In his more recent work elaborating cinematic responses to scepticism,
Cavell focuses on the remarriage comedy and the melodrama of the
unknown woman from the ethical perspective of moral perfectionism (Cavell
1981, 1996, 2004). We can define the latter as a post-foundational, non-
teleological conception of ethics that foregrounds the creative ethical task of
individuals in shaping their conduct and composing their lives as open-
ended projects. Drawing on the thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson (the
 Cavell as Film-Philosopher 183

American Nietzsche), Cavell suggests that narrative cinema is ideally suited

for exploring characters embarking on a quest for self-knowledge or
experience of creative self-transformation; the ethical process, as Nietzsche
described, of ‘becoming who one is’ independent of canonical moral rules or
abstract theoretical reflection. What is distinctive about moral perfectionism,
from a philosophical perspective, is its eschewal of universalist moral
principles, a utilitarian calculus of consequences, or the cultivation of
culturally valorised moral virtues, in favour of an individualist, experimental,
‘existential’ commitment to freedom and autonomous self-transformation.
Moral perfectionism’s creative response to ethics in the absence of
metaphysical foundations, rationalistic calculation or rigid moral principles,
makes it an ideal ethical response to scepticism on the moral-cultural plane.
So what is moral perfectionism? According to Cavell, it is not a distinct
moral theory but rather a dimension of moral thinking or ‘register of moral
life’ that can be found in a variety of philosophical texts and traditions (from
Plato’s Republic, Emerson’s essays and Nietzsche’s aphorisms, to Heidegger’s
Being and Time and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations) (Cavell 2004:
12–13). We can describe it as an ‘anti-foundationalist’ way of conceptualising
ethical experience, one that has a practical, ‘existential’ emphasis on the
importance of making oneself intelligible to others, of transforming oneself
throughout one’s life and of practising ‘philosophy as a way of life’ (Cavell
2004: 13; see Hadot 1995, 2005). Perhaps because of its broader cultural
significance, however, moral perfectionism remains a neglected way of
thinking ethics within academic philosophy compared with the dominant
theories of morality (Kantian universalism, utilitarianism and Aristotelian
virtue ethics). Although it reaches back to traditions of ancient Greek
thought, it also resonates with modern strands of romantic-existentialist
thinking. In this respect, it stands in stark contrast with the major traditions
of moral philosophy and more academic forms of moral inquiry.
Cavell’s account of moral perfectionism thus offers an alternative
perspective on prevailing moral theories, one focused on achieving self-
understanding and ethical self-transformation. It advocates a creative
shaping of one’s own existence without recourse to pre-given moral
principles, social conventions or universal duties. At the same time, it does
not deny the possibility of scepticism but in responding to it strives to avoid
overly speculative metaphysical commitments that dog other forms of moral
thinking (which tend to collapse into scepticism or even nihilism). Unlike
Plato’s conception of perfectionism (a teleological account of striving to
attain a transcendent ideal), Cavell’s ‘non-teleological’ moral perfectionism
184 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

involves an autonomous, practical, ‘existential’ quest to become what one is,

to approach, as Emerson put it, one’s ‘unattained but attainable self ’:

In Emerson and Thoreau’s sense of human existence, there is no question

of reaching a final state of the soul but only and endlessly taking the next step
to what Emerson calls ‘an unattained but attainable self ’ – a self that is always
and never ours – a step that turns us not from bad to good, or wrong to right,
but from confusion and constriction toward self-knowledge and sociability.
Cavell 2004: 13

For Cavell, moral perfectionism is the mode of thinking that best defines
the moral-ethical significance of the two genres of Hollywood film analysed
in Pursuits of Happiness and Contesting Tears: the remarriage comedy and
the melodrama of the unknown woman. These films focus on couples
seeking acknowledgment and self-education as to their desire, transforming
themselves in a manner that can be either comic or tragic. These are films
that remain related to earlier dramatic and literary traditions (Shakespearean
comedy, 19th-century social-domestic drama) but that do not fit readily in
any of the three major categories of academic moral philosophy (Kantian
universalism, utilitarianism or virtue ethics). They are films that explore the
question of critical self-transformation, the characters’ desire to reinvent
themselves and to explore the possibility of a transfigured world in which
new ways of being with one another might be possible. In this regard, they
remain closely related to Emersonian perfectionism, which does not strive
for a utopian ideal, nor dismiss the existing world as inherently meaningless.
Rather, in calling these films ‘Emersonian’, Cavell suggests that they
participate in the perfectionist quest for self-transformation within a world
that could be itself transformed, however partially, by reinventing our
relations with others within a democratic community.
So how does moral perfectionism relate to film? We can identify at least
three strands: 1) through cinema’s egalitarian capacity to thematise and reveal
the ordinary in all its rich texture of meaning; 2) through the development
of narrative film and of specific genres that explore the themes of self-
transformation, acknowledging others and either reconciling with or
transforming the world; and 3) through film’s capacity to transfigure human
figures as depicted on screen, to capture and convey emotional expression
and psychological complexity through gesture and performance. All three
aspects are at play in the genres of remarriage comedy and the melodrama of
the unknown woman. Indeed, it is through these films’ cinematic presentation
of singular characters confronting the ordinary moral challenges of love and
 Cavell as Film-Philosopher 185

friendship, freedom and fulfilment, recognition and reinvention, that an

ethical experience of moral perfectionism becomes vividly manifest.

Moral Perfectionism and

Remarriage Comedy
As remarked, Cavell’s two major philosophical works on film explore two
related Hollywood genres, the remarriage comedy and the melodrama of the
unknown woman (which Cavell is the first to identify). These genres
transform the theme of marriage, either as a utopian possibility of mutual
acknowledgment in the comedies, or as a block to the woman’s quest for self-
knowledge in the melodramas. In his earlier books, however, Cavell does not
explicitly link either genre with Emersonian moral perfectionism, although
Emerson’s thought remains, as ever, a constant reference point. Rather, he
draws attention to the manner in which such films thematise their condition
as visual media, their inheritance of literary and dramatic traditions, their
relationships with other films and constitution of a genre, and their reflection
on morally relevant themes, including the Emersonian critique of conformity
and the possibility of an egalitarian relationship between the sexes. It is only
in Cities of Words that Cavell explicitly recasts both genres as participating in
the philosophical discourse of moral perfectionism present in modern
culture since Shakespeare and Milton, Ibsen and Eliot, Emerson and
Nietzsche.
What are remarriage comedies? Cavell (2005b: 136) addresses these films
as a particular subgenre, exemplified by a selection of ‘seven talkies made in
Hollywood between 1934 and 1949’: It Happened One Night (1934), The
Awful Truth (1937), Bringing Up Baby (1938), His Girl Friday (1940), The
Philadelphia Story (1940), The Lady Eve (1941), and Adam’s Rib (1944).
Although they share many features with other romantic comedies, these
‘remarriage comedies’ are also distantly related to Shakespearean romances
like The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. Unlike classical comedy and romance,
where a young couple is shown ‘overcoming obstacles to their love and at the
end achieving marriage’, remarriage comedies commence with a mature
couple, getting or threatening to get their divorce, so that ‘the drive of the
narrative is to get the original pair together again’ (Cavell 2004: 4). They are
distinguished from other versions of romantic comedy (related to what
Northrop Frye called ‘new comedy’) in which a male character pursues his
186 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

beloved and battles familial and social barriers to their desired marriage.
Resonating with Frye’s account of ‘old comedy’, in the remarriage comedies
it is the woman who is the focus of the narrative, except that now she embarks
on a ‘sentimental journey’ to educate herself as to her desire, deciding
whether the man in question is a suitable partner for her project of self-
transformation. These films explore the concept of conversation, the ethical
idea of marriage as a ‘meet and happy conversation’ (as Milton put it in his
famous tract on divorce). They explore forms of social and personal exchange
in which each partner acknowledges the other in his or her uniqueness, yet
where each also provides the other with an educative perspective as to the
possibilities allowing for a transformation of his or her self-identity. This
raises the question of whether the relationship of equality between the sexes
envisaged by the couple is realisable within the social, cultural and ethical
norms of the community in which the couple find themselves. The utopian
aspect of these comedies thus lies not only in their exploration of a mutually
transformative relationship between the sexes, but also in imagining a form
of democratic community in which self-reliance and interpersonal intimacy
can be mediated with social freedom and political equality.
The remarriage motif, as Cavell remarks, is prompted by the changed
situation of marriage, which is ‘no longer assured or legitimised by church or
state or sexual compatibility or children’ but rather by the ‘willingness for
remarriage, a way of continuing to affirm the happiness of one’s initial leap’
(Cavell 2005b: 137). Marriage, in other words, is at once a romantic and an
ethical relationship sustained by an existential will to repeat one’s commitment
to seek happiness through mutual acknowledgment with an equal. The focus
is not only on the question of marriage but on how the latter is linked with the
self-education of the woman. Through these experiences, she learns the true
nature of her desire, seeking to establish her self-identity, and openness
towards the future, through a process of mutual acknowledgment between
her and her partner. The couple’s trials are carried comically thanks to virtuoso
dialogue and artful performance; their mutual adventures take them from the
city to the country (the Shakespearean ‘green world’), where the obstacles to
self-realisation through acknowledgment, hence to remarriage, are overcome.
What the couple discover, finally, is that they are indeed ‘made for each other’,
but only after having committed themselves, through ‘happy and meet
conversation’, to educating themselves, and thus transforming and reinventing
themselves, in felicitous partnership with one another.
By contrast, melodramas of the unknown woman, such as Ophüls’ Letter
from an Unknown Woman (1948), Cukor’s Gaslight (1944), Rapper’s Now,
 Cavell as Film-Philosopher 187

Voyager (1942) and King Vidor’s Stella Dallas (1937), appear to negate key
elements of the remarriage comedy, notably the institution of marriage itself.
Within these films, the idea of marriage as a route to self-creation is
‘transcended and perhaps reconceived’ (Cavell 2004: 6). Indeed, the route to
self-creation is not through marriage but involves, rather, a ‘metamorphosis’:
a radical, ‘melodramatic’ change in the identity of the woman that takes place
independently of any conversation or marital commerce with the man, and
which draws its nourishment from the otherwise marginalised ‘world of
women’ (Cavell 2004: 6). It is the woman’s education towards self-reliance,
and her subsequent rejection of marriage, that stands in sharpest contrast
with the remarriage comedy. Nonetheless, both genres share an underlying
commitment to (Emersonian) moral perfectionism, namely, by ‘working out
the problematic of self-reliance and conformity, or of hope and despair’, in
relation to the task of individual self-transformation (Cavell 1996: 9).
Cavell insists, moreover, that we can accommodate the contrasts between
the comedies and the melodramas within the moral perfectionist frame, the
former by offering an idealised egalitarian version of marriage, the latter by
questioning traditional conceptions of marriage in relation to the task of
achieving independence beyond socially allotted roles. The remarriage
comedies ‘envisage a relation of equality between human beings’, which
Emerson described as ‘a relation of rightful attraction, of expressiveness, and
of joy’; the melodramas of the unknown woman, by contrast, envision ‘the
phase of the problematic of self-reliance that demands this expressiveness
and joy first in relation to oneself ’ (Cavell 1996: 9). The latter involves a kind
of excessive or ‘melodramatic’ doubt, or passage through scepticism, that
leads the woman beyond sceptical despair and towards a fragile recovery of
herself and the world. Both subgenres allegorise these aspects of scepticism
and its overcoming in relation to the problem of marriage. Both traverse the
possibility of sceptical doubt over our relationship to the world, our capacity
for self-knowledge, our ability to know and understand one another, through
comic and tragic explorations of romantic relationships, understood as
expressions of the potential for acknowledgment within the everyday and the
domestic. These are some of the reasons behind Cavell’s otherwise surprising
claim that, contrary to appearances, scepticism, understood here as ‘the threat
to the ordinary’, should show up in fiction’s favourite threats to forms of
marriage, namely ‘in forms of melodrama and of tragedy’ (Cavell 1996: 10).
As critics have remarked, this is one of the more questionable aspects of
Cavell’s reading of the melodramas and romances, particularly with regard
to the question of gender relations (Sinnerbrink 2016a: 123–125; Willett
188 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

2008; Williams 1984). Indeed, I would modify Cavell’s claim and assert that,
if melodrama is the negation of remarriage comedy, then within melodrama
the moral perfectionist path is blocked or thwarted (the possibility of finding
and following such an ethical path towards independence is put into
question). The woman’s quest for self-transformation is compromised within
this world, which itself becomes the object of a critical reflection; the
constraints and conflicts to which she is subject, moreover, generate the
hyperbolic emotionalism and aesthetic excess for which the genre is famous.

Romantic Love and Moral

Imperfectionism: Carol as
Melodrama of the
Unknown Woman
One way to explore this claim further, and to suggest how a revised moral
perfectionism might work, is to offer a Cavellian perspective on a contemporary
‘melodrama of the unknown woman’. Todd Haynes’ Carol (2015) is a critically
acclaimed romance and melodrama based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel The
Price of Salt (published in 1952 under a pseudonym and republished in 1990
under Highsmith’s name with the title Carol). The screenplay was written by
Phyllis Nagy (who had been friends with Highsmith) and adapts the novel
brilliantly for the screen. Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara star as the romantic
couple: Carol Aird, a glamorous society woman and mother undergoing
a difficult divorce, and Therese Belivet, a younger woman working part-
time in the toy department of Frankendale’s (a Department Store based on
Bloomingdale’s) while pursuing photography. As a lesbian romance combining
elements of the maternal melodrama, the film shifts focus from the perspective
of the naïve Therese towards that of the sophisticated Carol, while exploring
different facets of their relationship. Both women, however, are shown in their
shared vulnerability, subtly articulated passion and suppressed desire, trying
to find ways to express their love within a world that refuses to recognise or
legitimate it. The film’s elegant visual style – its evocative use of colour, décor,
costume, music and setting – provide expressive aesthetic means to articulate
the emotional dynamics of a relationship that defies traditional prohibitions
on permissible paths to perfectionist self-transformation through romantic
love for, and between, women.
 Cavell as Film-Philosopher 189

Set in New York City in 1952–1953, but also venturing further afield into
the Midwest (Ohio), the film explores not only the life-transforming
experience of falling in love, but also the challenges of same-sex love in a
world where it remains suppressed and stigmatised. The film features many
elements that we can identify with Cavell’s moral perfectionism, notably the
quest for the characters to transform themselves, to choose how they want to
live, what kind of people they aspire to be, as a romantic couple struggling to
articulate their love within the conservative constraints of 1950s New York
society. Chiming with Cavell’s observations of the genre, both women
undergo a ‘metamorphosis’: a radical, ‘melodramatic’ change in identity that
takes place independently of any conversation or marital commerce with a
male character, and which is centred on the otherwise marginalised ‘world of
women’ (Cavell 2004: 6). As a melodramatic romance with a queer perspective
(McKee 2018; James 2018; V. L. Smith 2018; White 2015), it offers a way of
exploring what we might call moral imperfectionism: the difficulties involved
in pursuing a moral perfectionist path of self-transformation within a socially
constrained, morally prejudicial, imperfect social and cultural world.
Cavell’s account of the melodrama of the unknown woman acknowledges
that it offers something akin to the ‘negative’ version of moral perfectionism.
A woman who is both unknown (to herself) and to us (as various aspects of
her character or motivation remained concealed) undergoes a transformative
experience in which she begins to explore who she is, and has to choose what
kind of life she will lead, typically either rejecting the path of marriage,
questioning her traditional feminine role as mother, or choosing to venture
on a new way of life on her own terms, independent of marriage or the world
of men. Unlike remarriage comedies, in which the woman needs to choose
which partner will help educate her as to her desire, help her find her new
identity, in the melodrama of the unknown woman she attempts to find a new
path that might allow her to reconcile motherhood with independence,
romantic relationships with family or career, personal authenticity with social
acknowledgment or moral obligations. The women in these melodramas
experiment with the possibilities available within their social world to become
‘something else besides a mother’ (to quote Stella in Stella Dallas). Although
Cavell identifies this genre or subgenre within classic Hollywood melodramas
of the 1930s and 1940s, it remains a feature of melodramas that other critics
and theorists have explored in regard to more recent European and American
cinema (Rushton 2010, 2014; Staat 2016).
Many of these elements are present in Todd Haynes’ Carol, which focuses
on the passionate but thwarted romantic relationship between a wealthy and
190 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

experienced New York woman trying to leave her marriage and an

inexperienced young salesgirl cum photographer making her way in the
world. The film presents its story initially from the perspective of Therese –
as in Highsmith’s novel – but gradually shifts perspective towards Carol,
whose difficult battle with her patriarchal husband Harge [Kyle Chandler]
over the custody of their daughter Rinny threatens to destroy the women’s
relationship and casts Carol in an increasingly vulnerable role. We follow the
subtle but unmistakable signs of desire shaping their meeting – the chance
encounter at a department store toy counter at Christmas, their exchanged
glances signalling both attraction and uncertainty, Carol asking Therese for
advice on what to buy her young daughter for Christmas, leaving her leather
gloves on the counter ‘by accident’ – and then follow the blossoming of their
relationship, however furtive and hidden, until its near destruction thanks to
the efforts of Carol’s jealous and wounded husband. If this had been a more
traditional or conventional ‘melodrama of the unknown woman’, as those
Cavell studies, the story would likely have followed Carol’s trajectory, her
failed attempts to find happiness in some alternative kind of life, having
sacrificed her daughter and, most likely, her hopes of happiness for a
tragically ‘impossible’ love.
As a lesbian love story, however, Carol combines these elements with
romance, the experience of love with its anxieties, ecstasies and obsessions,
exploring how romantic love between two women might be possible within an
intolerant, prejudicial world.8 As remarked, Therese is an ingénue, still
unformed, finding her way in life, attracted to, but not quite comprehending,
the magnetic allure of the more experienced, worldly Carol. Both women
undergo a shared experience of love that is profound and transformative, and
both come to understand themselves and the possibility of a shared life
together that will require invention and independence. The fact that this is a
lesbian love affair, one that challenges many 1950s boundaries of moral
prejudice and social convention – not only concerning heterosexuality but
boundaries of age, class, parenthood and social experience – makes the
romance between Therese and Carol both transformative and tragic, passionate
and political. The film also combines elements of the ‘remarriage’ motif with
the melodrama, with the younger woman having to decide whether to see
Carol again after the seeming demise of their relationship, whether to recommit
to their love and live together as a couple, the film ending with a moment of
possible reconciliation and fragile sense of shared futurity.
I have chosen to focus on Carol because it raises an important issue that
has dogged Cavell’s accounts of the more ‘traditional’ (heterosexual)
 Cavell as Film-Philosopher 191

melodramas and remarriage comedies: the asymmetry between the woman’s

moral perfectionist quest or transformative ethical trajectory and the man’s
relatively static, unchanging status and experience, as though she has to
learn the nature of her desire in order to become who she is, whereas the
male characters, by and large, do not (see Sinnerbrink 2016a: 123–125). As a
lesbian romance, there are elements of the melodrama of the unknown
woman in both protagonists: not only Therese but Carol too is presented as,
and to an extent remains, an unknown woman but one who clearly also
undergoes a profound shift or transformation of perspective thanks to her
relationship with Therese. Both women are caught between worlds: Therese
between the worlds of photography, journalism, the student bohemian set
and Carol’s world of social privilege and bourgeois propriety; and Carol
between the worlds of motherhood, married respectability, and the
possibility of an alternative world that neither she nor Therese can yet name
or describe. Therese’s world offers the possibility of a career in photography,
being part of the (male) world of journalism, but also relationships with
women that may have to remain clandestine and fleeting (the young woman
who appears interested in her at a friend’s party towards the end of the film).
Carol renounces the lie of claiming that her homosexual affair was a
psychological aberration due to mental distress brought about by her
husband’s harsh conduct, claiming in a moving speech before the divorce
lawyers that she freely chose this affair and that she would rather give up
custody of her daughter Rinny (while insisting on visiting rights) than
continue to live a lie that ‘goes against my grain’.
There are no clear alternatives, however, available for either woman to
find genuine acknowledgment, their shared love having to remain concealed
and ambiguous, furtive and discreet, while also claiming subtle forms of
social visibility and moral acknowledgment.9 At the same time, Therese and
Carol have the possibility of inventing a new path, the open possibility of
finding a way of life that would allow them to live their love and transform
each other within a world that remains marked by ideological, moral and
social constraints. Their relationship nonetheless offers a more mutual
exchange than many of the more traditional melodramas Cavell reflects
upon, a genuinely transformative relationship in a reciprocal sense, educating
both women in different ways so as to enable them to become who they are,
despite the prejudices they face and the uncertain acknowledgment they
seek. As remarked, their relationship also has elements of the ‘remarriage’
theme: Therese must choose again, in her own way, whether to recommit to
her relationship with Carol, this time more autonomously, with the benefit
192 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

of experience. She knows that it may mean abandoning her place within her
current social milieu and embarking on an uncertain life together, the two
women having to find or invent ways to live and express their love in a world
that will continue to stymie or thwart it.
The film’s expressive visual style has often been noted and praised
(W. Metz 2016). There are numerous shots incorporating various forms of
framing and reflection (using car windows, mirrors, glass doors, window
frames, interior/exterior thresholds). There are shots using abstraction as
well as partial obscuring of vision (close shots within a car on a rainy night,
of hands, faces and arresting objects within a carefully controlled frame) and
shots that foreclose background in favour of focused intimacy (the
withholding of establishing shots or wider framings and use of shallow focus
in order to emphasise textures, fabrics, jewellery, clothing and make-up, not
to mention Blanchett’s and Mara’s facial expressiveness). All of these stylistic
choices contribute to showing the inner emotional states of the characters as
well as the interplay between image and world, interior and exterior, social
self-presentation and sensuous inner feeling. The expressive and intimate
visual style of the film helps convey the ambiguous imbrication of image and
desire, complicating the characters’ manoeuvring of the dialectic between
‘illicit’ forms of desire and deadening social convention.
Dialogue in the film is muted, understated, punctuated by pauses and
silences, but also filled with subtle facial expressions, significant gestures and
telling glances. When Carol and Therese sit down for cocktails and lunch in
a discreetly lit restaurant booth, ostensibly to thank Therese for returning
Carol’s leather gloves, the scene focuses closely on their face-to-face
encounter in the expressively lit, evocative restaurant setting. The dialogue is
both formal and intimate; each phrase Carol utters having to be at once
conventional and suggestive. As their meals arrive, Carol asks what Therese
does on Sundays, to which she replies, ‘nothing’, asking Carol the same
question in turn, to which Carol gives the same reply, with a certain emphatic
note inflecting her otherwise languid, sophisticated diction. After a pause,
Carol invites Therese to visit her on Sunday, barely able to glance at Therese
directly, combining a casual politeness with anxious poignancy. The shift in
tone from Carol’s haughty elegance, now more intimate and vulnerable, and
from Therese’s doe-eyed innocence to her subtle frankness in accepting
Carol’s offer without hesitation, while also hinting that she understands what
it really means, is all conveyed through tone and gesture, glances and
intonation. Carol glances briefly up at Therese, who is now smiling openly,
Carol adopting her feline suggestive smile in return, gazing briefly in
 Cavell as Film-Philosopher 193

admiration and perplexity at Therese. ‘What a strange girl you are’. ‘Why?’
Therese asks innocently, ‘Flung out of space’, Carol remarks, almost
whispering to herself.
This kind of subtle but suggestive exchange, communicating at the level
of interpersonal expression and shared affect rather than explicit dialogue or
action, is emblematic of their relationship. The careful framing, attention to
visual detail and aesthetic mood evoking longing as well as fascination,
anxiety as well as desire, is a remarkable achievement of the film. Style and
substance perfectly complement one another, combining artfully to express
the ‘moral perfectionist’ desire to transform oneself in partnership with an
Other, where this transformative ethic of open-ended becoming becomes
complicated thanks to both the ambiguity of romantic love and the social
constraints of the characters’ world. Like so many melodramas, visual style
and aesthetic ‘excess’ stand in for, or supplement and intensify, what cannot
be openly communicated or explicitly articulated. Drawing on masters such
as Sirk but adding the restraint of tragic romance (as in Lean’s Brief Encounter,
an explicit reference point for Haynes10), Carol shows how the moral
perfectionist quest, within the context of a lesbian romance, necessarily
encounters the prejudices and prohibitions of a straight world that cannot
openly acknowledge alternative forms of love and desire.
Carol shows us both the possibilities and limits of the melodrama of the
unknown woman multiplying the ethical dimensions of the romantic
relationship. By following the mutually transformation of two women in
love, rather than the asymmetrical trajectory of the woman and relative
stasis of the man in traditional melodramas, Carol highlights the struggle for
acknowledgment that the couple will experience together within a socially
imperfect world. The ethics of moral perfectionism at one level defines the
lovers’ quest, their shared experiment to find out who they are and what they
might become together, while also stressing the failure of this path to allow
these women to pursue their love without fear of exposure, censure or
sacrifice. To its credit, Carol eschews the conventional path of ultimately
‘punishing’ its queer characters for their transgressive desire, opting for
a more affirmative yet ambiguous denouement that suggests how the
transformative experience of romantic love between women may yet make
possible the invention of new ways of living. It does so, moreover, while
acknowledging the uncertainty and difficulty of achieving this within a
world that continues to constrain or limit the possibilities of moral
perfectionism for individuals who do not conform to social and cultural
norms of gender, sexuality or desire.
194 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

Recalling Cavell’s ‘classic’ melodramas of the unknown woman, Carol

both explores and extends the dialectic between acknowledgment and
rejection, individual self-realisation and the satisfaction of desire, the quest
to become who one is in a world bent on denying that quest. Carol and
Therese embark on a reciprocal form of self-transformation, a moral
perfectionist rejection of the world of marriage and men, struggling to invent
a new mode of existence and form of community for themselves, while
contending with the unavoidable prejudice they will face in living a queer life
together. We might describe Carol, in short, as a self-critical melodrama of the
unknown woman, one that, by transposing Cavell’s model to a same-sex
romance, reveals both the possibilities and the constraints, the promises and
disappointments, of moral perfectionism in an imperfect world.

Forking Paths: Cavell and Deleuze

on the ‘End of Film’
Already in The World Viewed, one finds Cavell reflecting on the end and
future of Hollywood, reflections that resonate strikingly with those of
Deleuze on the difference between pre- and post-war cinema. Cavell too
notes the shift in cinematic practice since the war, commenting on the ‘end
of the myths’ and ‘loss of conviction’ that sustained classical Hollywood
narrative and genres:
I assume it is sufficiently obvious that these ways of giving significance to the
possibilities of film – the media of movies exemplified by familiar Hollywood
cycles and plots that justify the projection of types – are drawing to an end.
And this means. . . that they no longer naturally establish conviction in our
presentness to the world.
Cavell 1979: 60

Like Deleuze, the crisis signalled by the exhaustion of genres and ‘end of
the myths’ is also a crisis of belief, the loss of a sense of connection with the
world. Deleuze describes this phenomenon as a ‘loss of belief in the world’,
Cavell as a loss of ‘conviction in our presentness to the world’. They amount
to a shared philosophical-cultural diagnosis, which we can express as an
acknowledgment of the effects of nihilism or (moral-cultural) scepticism. For
both thinkers, moreover, this is not a cause for despair so much as an
occasion for thought: to understand the source and significance of this crisis
in narrative and genre, and to explore the possibilities that contemporary
 Cavell as Film-Philosopher 195

cinema has begun to realise in its various attempts to question the nature
and prospects of the (mutating) medium of film.
Narrative film since the 1960s and 1970s, according to Cavell, has moved
away from the traditional Hollywood emphasis on genres and types, that is to
say, from the expression of generic types or culturally resonant individualities.
Indeed, Cavell comments on the recycling of traditional narratives, the
hyperbolic inflation of received techniques and the seeming‘interchangeability’
of film actors, characters and plots (1979: 69–72). It is as though film had lost
conviction in its own aesthetic and mythmaking power; as though it were
estranged from its own history and thus from its future – Cavell’s version of
Deleuze’s complaint against the ubiquity of cinematic, psychic and cultural
clichés. Again, for both Deleuze and Cavell, the future of the art of film turns
on belief; belief in the possibilities of the medium, in inheriting and renewing
its own traditions, in having something meaningful to offer to a cultural
milieu afflicted by a diffuse, pervasive and inarticulate scepticism.11
Like Deleuze, but from an American perspective, Cavell also identifies a
post-war break with the belief in individual and collective agency. Following
the traumatic historical experience and moral disorientation brought about
by WWII, the Cold War and Vietnam, many of the myths of cinema – as of
history, politics and morality – have been shattered:

These beliefs flowered last in our films about the imminence and the
experience of the Second World War, then began withering in its aftermath
– in the knowledge, and refusal of knowledge, that while we had rescued our
European allies, we could not preserve them; that our enemies have prospered;
that we are obsessed with the ally who prospered and prepared to enter any
pact so long as it is against him; that the stain of atomic blood will not wash
and that its fallout is nauseating us beyond medicine, aging us very rapidly.
Cavell 1979: 63

Films such as Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and Kubrick’s

Dr Strangelove (1964) readily come to mind. Some of this historical loss of
belief, however, is also due to a more positive shift in social mores and cultural
sensibilities. We no longer believe, for example, in sexist depictions of women,
which opposed beauty and intelligence, intimacy and demonstrativeness
(Cavell, 1979: 63–64); nor in the demand for the bullish machismo of men
who must be strong, silent and brooding, or else upstanding, outspoken and
heroic (Cavell 1979: 67). The possibilities of the body, again anticipating
Deleuze, now provide possibilities for new expressions of selfhood that
promise a renewal and reinvention of types – both male and female – involving
196 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

the cinematic ‘myth of youth’, the ‘vanity of personal freedom’ and the
democratic athleticism of the body (Cavell 1979: 68). Despite these signs of
renewal, the degeneration of film’s erstwhile conviction in its own aesthetic
possibilities, in its capacity to discover and deploy the ‘automatisms’ of the
medium (see Trahair 2014), signals its belated and uncertain entry into the
condition of modernism.
Here one might ask whether such signs of modernist cinematic self-
reflection are really so recent. Arguably, film has always been ‘modern’,
concerned to reflect on its own history (‘movies come from other movies’, as
Cavell observes), and thus able to renew itself in relation to its own historical
traditions. Film has always been modern and pre-modern at once, synthesising
traditional narratives with reflections on genre, the history of film and cultural
mythologies. Indeed, cinema, we can say, is an expression of what Rancière
calls the modern aesthetic regime of the arts, which combines elements of an
ethical concern with the social-cultural use of images, an emphasis on
representational narrative and an egalitarian aesthetic of experimentation
across all possible genres, styles and subject-matters (2004, 2006: 7–11).
Whatever the case historically and culturally, contemporary film, in its
troubled self-consciousness, cannot avoid asking the inescapably philosophical
question, ‘What is film?’ Or better, ‘What becomes of film in a sceptical age?’
It must retrieve and reinvent the possibilities of its still evolving medium, now
turned digital, and in doing so will be ‘asking exactly whether, and under what
conditions, it can survive’ (Cavell 1979: 72).

Both Cavell and Deleuze ground their respective paths of film-philosophy

in the cultural-philosophical crises in meaning that go by the names of
scepticism or nihilism. Both thinkers see cinema as offering creative
responses to this shared problem, whether through the invention of new
images and styles of narrative film, or film styles and genres in which
scepticism is both enacted and overcome. Both also point to the shift in film
during the course of the previous century, from a classical to a post-classical
phase in which film ‘exists in the condition of philosophy’. The latter designates
a cinematic modernism in which film ‘has lost its natural relation to its
history’ (Cavell 1979: 72), and thus strives to invent new cinematic myths,
narrative styles and artistic uses of the medium. Where both thinkers differ
is in their particular presentation of the film-philosophy relationship:
Deleuze’s taxonomy of images draws on a plurality of film examples to
instantiate a conceptual framework articulating the shift from movement- to
time-image cinema.12 Cavell’s philosophical readings of particular films
 Cavell as Film-Philosopher 197

perform singular forms of philosophical film criticism that show, rather than
tell us, what the relationship between film-philosophy might become, in light
of film’s vocation to project and overcome scepticism at once. This fork in the
paths opened up by Cavell and Deleuze thus leaves us with a tantalising
question: can films ‘do philosophy’ in a distinctively cinematic way?
198
 8
Scenes from a Marriage:
On the Idea of Film
as Philosophy

Chapter Outline
The Idea of Film as Philosophy 201
The Film as Philosophy Thesis: Bold, Moderate or Bogus? 204
Marital Crisis: Saving the Film as Philosophy Thesis 211
Philosophical Paraphrase: Problem or Heresy? 212
Rodowick on a Film Philosophy of the Humanities 216

The recent ‘philosophical turn’ in film theory is often described as

commencing during the 1990s, thanks to the growing reception of works by
Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze. Thomas Elsaesser, for example, credits
Deleuze’s Cinema books as having inaugurated the current wave of interest
in film and philosophy, while Cavell is credited as the first major Anglophone
philosopher to make cinema central to his philosophical work (Elsaesser
and Hagener 2010: 8–12, 187). Both thinkers articulate the possibility of a
mutually productive encounter between film and philosophy in complex
ways. How are we to understand this film-philosophy relationship? Are film
and philosophy contraries or complementaries, friends or foes? One of the
more original contributions to contemporary aesthetics is the idea that film
can engage in its own distinctive kind of thinking: the idea of film as
philosophy. Defenders of the ‘film as philosophy’ thesis have argued

199
200 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

that films are capable of screening philosophical thought-experiments

(Wartenberg 2007); that film can philosophise on a variety of topics,
including reflection on its own status, in ways comparable to philosophy
(Mulhall 2002, 2008); or that film has its own affective ways of thinking that
alter the manner in which philosophy can be experienced (Frampton 2006).
Critics of the ‘film as philosophy’ idea, by contrast, have argued that such
claims are merely metaphorical: for these critics, film, as a visual narrative
art, does not give reasons, make arguments or draw conclusions; hence it
cannot be understood as ‘philosophical’ in the proper sense (Baggini
2003; Russell 2006). Or given the ambiguity of film narrative, if there are
philosophical aspects to a film, these are usually subordinate to its
artistic and rhetorical ends (M. Smith 2006). Alternatively, critics argue
that any philosophy to be gleaned from a film is either due to the philosophical
acumen of the interpreter, or else is confined to the expression of an
explicit aesthetic intention on the part of its maker(s) (Livingston 2006,
2009a). The difficulty with such contentions, however, is that they often
assume a too narrow or reductive conception of what counts as philosophy,
or else fail to reflect on the variety of ways in which film and philosophy – or
indeed philosophy and art – can be related. My suggestion is that the
most productive way of exploring the idea of film as philosophy is as an
invitation to rethink the hierarchical relationship between philosophy
and art. The encounter between film and philosophy invites us to explore
novel ways in which our conventional understanding of philosophy, and
aesthetic receptivity to new kinds of experience, might be renewed and
transformed.
Taking my lead from this claim, I analyse the recent interest in the ‘film
as philosophy’ thesis: the idea that film does not simply reflect philosophical
themes but can engage in philosophising, broadly construed, in an
independent manner. This could be a true marriage, provided both parties
are acknowledged as equals whose union preserves their particular
differences. Like any marriage, it works best when film is acknowledged
as equal yet different, rather than as unruly pupil or intellectual subordinate.
I also consider some of the debates that have arisen concerning ‘bold’
versus ‘moderate’ versions of the film as philosophy thesis, as well as offer
some critical reflections on more recent contributions to film-philosophy
(D. N. Rodowick, for example) that argue for the ethical, political, as well as
philosophical contributions of cinema to contemporary social-political
debates and moral-cultural understanding.
 On the Idea of Film as Philosophy 201

The Idea of Film as Philosophy

The field of philosophical aesthetics is long accustomed to the argumentative
use of exemplary works of art to illustrate a theoretical point, clarify an
argument or support an inquiry. Much work in recent philosophy of film
bears out this observation, with philosophers typically adducing aptly
chosen films in the course of discussing philosophically relevant topics.
Indeed, philosophers have long accepted the idea that films, like other
artforms, can contribute to philosophical reflection, whether by illustrating
philosophical ideas, exploring situations and problems of general
philosophical interest or by eliciting sophisticated criticism and analysis by
suitably engaged theorists.
In recent decades, however, a number of philosophical film theorists have
advanced a bolder thesis: the idea that film not only provides handy
pedagogical illustrations or a lively stimulus to philosophical reflection, but
can engage in philosophy in a manner comparable to, although differing
from, philosophy itself. Apart from work influenced by Deleuze and Cavell,
the most well-known exponents of this view – the ‘film as philosophy’ thesis
– include Stephen Mulhall (2002, 2008), Daniel Frampton (2006), Thomas
Wartenberg (2007), D. N. Rodowick (2007a, 2007b, 2014, 2015), Robert
Pippin (2010, 2012, 2017, 2020), and Robert Sinnerbrink (2011a, 2011c).
Each of these film-philosophers offers a distinctive version of the ‘film as
philosophy’ thesis, whether more or less bold, moderate or, for some, ‘bogus’.
The debate itself continues unabated, with new contributions, criticisms,
refinements and elaborations appearing in recent years (Davies 2008, 2019;
McClelland 2011, 2019; Neiva 2019; see also the other contributions in
Rawls, Neiva and Gouveia 2019). I will address some of these (focusing on
Davies’ 2019 contribution) in the concluding part of this section. I shall also
return to the idea of ‘cinematic thinking’ in Part III, as a way of defending
the idea of ‘film as philosophy’ by emphasising the affective potential of the
‘aesthetic dimension’ of cinematic works as ways of opening new paths for
thinking, forms of ethical experience and transformation of perspectives.
Cavell and Deleuze, orginators of a film-philosophy approach, have
influenced and inspired a host of philosophical successors. Stephen Mulhall,
one of the premier Wittgensteinian Cavellians, has developed his own bold
version of the ‘film as philosophy’ thesis (2002, 2008, 2015). For Mulhall,
films can philosophise and make ‘real contributions’ to contemporary
philosophical debates, for example, on the relation of human identity to
embodiment (for which the Aliens quartet, the subject of Mulhall’s highly
202 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

influential book On Film (2002) is praised). To quote the most famous

statement crystallising Mulhall’s ‘strong’ claim:

I do not look to these films as handy or popular illustrations of views and

arguments properly developed by philosophers; I see them rather as
themselves reflecting on and evaluating such views and arguments, as
thinking seriously and systematically about them in just the ways that
philosophers do. Such films are not philosophy’s raw material, nor a source
for its ornamentation; they are philosophical exercises, philosophy in action
– film as philosophizing.
Mulhall 2002: 2

This claim has provoked a storm of debate and disputation, some

philosophers applauding Mulhall’s championing of an ‘open border’ between
philosophy and art, notably literature, drama and film, and others denouncing
this claim as a sophistical attempt to elevate artistically dubious popular
entertainment to the lofty heights of professional philosophy (see Baggini
2003; Russell 2006). As we shall see, it is the claim that Paisley Livingston
(2006) attacks directly in his deflationary critique of the very idea of film as
philosophy. For the moment, however, I note that Mulhall, inspired by Cavell,
is urging us to consider the merits of popular films and film genres as
vehicles for philosophical reflection, engagement, even argumentation,
broadly construed. Thus Mulhall analyses at length how the Alien quadrilogy
– Ridley Scott’s original Alien (1979), James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), David
Fincher’s Alien3 (1992) and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien Resurrection (1997) –
make philosophically noteworthy contributions to our understanding of
human identity, embodiment, horror, sexuality, gender, technology, nature
and mortality. They also engage in complex and sophisticated self-reflection
on their status as cinematic fictions, the relationship between original and
sequel, the question of artistic inheritance, and the significance of the ‘star’ in
film narrative and audience reception (Mulhall 2002, 2008, 2015).
In the second edition of On Film (2008), Mulhall develops and extends
this line of film-philosophical inquiry by offering a reading of Spielberg’s
Minority Report (2002) as a meditation on the question of moral agency. The
film, for Mulhall, is a complex science fiction/crime thriller response to the
hypothetical challenge of a scientific/spiritual concept of predetermination
versus our faith in human openness towards the future. At the same time, the
film is a metafilmic reflection on the future of cinema as a ‘memory of the
future’ (not to mention an intriguing commentary on Tom Cruise’s
ambivalent status as popular star, and the varieties of cinematic ‘punishment’
 On the Idea of Film as Philosophy 203

to which his narcissistic screen persona is frequently subjected). Mulhall

also analyses at length the three Mission: Impossible films (directed by Brian
de Palma (1996), John Woo (2000) and J. J. Abrams (2006) respectively),
exploring the complex shifts in identity undergone by Tom Cruise’s character
in relation to screen persona, visual physiognomy, bodily performance and
the translation of televisual into cinematic worlds. Whether this trilogy of
stylistically impressive, kinetically charged and generically sophisticated
films bears the weight of Mulhall’s brilliant critical ruminations is left for
dedicated viewers of the Mission: Impossible franchise to decide.1
In any event, for Mulhall, the film and philosophy relationship can take at
least three forms, all of which may be present in philosophically sophisticated
films. 1) Films can reflect upon, question or contribute to our understanding
of significant philosophical questions or problems (‘films as philosophising’).
2) Films can question or explore the nature of the cinematic medium in a
manner comparable to philosophy (‘philosophy of film’). And 3) films can
reflect upon their own conditions of possibility or their own status as
cinematic fictions, for example as comprising a series of sequels within an
inherited genre (‘films in the condition of philosophy’) (Mulhall 2002, 2008:
1–11). We should note that these are not hard and fast distinctions, and that
films counting as ‘philosophical’ often engage in all three forms of
philosophical reflection. Crucial to Mulhall’s Cavellian-inspired film-
philosophy is that such claims are not to be defended by general arguments
concerning the ‘film as philosophy’ thesis, but rather by detailed analyses and
critical interpretations of the films themselves. For Mulhall, as for Cavell, this
is the only way to debate or defend the claims made for their philosophical
significance (for example, whether they can reflect on the ‘dialectic of
originality and inheritance’ inherent to the composition of cinematic sequels).
This point, as Mulhall complains, has been rather lost on his philosophical
critics, who persist in identifying his film-philosophical approach as the
application of a standalone methodology or independent theoretical
argument. Such is the case, for example, with Paisley Livingston (2006), who
avoids any detailed engagement with Mulhall’s readings of the Alien
quadrilogy, opting instead to challenge Mulhall’s claims through general
arguments or theoretical criticisms (as I address below). From Mulhall’s
perspective, however, the ‘priority of the particular’ (2008: 129 ff.) is what
matters in aesthetics and in philosophy of film more specifically, assuming
that we wish to do justice to the aesthetic complexities of film, and to
entertain the possibility that films can philosophise. To do so, however, also
demands that we remain open to the kind of self-questioning that philosophy
204 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

generally demands of other disciplines, and indeed should demand of itself.

We do not always find such self-questioning, however, in critics of Muhall’s
approach to film-philosophy. To be sure, the more conventional ‘philosophy
of film’ depends upon critical arguments and theoretical claims aiming at
the highest level of generality. Cavellian or Mulhallian film-philosophy, on
the other hand, prioritises the particular, responds aesthetically to the
singularities of the work, and develops its argumentative claims on the basis
of philosophically informed film analysis and interpretation (as I shall
attempt in Part III of this book).

The Film as Philosophy Thesis:

Bold, Moderate or Bogus?
An oft-recited criticism of some approaches to the film-philosophy
relationship, reiterated by Mulhall (2002: 2; 2008: 4), is that they take films as
‘mere illustrations’ of philosophical ideas, and so cannot be counted as
instances of film as philosophy in the proper sense. Thomas Wartenberg
(2007: 32–54), however, has argued against the presumption that illustration
cannot be a valid philosophical role for film to play. On the contrary, films
can be philosophical in many ways. They can serve as critical illustrations of
a complex philosophical thesis (Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) as an
illustration of Marx’s theory of alienation and exploitation within capitalist
society) (Wartenberg 2007: 44–54). They can articulate complex philosophical
thought experiments (the Wachowski Siblings’ The Matrix (1999) as an
experiment – for characters and viewers – in Cartesian radical scepticism)
(Wartenberg 2007: 57–75). They can argue against a philosophical thesis by
presenting a filmic counterexample (Gondry/Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of
the Spotless Mind (2004) as a counterexample to utilitarian moral philosophy)
(Wartenberg 2007: 76–93). They can both illustrate a philosophical theory
and present a cinematic thought experiment (Carol Reed’s The Third Man
(1949) as an exploration of our moral intelligence and critical response to
Aristotle’s theory of friendship) (Wartenberg 2007: 94–116). And they can
also perform varieties of self-reflection on the nature of the cinematic
medium (structural avant-garde films like Warhol’s Empire (1964) and Tony
Conrad’s The Flicker (1965) as foregrounding the background that ordinarily
remains unremarked in our experience of film (Wartenberg 2007: 117–132).
Wartenberg adopts a pragmatist, local rather than global approach, arguing
 On the Idea of Film as Philosophy 205

that we should demonstrate the link between film and philosophy via
particular cases, showing the various ways in which they can be
philosophically significant, the diverse ways in which philosophy can be
screened. At the same time, he rejects Mulhall’s ‘extreme’ version of the ‘film
as philosophy’ thesis (that films philosophise in ‘just the ways philosophers
do’), and defends the more moderate claim that they can engage in various
philosophical explorations of film – via suggestive illustration, thought
experiment, counterexample, and self-reflection – in ways that enhance our
understanding of both film and philosophy.
Not all philosophers of film, however, are convinced that film can be
philosophical in the ways that Mulhall and Wartenberg claim. Paisley
Livingston (2006), for example, has articulated a powerful critique of the
idea of film as philosophy, targeting in particular the ‘bold thesis’, as he puts
it, that ‘films make creative contributions to philosophical knowledge, and
this by means exclusive to the cinematic medium’ (2006: 11). Livingston
undertakes a critique of this bold thesis, as I discuss further below, for
positing either an ineffable cinematic contribution that cannot be articulated
discursively, or for having a philosophical content that is fundamentally
dependent on pre-existing philosophical ideas. Livingston too, however,
ends up advocating a modest version of the claim that films can contribute
to philosophy; namely, either as helpful pedagogical illustrations, or as
stimulating examples for the hard work of philosophical analysis (2006,
2008). We should note here Livingston’s emphasis on ‘philosophical
knowledge’, the epistemic aspect of the bold thesis, as well as his requirement
that this contribution be exclusive to the cinematic medium (the ‘exclusivity
thesis’) (2006: 11–12). The bold (epistemic) thesis includes, furthermore, two
key constituents: 1) an account of which exclusive capacities of film are
capable of making a special contribution to philosophy; and 2) an insistence
on the significance and independence of this epistemic contribution, where
this contribution does more than reflect general philosophical themes or
ideas. Indeed, a bona fide case of film as philosophy, for Livingston, would be
one that realises an historically innovative contribution to recognised
philosophical debate on a given topic, and does so in an independent
manner; that is, where the communication of the film’s philosophical
contribution ‘would not be dependent on a subsequent paraphrase’ (2006:
11) or interpretation.
The point here is that, in order to fulfil the bold thesis, a film cannot be
just a skilful rehearsal or novel illustration of familiar philosophical themes.
That a film might explore well-known philosophical ideas – to do with
206 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

morality, existence, love or metaphysics – would not suffice for the film to
count as independently philosophical. It would have to make independent
philosophical points or claims in a distinctively cinematic manner, and
articulate such points or claims in a way that goes beyond ‘mere illustration’,
pedagogical instruction, or theoretical platitude (as some critics argue is the
case with the Matrix trilogy or with the Alien quadrilogy).2
Like Wartenberg, Livingston will defend a moderate version of the film as
philosophy thesis, but insists on a much stronger degree of philosophical
intention on the part of the filmmakers. He insists, furthermore, on the way
that this independent contribution must use specifically cinematic means in
order to achieve its philosophical aspirations. This constraint is underlined
in order to rule out cases where a philosopher might be filmed delivering a
philosophical lecture; such a film recording (as we might find on YouTube,
for example) might well communicate philosophical content, but not by
means exclusive to the cinematic medium (it could equally be delivered
verbally, in audio recording or as a written text). Livingston summarises the
bold thesis on film as philosophy thus: it refers to ‘the idea that films do make
historically innovative and independent contributions to philosophy by
means exclusive to the cinematic medium or art form’ (2006: 12).
Having outlined the ‘bold thesis’, however, Livingston argues that it falls
foul of ‘an insoluble problem of paraphrase’ taking the form of a ‘fatal dilemma’
(2006: 12). Either the philosophical content of a film cannot be paraphrased,
hence remains ineffable or incommunicable, which means that doubts can be
raised about its existence or its intelligibility (since communicability and
rationality are required for a thought or idea to count as philosophical). Or
the film’s philosophical significance can be so paraphrased, in which case it is
not exclusive to film or has no necessary connection with film as an artistic
medium (and might indeed be better expressed philosophically, which is to
say, linguistically). Even if we moderate the requirement of exclusivity (that
the philosophical contribution of film must be expressible in a manner
exclusively bound up with the medium of film), this nonetheless leads to a
reductio or trivialisation of the film as philosophy thesis. For in this case any
filmic recording of a philosopher presenting a philosophical paper or
engaging in a philosophical discussion – provocative Slovenian philosopher
and psychoanalytic theorist Slavoj Žižek being interviewed for Philosophy
Now, for example – would count as an instance of ‘film as philosophy’.3 Here,
however, the philosophical content seems in no way dependent upon its
delivery via the medium of film, since a sound recording or verbatim
transcription would presumably convey the same content equally well.
 On the Idea of Film as Philosophy 207

If one were to reject this approach, however, and to argue instead that the
‘properly cinematic’ philosophical contribution of the film resists paraphrase
(that it can be referred to, but not stated in words), then doubts arise,
Livingston argues, as to the validity of the philosophical insights purportedly
being expressed by the film. Appeals to a cinematic je ne sais quoi (Livingston
2006:13) that a philosophically inclined viewer claims to have experienced
will remain doubtful if it cannot be further explicated with reference to
reasons or arguments to justify the claims being made. Such esoteric
philosophical insight thus remains either stubbornly subjective or untenably
dogmatic; hence it cannot be adduced as plausible evidence supporting the
‘bold epistemic thesis’, namely that it ‘has significantly advanced philosophical
knowledge’ (Livingston 2006: 13) in a manner exclusively dependent upon
the medium of film.
One might nonetheless want to argue that such cinematic insights can be
paraphrased, where a ‘paraphrase’ is ‘the result of an attempt to provide an
interpretative statement or thinking through of that item’s meanings’
(Livingston 2006: 13). In this case, however, we would be admitting that the
relationship between film and philosophy is one in which film is dispensable;
that is, we need not refer to the film itself but could simply rely on the paraphrase
in order to reveal the film’s philosophical content. Film, on this view, would
depend upon language in order to communicate its philosophical insights; but
philosophy has no need of film in order to do the same. The result is that
philosophy maintains its position of epistemic superiority. Thus, for Livingston,
philosophy can happily regard film as providing ‘pedagogically useful
illustrations or evocations of previously published philosophical reasonings’
(2006: 13), but it cannot regard film as capable of philosophising in its own
right. A film that attempted to explore, in an artistically sophisticated manner,
philosophical ideas or the life and work of a particular philosopher – say, Derek
Jarman’s Wittgenstein (1993) – would still depend, Livingston avers, upon
‘linguistically articulated background thoughts that are mobilised in both the
creation and interpretation of the film’s philosophical significance’ (2006: 13).4
In these cases, films remain parasitically dependent upon philosophy, whereas
philosophy can exist and assert itself independently of film (or any other
artform). The sceptical lesson to be drawn from this fatal problem of paraphrase,
Livingston concludes, is that ‘the cinematic display’s contribution to philosophy
can be neither independent nor historically innovative – as the bold thesis
would have it’ (2006: 14).
Does this mean that Plato was right to demand the banishment of the
poets (or filmmakers) from the rationally governed city? Not quite. In his
208 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

study of the films of Ingmar Bergman, Livingston (2006) argues, rather, that
we need only drop the bold thesis, that is, reject any exclusivity requirements
concerning film’s philosophical contribution and any strict epistemic
constraints concerning its capacity to advance philosophical knowledge. The
right alternative, Livingston contends, is a more moderate film as philosophy
thesis, according to which we reject the haughty dismissal of film as ‘merely
illustrative’, but also avoid the bold claims that films can philosophise in their
own right. Instead, we should embrace the more modest view that film can
be a welcome helpmeet to philosophy, providing lively examples conducive
to pedagogical instruction, or stimulating source material for the conceptual
work of analysis and argument. This rather deflationary conclusion is an
example of what we might call the philosophical disenfranchisement of film:
philosophy’s inveterate tendency to subordinate art as an inferior way of
knowing, one that philosophy proper would theoretically complete (see
Sinnerbrink 2010, 2011a). In the difficult marriage between philosophy and
film, philosophy ‘wears the trousers’ (to use J. L. Austin’s rather sexist phrase),
deciding the terms of engagement and judging the worthiness of its
cinematic partner in the mirror of philosophy’s own standards.5
In order to forestall charges of philosophical disenfranchisement,
however, Livingston has conceded the possibility that films might make a
modest philosophical contribution of their own in special cases. Adapting a
‘moderate’ (although actually quite strong) ‘intentionalist’ thesis on art (that
the meaning of an artwork depends upon grasping the artist’s demonstrable
intentions), Livingston argues (2009a, 2009b) that films can be regarded as
philosophising. We simply need to show – using verifiable textual or
biographical evidence external to the film – that the author/director intended
to explore philosophical ideas in an artistically serious way and put these
ideas into practice in the making of a film.
His case study here is the cinema of Ingmar Bergman, long regarded as
one of the most philosophical of modernist European directors. Indeed,
Bergman has traditionally been interpreted as exploring existentialist
themes in a distinctively cinematic style, and has often been aligned with
the thought of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, not to mention the dramas of Ibsen
and Strindberg. If there were ever an uncontroversial candidate for the title
of ‘cinematic philosopher’ – to quote the title of the late Irving Singer’s
philosophical study (2007) – it is surely Ingmar Bergman.
Livingston’s novel contribution to Bergman criticism, however, is to argue
that there is little evidence to link Bergman’s films or concerns as an artist
with Kierkegaard, for example, or post-war French existentialism (Sartre
 On the Idea of Film as Philosophy 209

and Camus). Despite some minor biographical evidence of familiarity,

Bergman apparently did not engage much with Kierkegaard’s link to ‘Danish
Hegelianism’, as Livingston remarks, and only ever staged one Camus play
(Caligula) in his youth (and that as an anti-establishment provocation)
(2009b: 560–561). Given the paucity of demonstrable biographical or
external evidence in their favour, the standard ‘existentialist’ interpretations
of Bergman, or even Christian-Lutheran ones, remain little more, Livingston
claims, than speculative surmises or vague interpretative conjectures.
Be that as it may, there is a thinker who Bergman himself claims as a major
influence: the little-known Finnish positivist and psychologist, Eino Kaila
(Livingston 2009b: 562–567).6 Since we have here, according to Livingston, a
demonstrable case where an artist was influenced by a philosopher’s work
and intentionally sought to realise these ideas, we can confidently assert that
this is a bona fide case of film as philosophy. We can find confirmation of this
claim, according to Livingston, in the way that Bergman’s films evince a
sophisticated engagement with Kaila’s ideas on the irrational sources of
desire and action, and on the ineluctable conflict attending most human
relationships. On Livingston’s view, Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) or
Scenes from a Marriage, for that matter, are ‘philosophical’ only insofar as they
are intentional efforts to express, or even go beyond, philosophical ideas that
Bergman derived from his study of Kaila (2009b).
We can raise a number of objections concerning Livingston’s critique. The
first concerns the overly demanding intentionalist account of art at work in
his argument. Artistic (and philosophical) meaning, for Livingston, is
anchored exclusively within the author’s explicit intentions; but this ignores
the contextual and cultural-historical dimensions of the work’s production,
as well as the active role of audiences, viewers or critics in interpreting the
work. The second is Livingston’s dismissal of the possibility that intentionality
can be displayed within the work itself; that we can impute an artistic, or for
that matter philosophical, intention to a work in order to make sense of its
cinematic, narrative or thematic structure or elements. We can do this (and
often have no other choice if we are to interpret the work) regardless of
whether we can demonstrate that the filmmaker (or screenwriter) explicitly
intended to make a philosophical point or realise a philosophical idea.
Thirdly, Livingston assumes, furthermore, that novelists, dramatists or
filmmakers can only adopt, translate or apply philosophical ideas that are
derived from their reading of an accepted philosopher’s works. This
assumption, however, begs the question whether film can be philosophical.
For the question at issue is whether there are independent ways in which
210 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

films can ‘screen philosophy’. Livingston, however, claims that the only way
to do so is by construing film as dependent on a philosophical author’s ideas,
which the filmmaker then attempts to portray. This is to prejudge the ways
in which it might be possible for film to be, or be regarded as, independently
philosophical, and therefore blocks the ‘debate’ before it has even begun.
These objections raise a more general concern about how we should
approach the film-philosophy relationship. We might ask on what grounds
we should accept that the philosophical contribution of a film (or any other
work of art) depends on locating a philosophical source that the filmmaker
intended to realise in making the film. Why assume that films can be
philosophical only if a critical interpretation can be anchored in an already
recognised philosophical position? Would Bergman’s films be any less
philosophical if we acknowledged that Ibsen and Strindberg were equally
important dramatic and philosophical sources for his films? In Livingston’s
view, Bergman is philosophical because of Kaila’s influence as a philosopher,
and because of Bergman’s elaboration of Kaila’s theoretical views. There are,
of course, obvious cases of direct philosophical influence on a filmmaker’s
work: Eisenstein’s Hegelian-Marxist dialectics, Godard’s Brechtian-Marxism,
Hitchcock’s Catholic-Freudianism, the Wachowski Brothers’ allusions to
Jean Baudrillard in The Matrix (see Constable 2009), Malick’s existentialism
and so on. In Livingston’s view, however, very few filmmakers would qualify
as cinematic philosophers, since it is rare to find philosophical sources being
explicitly cited or deliberately portrayed in movies.
On the other hand, it is not impossible. Some philosophers, for example,
have maintained that the films of Terrence Malick – a former student of
Stanley Cavell’s, translator of Martin Heidegger and inheritor of American
transcendentalist thought – can also be regarded as philosophical because of
their realisation of phenomenological, existentialist and transcendentalist
themes (see Clewis 2003; Critchley 2005; Davies 2009b; Furstenau and
MacEvoy 2007; Loht 2013; Silverman 2003; Sinnerbrink 2006, 2019d).
Showing that Bergman was impressed by Kaila’s philosophy, or that Malick’s
films evoke Heideggerian themes, however, does not mean that these
philosophical sources therefore determine the meaning – or philosophical
contribution – of these filmmakers’ superlative works. Rather, it is in the
artist’s creative appropriation and reworking of inherited cultural sources
that we can find and acknowledge the work’s aesthetic and philosophical
achievements. The point is less about the origin of the philosophical influence
than the originality of the film’s treatment of these culturally inherited ideas.
It is not in the critical detection of artistic intention but in the aesthetic
 On the Idea of Film as Philosophy 211

transformation of these intentions that we find the film’s original and

independent philosophical contribution.
Bergman’s Persona (1966) can be interpreted as ‘existentialist’, I would
suggest, not simply because Bergman read and was impressed by Kaila but
because of the cinematic originality of Bergman’s aesthetic treatment of
existentialist themes. And this applies whether or not the filmmaker
expresses any such philosophical intention (as many filmmakers refuse to
do), or where such philosophical sources are absent, questionable or obscure
(as is typically the case in the interpretation of artists’ intentions). Livingston’s
attempt to anchor the philosophical contribution of the film in the intentions
of its author is philosophical film criticism masquerading as theoretical
argument. Ironically, this is one of the theoretical sins for which the much
maligned ‘Grand Theory’ was so roundly castigated.

Marital Crisis: Saving the Film as

Philosophy Thesis
There have been a number of ingenious responses to Livingston’s critique of
the idea of film as philosophy. Accepting the basic terms of Livingston’s
argument, Aaron Smuts has defended a modified version of the ‘bold thesis’
concerning film as philosophy (2009b). He argues that Livingston’s ‘insoluble
problem’ of paraphrase can be resolved, provided we accept a more generous
conception of what counts as a philosophically significant contribution
(namely that films can provide ‘reasons to believe’ a philosophical argument,
and do so by specifically cinematic means, rather than Livingston’s more
theoretically onerous ‘historically innovative contribution to philosophical
knowledge’). Smuts agrees with Wartenberg (2007) that films can make
significant contributions to our understanding of philosophical problems
and arguments through their creative use and innovative staging of complex
thought experiments. The latter enable us to test our intuitions, discover
inconsistencies in our assumptions or convictions and can provide
counterexamples to theoretical claims or arguments. According to Smuts,
however, the ‘film as thought experiment’ position is still open to the
objection that it is not the film so much as the interpreter who is doing
the philosophising (for example, providing the relevant interpretation of The
Matrix showing how the fictional scenario presented in the film might be
used in a philosophical argument concerning scepticism).7
212 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

Defending a version of the bold thesis, Smuts argues that we can show
how (some) films are capable of producing arguments, provided we accept a
generous enough definition of them; Smuts suggests that an argument be
taken as an articulated train of thought providing reasons in support of a
conclusion (2009b: 413). Smuts’ showcase counterexample of a film ‘doing’
philosophy is the ‘God and Country’ sequence in Sergei Eisenstein’s October
(1922), a sequence that presents, through Eisenstein’s famous use of
dialectical-intellectual montage, an analogical argument concerning the
vacuity of religious idols across different cultures, and hence provides
reasons supporting the sequence’s intended atheist-materialist conclusion
(2009b: 414–417).8 Although Smuts provides a persuasive counterexample
to Livingston’s claim that films cannot ‘do’ philosophy, he accepts uncritically
the terms of Livingston’s account of the ‘problem of paraphrase’, in particular
the claim that films are philosophical only if they can be paraphrased into
suitably philosophical terms. Smuts shows that it does not follow from
Livingston’s argument that films cannot make a philosophical contribution
by cinematic means; but he also does not consider whether the account of
philosophical paraphrase on which Livingston’s argument relies is plausible.9

Philosophical Paraphrase:
Problem or Heresy?
Here I would like to question Livingston’s account of the problem of
paraphrase (an inversion of Cleanth Brooks’ ‘heresy of paraphrase’), as well as
the conception of the film-philosophy relationship that his position assumes.10
One of the problems with Livingston’s argument lies in its assumption that
the relationship between film and philosophy is essentially epistemic; namely,
whether films can make medium-specific and linguistically independent
contributions to ‘philosophical knowledge’ (2006: 15) concerning well-
established issues (such as ‘personal identity, freedom, meta-ethics, moral
dilemmas, or epistemology’) (2006: 13). As Wartenberg and Smuts remark,
Livingston sets the standard for film making a philosophical contribution
implausibly high (as though a film would count as philosophical only if its
content were deemed publishable by a top international journal!). Why
assume that a film’s contribution to philosophy only concerns epistemic
claims or furthering philosophical knowledge? Stephen Mulhall and other
philosophers, for example, have suggested that the philosophical contribution
 On the Idea of Film as Philosophy 213

film can make is more akin to showing than saying: to exposing, reflecting or
disclosing through vivid redescription salient aspects of a situation, problem
or experience, typically through the artful use of narrative, performance or
cinematic presentation (montage, performance, visual style or metafilmic
reflection). Film contributes, moreover, to questioning or rendering
problematic the background assumptions that we draw upon in framing
specific arguments or making philosophical claims, whether on generally
recognised themes, or on what we might understand film to be.
The issue of paraphrase, however, merits further reflection. Livingston
defines ‘paraphrase’ as providing an interpretation of the film’s (philosophical)
meaning (2006: 13). A film can be philosophical, indeed contribute to
philosophy, insofar as we can paraphrase its content into a suitably philosophical
interpretation. If we admit this possibility, however, then we are in conflict with
the ‘exclusivity thesis’: the view that the philosophical contribution at issue be
communicated by exclusively cinematic means. Livingston’s fall-back position,
as we have seen, is to admit that some films can be said to philosophise, provided
we can demonstrate the filmmaker’s intention to realise a recognised
philosophical idea (such as Bergman with Kaila).
Let us consider some relevant examples of philosophical paraphrase:
Livingston claims that ‘Bergman’s films are replete with characterisations
informed by the perspective on human irrationality and conflict that Kaila
codified in his treatise on philosophical psychology’ (2009b: 566–567).
Andras Balint Kovács claims that Tarkovsky’s films express the tradition of
Russian Christian personalist philosophy (notably the work of Nikolai
Berdyaev): the cinema, for Tarkovsky, was ‘a particularly vivid and powerful
tool to represent the struggle of the spiritual person to prevail in a world
where everything from politics to science and consumer culture denies
its existence’ (Kovács 2009: 590). Or consider Lars von Trier’s The Five
Obstructions (2003): a maverick filmmaker/character called ‘Lars von Trier’
(played by von Trier) challenges his filmmaker-mentor ‘Jørgen Leth’ (played
by Leth) to remake one of Leth’s early experimental films (The Perfect Human
1967), under increasingly demanding rules or ‘obstructions’ imposed by the
von Trier character, with ‘von Trier’ making the fifth and final ‘Jørgen Leth’
film himself. Mette Hjort paraphrases The Five Obstructions as thus providing
‘a demonstration of the philosophical thesis that creativity finds a condition
of possibility in constraint’ (Hjort 2009: 637).
In each case, we have a philosophical paraphrase of a cinematic work,
one that ‘translates’ its philosophical significance or contribution into a
recognisable philosophical discourse or thesis. What Livingston calls
214 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

‘paraphrase’, then, is another way of saying philosophical interpretation; one

that stakes a claim to capturing and translating the philosophical ‘essence’ of
the film in question. How is the validity of such philosophical paraphrasing
to be decided?
Here I would like to make a more general argument concerning the
problem of paraphrase in cases where we are concerned with the idea of ‘film
as philosophy’. It is neither obvious nor uncontestable to claim that such
paraphrases can readily capture a film’s philosophical contribution. This is so
whether we then take such paraphrases as violating the so-called ‘exclusivity
thesis’ (as Livingston argues), or as confirming the film’s philosophical
contribution (as Smuts argues). For we are not dealing here with an
argumentative claim so much as an interpretative proposal; a ‘philosophical
paraphrase’ is not a theoretical claim about film’s philosophical content but an
interpretative claim or instance of philosophical film criticism. Such
philosophical interpretations, however, are open to challenge and contestation;
there are many ways in which a film might be paraphrased or interpreted, and
it is not obvious by what criteria we decide between competing philosophical
interpretations. This implies that the question of a film’s philosophical
contribution, indeed the very idea of film as philosophy, depends upon the
philosophical interpretations of the films in question. We can only
‘demonstrate’ whether a film makes a philosophical contribution by offering
aesthetically receptive, hermeneutically defensible and philosophically
original interpretations of the films under consideration.11 The ‘film as
philosophy’ thesis is less a matter of theoretical argument (concerning, for
example, the paradoxes of philosophical paraphrase) than of critical reflection
and debate concerning competing interpretations of relevant films.
In sum, one key way to justify that a film has philosophised, or illustrated
a philosophical idea, or exists in the condition of philosophy, is by way of a
plausible but contestable philosophical interpretation of that film. The
validation of the film as philosophy thesis thus depends upon our accepting
that interpretation, or engaging in philosophical criticism concerning the
merits of competing interpretations. To do this, moreover, we have to engage
with aesthetic, hermeneutic and other relevant criteria that fall outside of the
domain of philosophical argumentation, narrowly construed. In other
words, we can only defend the ‘film as philosophy’ thesis by interdisciplinary
means; that is, by offering contestable philosophical interpretations of films
rather than relying solely on general arguments. This is essentially a
restatement and defence of Mulhall’s claims for the ‘priority of the particular’
in performing film-philosophy.
 On the Idea of Film as Philosophy 215

There is a further argument we could pursue here, which concerns the

possibility of defending a modified but still ‘bold’ version of the film as
philosophy thesis. Instead of forcing films to fit the stringent criteria adduced
to define the ‘bold’ version of this thesis – that films make an independent
and original contribution to philosophical knowledge by exclusively
cinematic means, and which do not depend on a subsequent paraphrase –
we could show how cinematic works can express and elicit thought by
aesthetic means in ways that are philosophically and ethically transformative.
This would mean modifying the claims concerning film as philosophy into a
claim concerning the capacity of films to engage in what I am calling
‘cinematic thinking’: emphasising the affective, ‘non-cognitive’ dimensions
of the aesthetic experience cinema can afford, an experience of aesthetic
encounter prompting thought. As Davies (2019) notes, here it is important
to emphasise the philosophical dimension of cinematic experience itself, the
idea that such films can contribute to philosophical understanding during
our experience of film, in order to capture how cinematic thinking pertains
to features of cinema that are central to the medium (in particular, cinema’s
capacity to elicit affective responses). This means acknowledging the role of
affective experience, the ‘non-cognitive’ dimensions of cinematic experience
that can prompt thought or alter our ethical orientation, shifting horizons of
meaning, reconfiguring shared intuitions and settled beliefs, in ways that can
be subsequently elaborated in theoretical terms. At the same time, affective
engagement with cinema can also prompt subsequent reflection, which
would be required for any claims regarding the potential for cinema to
enhance understanding, facilitate learning, reconfigure our intuitions or
beliefs or shift horizons of meaning in ways conducive to ethical
transformation. In this integrated or combined way, linking affective
responses with cognitive reflection, both during and after our viewing of
film, we might be able to address some of the claims made in favour of the
‘bold’ version of the film as philosophy thesis.
As remarked above, this approach does not confine cinema to the
Procrustean bed of philosophical argumentation narrowly construed, but
rather opens up the possibility of film and philosophy engaging in a mutually
transformative encounter. This possibility of cinematic experience, in
response to a film’s aesthetic dimension, prompting thought, critical
reflection and ethical reorientation via affective means, is one that I explore
in Part III of this book, which is dedicated to examining cases of a ‘cinematic
thinking’ expressed through audiovisual works with both philosophical and
ethical intent.
216 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

Rodowick on a Film Philosophy of

the Humanities
In recent years, D. N. Rodowick has made a major contribution to film-
philosophy, both as a commentator and as a participant, from his
groundbreaking independent philosophical study, Deleuze’s Time-Machine
(1997) to his recent major trilogy, The Virtual Life of Film (2007a), Elegy for
Theory (2014) and Philosophy’s Artful Conversation (2015). As discussed in
the Introduction, one of these achievements has been to map the philosophical
turn in film theory and rise of film philosophy as a response to the digitisation
of the medium, the subsequent ‘crisis’ in film theory and the challenge offered
by the rise of competing analytic-cognitivist approaches (2007b). In his two
most recent volumes (2014, 2015), Rodowick articulates and develops a ‘film
philosophy of the humanities’, drawing principally on Deleuze and Cavell, as
a philosophical – or, more specifically, ethical – rejoinder to what he criticises
as the overly epistemic and scientistic orientation of cognitivist theory and
the dogmatically anti-theoretical stance of historicist and culturalist
approaches to film studies. As part of this project, he offers a Wittgensteinian-
inspired critique of the alleged post-Theory commitment to ‘scientism’ and
correlated epistemic turn to analytic-cognitivist philosophies of film. His
critique of the analytic-cognitivist paradigm, and defence of a (Deleuzo-
Cavellian) film philosophy as an alternative paradigm of humanistic inquiry,
represents an important intervention in contemporary debates and thus
merits further critical reflection. In what follows, I outline the essential
features of Rodowick’s critique and defence of a ‘film philosophy of the
humanities’, followed by Malcolm Turvey’s (2007) critique of Rodowick and
alternative proposal for a humanistic film philosophy, as this debate vividly
articulates that character and stakes of the philosophical turn in contemporary
film theory.
Rodowick’s article ‘An Elegy for Theory’ (2007b) sets out, in compact
form, his Wittgensteinian critique of what he characterises as the scientistic
and empiricist bases underpinning the development of contemporary
analytic-cognitivist film theory. He commences with an account of the
Bordwell-Carroll attack on ‘Grand Theory’, arguing that, in their rejection of
the implausible and incoherent aspects of such theories, they reject the idea
of ‘Theory’, as used in film studies and other humanistic disciplines, tout
court. Moreover, they are criticised for ‘confusing “theory” with Theory’
(2007b: 92), that is, confusing the concept of ‘theory’ as referring to a
 On the Idea of Film as Philosophy 217

humanistic practice of interpretation, evaluation, understanding and

reflection, with ‘Theory’ as referring to the paradigm of Lacanio-Marxist-
poststructuralist screen theory that dominated film studies from the 1970s
through to the late 1990s (see Chapter 1). The latter has since developed in a
plurality of directions broadly shaped by various sources in Continental
philosophy (Deleuze, phenomenology, critical theory, feminist and gender
theory and so on). In addition to this confusion, according to Rodowick,
Bordwell, Carroll and other analytic-cognitivist theorists were guilty of
ignoring ethical commitments shaping theoretical inquiry in favour of the
pursuit of epistemic inquiry without regard for these ethical commitments.
Indeed, contemporary cognitivists risk losing sight, Rodowick argues, of the
dependence of epistemological inquiry on the ethical orientation shaping
our commitments: as he puts it, ‘judgments advanced – in history, criticism,
or philosophy – in the absence of qualitative assessments of our
epistemological commitments are ill-advised’ (2007b: 92). What are these
‘qualitative assessments’ of theoretical judgments? Rodowick means here
value orientations or ethical commitments that are supposed to inform,
shape or even justify epistemic claims and inquiry more generally (‘the
ethical styles behind our styles of knowing’ (2007b: 92)). A commitment to
social justice regarding racial or sexual equality, for example, might shape
one’s research into the representation of racial or sexual identities in
contemporary cinema. Rodowick’s claim, as a result, is not to argue for a
return to 1970s-style ‘theory’ but rather for ‘a vigorous debate on what should
constitute a philosophy of the humanities critically and reflexively attentive
in equal measure to its epistemological and ethical commitments’ (2007b:
92). The notion of ‘theory’, he argues, should be rehabilitated and restored to
its rightful place – given the genealogical history of film studies and its
adoption of the mode of (speculative and hermeneutic) theory – as the
mode of inquiry most appropriate to the humanities. This is especially so,
Rodowick maintains, in recent decades. With the advent of electronic digital
media during the 1990s to 2000s, which rapidly supplanted traditional ‘film’
and related cinemagoing practices, film theory found itself bereft of an
object, even ontologically ‘ungrounded’ in that it no longer had a stable
object – namely, ‘film’ – as the determinate centre of theoretical inquiry.
Consequently, and in keeping with the philosophical origins of film theory,
Rodowick points out that ‘we are compelled to revisit continually the
question, What is cinema?’ (2007b: 93). Coupled with this renewed focus on
the question of ontology, film theorists also questioned the nature of their
own discipline, ushering in a ‘metacritical attitude’ over the past few decades
218 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

towards its history and prospects within an uncertain intellectual and

historical context – a troubled discipline with an unstable object and critical
doubts about its past and present (Rodowick 2007b: 93).
It is worth noting that this account of the ontological unmooring and
disciplinary self-questioning of film theory appears driven by technological
as well as social-cultural changes in the medium – by the manner in which
films are produced, circulated and viewed in a technologically mediated
global context – rather than by any profound or global paradigm shift in
ethical or political sensibilities. In any event, film theory, for Rodowick,
responded to this ontological ungrounding and methodological self-
questioning in distinct ways. The first is the rise of what I have called analytic-
cognitivist theories that are inspired, according to Rodowick, by ‘[n]atural
scientific models’ (2007b: 93). The latter emphasise epistemological concerns
and conceptual clarity, according to Rodowick, and assume that ‘there is an
ideal model from which all theories derive their epistemological value’,
namely the model of inquiry epitomised by the natural sciences (2007b: 94).
The second is the rise of historical and sociologically oriented theories,
revising the history of film theory and that of the medium; these take an
historical and/or sociological approach towards the development of film
studies as a discipline, while remaining agnostic about epistemological, ethical
or ontological questions. The third approach, within which Rodowick situates
his earlier work, The Crisis of Political Modernism (1994), takes a discursive,
genealogical or critical approach to the history of the discipline – in his case,
inspired by the work of Foucault – analysing ‘how knowledge is produced in
delimited and variable historical contexts’ (Rodowick 2007b: 94).
The question is where this ‘metacritical’ approach leads us, if we are
committed to philosophising on cinema, given its emphasis on reflexively
analysing the conditions of the emergence of various influential theories
rather than engaging in any ‘first order’ theorising on its own account.
Instead of addressing questions, say, concerning the ontology of cinema (like
‘What is (digital) cinema?’), we would ask,‘What are the discursive conditions
or ideological contexts within which such questions appear pertinent or
necessary?’ ‘Which other questions are thus sidelined or marginalised as a
result?’ Although such an approach might tell us about the historical and
institutional conditions shaping particular forms of theoretical inquiry, it
leaves us in the dark concerning the nature of our theoretical object (we are
none the wiser concerning the nature of digital cinema).
It is against this background that Rodowick launches his ‘Wittgensteinian’
critique of the Bordwell-Carroll model of ‘post-Theory’, which served as a
 On the Idea of Film as Philosophy 219

model for the development of what I have called the analytic-cognitivist

paradigm. Rodowick targets the tradition of analytic philosophy, which he
claims ‘has been responsible for projecting an epistemological ideal of theory
derived from natural scientific methods’ (2007b: 97). He claims further that
the concept of ‘theory’, as practiced within the humanities, has begun to
disappear in favour of scientific inquiry, but also that philosophy begins to
‘lose its autonomy and self-identity’, becoming subservient to ‘scientific
ideals’ (2007b: 98). Film theory, Rodowick continues, predicated on the
hermeneutic and reflective practices of the humanistic disciplines, becomes
delegitimated insofar as it depends upon ‘concepts and methodologies
influential in the humanities’ that fall outside of ‘naturalized philosophy’
(2007b: 98) or what contemporary philosophers would describe as a
philosophical naturalism. Rodowick concludes that the analytic-cognitivist
challenge to film theory reflects a broader cultural critique, focusing on the
privileged role of ‘epistemology and epistemological critique’ in the
humanities as well as ‘the place of philosophy in regard to science’ (2007b:
98). Rodowick concludes his critique by claiming that the analytic-cognitivist
turn is therefore nothing less than an attempted ‘delegitimation’ of humanistic
forms of inquiry within film theory:

Analytic philosophy wants to redeem ‘theory’ for film by placing it in the

context of a philosophy of science. At the same time, this implies that the
epistemologies that were characteristic of the humanities themselves for a
number of decades are neither philosophically nor scientifically legitimate.
And so the contestation of theory becomes a de facto epistemological
dismissal of the humanities.
Rodowick 2007b: 98

I shall return below to the question of whether such a critique is plausible

or legitimate. How might we counter this alleged ‘dismissal’ of the humanities?
Rodowick’s gambit is to reclaim a certain philosophical approach to cinema,
one oriented towards ethical and critical reflection rather than scientific
naturalism and empirical inquiry. He argues for an epistemic and ethical
reorientation towards less reductive, more humanistic (understood broadly
as ‘hermeneutic’) forms of theory: a transformation of film theory via (a
‘Continental’ Wittgensteinian) philosophy into an ethical ‘humanistic film
philosophy’ drawing on both Cavell and Deleuze. Although this will address
questions of ontology and conceptual taxonomy (as both Cavell and Deleuze
do in their philosophical work on cinema), it will above all emphasise their
ethical thought (Cavell’s emphasis on moral perfectionism in narrative film
220 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

and Deleuze’s claim that cinema can give us ‘reasons to believe in the world’).
This is because film philosophy, Rodowick maintains, needs to balance
epistemic concerns with ethical commitments, critically examining our
value assumptions and moral-ethical implications of particular theoretical
approaches or forms of inquiry, and thereby finding ways to think anew with
cinema in an ethically and existentially affirming manner. Engaging
philosophically with cinema, especially in the digital age, offers a way of
reanimating a humanistic approach to art and questions of meaning that are
not suited for reductive scientific analysis or naturalistic causal explanation.
In short, Rodowick rejects analytic-cognitivist versions of the new
philosophies of film, on ethical rather than epistemic grounds, and defends
instead the cultivation of ‘Continental’ Deleuzo-Cavellian approaches
committed to ethico-aesthetic as well as metaphysical-speculative reflections
on cinema and its capacity for ethical transformation.
What are we to make of Rodowick’s ‘elegy for theory’? Has humanistic
inquiry been quashed within film theory? Are Deleuze and Cavell (and
perhaps Wittgenstein and his ‘Continental’ followers) the only philosophers
to be trusted, at least in ethical terms, within the contemporary philosophical
turn within film theory? Should we regard humanistic and naturalistic
inquiry – or, for that matter, ethics and epistemology – as forever opposed
within film theory and philosophies of film?
We can contest and question a number of claims in Rodowick’s critique,
and the implications he draws from them for contemporary philosophical
film theory. First, it is not clear that Rodowick’s characterisation of ‘analytic
philosophy’ accurately reflects the diversity and plurality of approaches
within contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. Indeed, it seems to refer
more to the views held by logical positivists and logical empiricists in the
1930s and 1940s (Carnap and Hempel, for example) than to contemporary
practitioners of analytic aesthetics or analytic-cognitivist theorists (even
Bordwell and Carroll), most of whom would probably be best described as
‘post-analytical’.12 Apart from the explicit focus on conceptual analysis and
the philosophical reflection on language and meaning (which Rodowick
tends to ignore), contemporary analytic and post-analytic philosophy, by
contrast, is characterised by a number of features. These include a critical
rejection of dogmatic or reductive ‘scientism’, a greater acknowledgment of
its own historicity and cultural-contextual conditioning and a diversity of
approaches spanning both naturalistic and humanistic accounts of knowledge
(see Rachjman and West 1985; Reynolds, Chase, Williams and Mares 2010).
We might think, for example, of pragmatist approaches to language or
 On the Idea of Film as Philosophy 221

contemporary 4E cognitive theories of the embodied mind, along with

‘hybrid’ approaches to philosophical film theory that combine
phenomenological and cognitivist approaches (see Sinnerbrink 2010, 2019c).
In his critical response to Rodowick, Turvey points out that his own
Wittgensteinian critique of cognitivist theory (which Rodowick cites) targets
reductive scientism, rather than naturalistic approaches tout court (2007: 113).
Turvey’s critique stresses, moreover, how Rodowick mischaracterises both
analytic-cognitivist film theories and the nature of naturalistic theoretical
inquiry within contemporary philosophy. Neither Bordwell nor Carroll are
committed to a conception of theory ‘based on scientific models’ or ‘grounded
in natural scientific methods’; rather, both define film theory simply as
‘explanatory generalisations about film’ (Turvey 2007: 111). Carroll, for example,
rejects the view (as does Turvey) that film theory should be ‘turned into a
science’, favouring piecemeal forms of inquiry informed by empirical research
but also constrained by critical reflection and argumentative clarity (that is,
offering superior responses to shared problems or questions than competing
theories). The vast majority of philosophers, even those committed to empirical
forms of inquiry – which is not to be confused with empiricism – do not engage
in experimental work but rather draw upon, analyse and critically reflect upon
such work. We can say the same about contemporary philosophers of film who
use empirical research in their theoretical practice (see Plantinga 2009a, 2018;
Smith 2017; Stadler 2008; Taberham and Nannicelli 2014).
Turvey also criticises Rodowick’s relativistic use of a Wittgensteinian
critique of scientism, which has a decidedly Rortian-Foucaultian flavour
(knowledge construed as cultural conversation and grounded in the
acceptance of epistemic vocabularies by the relevant community of inquiry;
and knowledge construed as a product of discourse, structured and organised
by historically variable forms of institutionalised practices and social
networks of power). The Turvey-Allen critique of reductive scientism within
film theory explicitly rejects the (Rortian-Foucaultian) relativist claim that
all film theorists need do is reflect on the history and norms of their own
practices,13 rather than draw or reflect upon scientific or empirical research,
including work from other humanistic disciplines. The idea that philosophy
is self-referential and makes no claims about, for example, both natural and
social worlds is hard to fathom, since it suspends the question of empirical
truth or historical veracity in favour of discursive consistency or social and
epistemic familiarity. We are not going to understand the nature of digital
cinema and its aesthetic as well as ethical possibilities by simply reflecting on
the history of our critical theoretical practices and socially institutionalised
222 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

contexts of inquiry. We might claim that our theories have been confirmed
by ‘the critical investigation of our own practices’, but they could still turn
out to be wrong with regard to our object of inquiry or to the rest of the
world – for example, in light of new psychological studies, sociological data,
conceptual criticism, empirical research or historical evidence. Film theory/
philosophy is not merely a discursive practice conditioned by internal
institutional norms and epistemic practices but is constrained by both
natural and social facts external to the relevant theories and pertaining to
nature as well as to history, society and culture.
Turvey then criticises Rodowick’s main claim, namely that a humanistic
film-philosophy – exemplified by Cavell and Deleuze – needs to recognise
both epistemic and ethical commitments in order to avoid reductive scientism
or the failure to engage ethically with cinema. Epistemic and ethical
commitments, he argues, do not necessarily determine the content and
meaning of a theoretical claim or position; on the contrary, epistemic and
ethical commitments typically underdetermine the content or meaning of
particular theories and so can co-exist in diverse theoretical and ethical
configurations (Turvey 2007: 114). As Turvey points out, one can be committed
to realism about our knowledge of the world, yet one theorist might be a
cognitivist, the other a psychoanalytical theorist; or one might be persuaded
by Dziga Vertov’s claims concerning the ‘Kino-eye’ without necessarily sharing
Vertov’s commitment to Marxism (Turvey 2007: 114). To pick some relevant
examples, one can be a Bergsonian without being a Deleuzian, or a
Wittgensteinian without being a Cavellian (or either a Deleuzian or a Cavellian
without necessarily being a ‘film-philosopher’). One could be a logical
positivist while being committed to Marxist politics (as some members of the
Vienna circle were), or a Heideggerian (who did embrace Nazism for a period)
while being committed to neo-Marxist politics (like contemporary ‘left
Heideggerians’). Although critical reflection on both one’s epistemic and
ethical commitments is salutary, such reflection on its own does not have, as
Rodowick implies, a determining impact on one’s theoretical approach to
intellectual inquiry.
As Turvey (2007), Carroll (1996, 2008) and Smith (2010, 2017) argue,
there is no meaningful sense in which contemporary analytic-cognitivist
film theory requires any reduction to ‘philosophy of science’, even if scientific
forms of inquiry, and aspects of ‘dialectical’ theory construction, may play an
important role in particular fields of research tackling specific problems (see
Nannicelli and Taberham 2014). Nor is there any clear sense in which
adopting a naturalistic approach in aesthetics, or in respect of film theory,
 On the Idea of Film as Philosophy 223

necessarily implies a ‘dismissal of the humanities’, unless one holds uncritically

to C. P. Snow’s famous ‘two cultures’ account of the conflict, or Kuhnian
‘incommensurability’ between scientific and humanistic modes of inquiry.
Indeed, as Murray Smith has shown with his ‘naturalised aesthetics’ of film
(2017), the ‘two cultures’ problem can be overcome through productive and
open interdisciplinary inquiry, exploring how a non-reductive naturalism
might contribute to, and work together with, more traditional humanistic
philosophical approaches to cinema and to art more generally.
This is not to say, however, that there is no risk of subsuming or
subordinating humanistic approaches to naturalised aesthetics, natural
scientific models or empirical forms of inquiry. The risk of what I have called
the ‘philosophical disenfranchisement’ of film persists, requiring critical
reflection and a pluralist interdisciplinary approach instead (see Sinnerbrink
2019c).14 This kind of methodological pluralism, however, seems preferable to
Rodowick’s rather rigid ‘Wittgensteinian’ (but actually neo-Kantian) dualism
between the natural and humanistic ‘sciences’ (or Geisteswissenschaften).
Despite the pretence of interdisciplinary openness, we find here a rival form
of philosophical hegemony, where (Continental and/or post-analytic)
philosophy arbitrates over which forms of inquiry are ethically legitimate
with respect to the multifarious media of cinema. Instead of a methodological
pluralism we have a philosophically grounded dualism, where each mode of
inquiry (naturalistic versus humanistic), remains sequestered in its own
epistemic and ethical domain, with little exchange or productive interaction
between them. Instead of accepting Rodowick’s straw man version of analytic
philosophy (or analytic aesthetics), and his false dilemma concerning the
rigid either/or choice between science and the humanities (the ‘two cultures’
problem), we should explore further how naturalistic and humanistic modes
of inquiry could work together to deepen and enrich philosophical film
theory.

The debate over the idea of film as philosophy thus raises the question of
what counts as ‘philosophy’, especially in relation to cinema. It prompts us to
consider the ways in which the encounter between film and philosophy
might help us overturn the traditional Platonic prejudice against art, but also
how to avoid forms of philosophical arbitration that dogmatically legitimate
(or delegitimate) certain forms of inquiry over others. As I have shown, the
new philosophies of film are productively diverse and engaged in complex
theoretical disputation and debate. They have found original and productive
ways of bringing film and philosophy together, even defending the view that
224 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

film can contribute to philosophy in a distinctive and meaningful way. For

some philosophers of film, it is through an aesthetic cognitivist approach
that takes films as capable of enhancing our understanding or facilitating
knowledge, notably through the idea of narrative cinema as thought
experiment or as reconfiguring our pre-existing intuitions or beliefs. For
others, one can defend a ‘bold’ version of the film as philosophy thesis,
arguing that some films, at least, can make original and independent
contributions to philosophical understanding by cinematic means, even
though such films usually involve subsequent theoretical reflection. There is
also the possibility of defending the idea of films as expressing and eliciting
forms of ‘cinematic thinking’: the capacity of some cinematic works to
provide aesthetic forms of experience that communicate ‘non-cognitive’
forms of affective engagement conducive to further cognitive reflection.
There are, in short, many ways that cinema can open up many productive
paths for thinking, provided we accept a broad enough conception of
philosophy and remain sensitive to cinema’s capacity to express and elicit
thought. Critics of the film as philosophy idea, however, often miss this
opportunity to deal with these productive disagreements, which are
themselves testimony to the capacity of cinema to contribute to philosophy.
Like Johan and Marianne, the estranged partners in Bergman’s Scenes from a
Marriage, the marriage between philosophy and film remains calm, orderly
and secure, provided that one partner dominates the epistemic agenda or
sets the terms of (interpretative) engagement for the other – hardly a recipe
for marital bliss. Yet the film-philosophy encounter also points to another
possibility: reinventing this relationship, overturning the hierarchy between
philosophy and art, emancipating both partners through a genuine meeting
of minds (and bodies). How this more felicitous encounter between film and
philosophy might work is the subject of Part III of this book.15
 9
What is Cinematic Ethics?
Cuáron’s Roma (2018)
as Case Study

Chapter Outline
Cinema and/as Ethics 226
Cinema and Ethics: Mapping an Encounter 227
Cinema as Medium of Ethical Experience 231
Roma 233

Moral questioning of the ethical values and dangers posed by the cinema is
as old as the medium itself. Hugo Münsterberg, for example, one of the
founding figures of film theory, raises the issue in his 1917 essay, ‘Peril to
childhood at the movies’ (2002 [1917]). Apart from his evident fascination
with the new medium, he notes the‘danger’ posed by‘the gaudy cinematograph’,
especially for children exposed to images of sex and violence, while defending
its contribution to knowledge and to the learning of aesthetic and moral
ideals (see Nysonnen 1998). Film theory traditionally has been wary of
cinema’s ethical potential, treating it as a fascinating yet deceptive medium
requiring theoretical analysis, demystification and ethico-political critique.
Concerns about the ideological power of the ‘apparatus’, its capacity to
manipulate audiences through visual identification and narrative pleasure,
fuelled the development of Anglophone screen studies from the 1970s to the
1990s (see Allen and Smith 1999; Baudry 2004a, 2004b; Bordwell and Carroll
1996; Comolli 1977 [1969]; Comolli and Narboni 1977 [1969]; Heath 1981;

225
226 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

Metz 1974, 1982; Mulvey 1975). Although philosophers of film have begun
exploring the question of ethics and cinema, there is surprisingly little
consensus on what this means. How do movies express ethical ideas? How
can they reveal the complexities of a moral situation? What kind of ethical
experience can cinema evoke? These questions have gained a renewed
urgency with the shift to digital cinema and with the globalisation of cinema
across diverse cultural and social contexts. I explore these questions in what
follows, outlining some of the theoretical approaches evident in recent work
dealing with this topic, and examining some of the methodological issues
raised by the relationship between cinema and ethics. I turn then to a
discussion of the idea of cinematic ethics, which acknowledges cinema’s
power to mesmerise and manipulate, but also offers a way of thinking about
cinema’s ethical potential as a medium of transformative ethical experience.
To do so, and to show how film can serve as a medium of ethical experience,
I turn to Alfonso Cuáron’s award-winning domestic drama and memory
film, Roma (2018), as a fascinating case study in cinematic ethics.

Cinema and/as Ethics

Although the philosophy of film or philosophical film theory has flourished
in recent decades (see Elsaesser 2009: 185–187), there have been few explicit
investigations of the relationship between ethics and cinema in the history
of film theory. It is clear, however, that film has an ethical potential for
exploring moral issues, ethically charged situations or moral ‘thought
experiments’, and this has been taken up by film theorists and philosophers
from a variety of philosophical perspectives (see Choi and Frey 2014;
Elsaesser 2019; Flory 2008; Jones and Vice 2011; Mulhall 2008; Plantinga
2018; Shaw 2012; Terman 2009; Wartenberg 2007). More recently, theorists
have elaborated the ways in which cinema can be read alongside philosophical
approaches to ethics, or how certain filmmakers can be understood as
engaging in ethics through film (Bolton 2019; Cooper 2006; Downing and
Saxton 2010; Ince 2017; Sinnerbrink 2016a; Stadler 2008; Wheatley 2009).
Indeed, philosophy of film/film-philosophy could be described as having
undergone an ‘ethical turn’ over the last decade, reflecting upon cinema as a
distinctive way of thinking through ethical concerns or even exploring the
idea of cinema as ethics (see Chauduri 2014; Choi and Frey 2014; Downing
and Saxton 2010; Grønstad 2016; Jones and Vice 2011; Sinnerbrink 2016a;
Stadler 2008).
 What is Cinematic Ethics? 227

As a response to this trend, in what follows I analyse some of the ways in

which cinema can be related to ethics, map conceptually the film-ethics
relationship, and explain how particular films might both express and
evoke moral reflection. This kind of inquiry into cinema and ethics, as I shall
argue, opens up the possibility that we can understand cinema as a medium
of ethical experience: a ‘cinematic ethics’ that brings film and philosophy
together in order to cultivate an experiential approach to ethical
understanding and philosophical reflection. It can not only stage moral
thought experiments, thematise moral problems or pose ethical questions; it
can also expose us to morally confronting, ethically estranging and
emotionally challenging forms of experience that demand a philosophical
response on our part. It is in this latter sense, I suggest, that we can approach
certain kinds of cinema as engaging in ethical thinking, both expressing and
soliciting varieties of ethical experience, hence prompting critical
engagement on our part – the idea of cinema as ethics or cinematic ethics
(Sinnerbrink 2016a: 10–17).

Cinema and Ethics: Mapping

an Encounter
To explore this idea of cinematic ethics, let us map some of the ways in which
cinema and ethics have been related. We can describe ethical approaches to
cinema as tending to focus on one of three aspects of the relationship
between film, spectator and context. The most familiar example is 1) ethics
in cinema (focusing on narrative content including dramatic scenarios
involving morally charged situations, conflicts, decisions or actions). Many
analyses of particular films or individual auteurs will explore cinematic
works in terms of their narrative content, moral thematics or interplay
between cinematic, dramatic and moral-ethical concerns. The other
influential approach, spanning both fiction and non-fiction film, concerns 2)
the ethics (and politics) of cinematic representation. This encompasses, for
example, ethical issues raised by elements of film production and/or audience
reception, studies on the ethics of documentary representation concerning
issues of consent or truthful depiction, or ongoing debates over the effects of
screen violence in narrative film and computer gaming. This can be
broadened out into the cultural-ideological domain, which takes tackles 3)
the ethics of cinema as a cultural medium expressing moral beliefs, social
228 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

values or ideology (such as feminist film analysis of gender representations,

Marxist analyses of ideology or critical theory analyses of ‘race’ and ethnicity
in popular cinema). To this we could add recent interest in ecocritical
approaches to the question of cinema and the environment, the depiction of
animals, ecological themes and the question of the ‘Anthropocene’ in regard
to cinema. Each of these three aspects of the film-spectator-context
relationship has spawned a distinctive approach to the question of cinema
and ethics (see Choi and Frey 2014; Downing and Saxton 2010; Ince 2017;
Jones and Vice 2011; Pick and Narraway 2013; Rust, Monani and Cubitt
2015; Shaw 2012; Stadler 2008; Wheatley 2009). At the same time, few
theorists have attempted to articulate the relationships between these aspects
with a view toward their ethical significance, conceptual connections and
theoretical implications.
A common approach in much recent philosophy of film is 1) to focus on
ethics within cinematic representation (morally relevant themes, problems
and scenarios within the narrative or approaching film as a moral ‘thought
experiment’). To cite an example, consider Wartenberg’s (2008) discussions
of The Matrix as a cinematic version of Descartes’ experiment in radical
scepticism, or his reading of Chaplin’s Modern Times as staging but also
extending Marx’s critique of alienated labour. Or consider Cavell’s ‘moral
perfectionist’ reading of the melodrama Stella Dallas (Cavell 1996), according
to which brassy Stella comes to a greater understanding of herself and makes
an ethical decision to give her daughter Laurel a chance at marital and social
happiness by deliberately withdrawing herself from her daughter’s life.
Film theorists have often focused on 2) the ethics of cinematic
representation, whether from the filmmaker perspective (production) or
from the spectator perspective (reception). Consider, for example, debates
over objectivity and truth in documentary representation, or whether a
filmmaker can use elements of fiction in the presentation of what purports
to be fact (for example, Errol Morris’ use of fictional techniques, poetic
imagery, evocative music and dramatic re-enactment in The Thin Blue Line
(1988)). We might ponder the ethics of production, for example how a
filmmaker treats his/her cast and crew (Werner Herzog’s filming of the epic
Fitzcarraldo (1982) in the jungles of Peru was notoriously risky and resulted
in an accident in which indigenous workers were seriously injured).
Alternatively, we might be drawn to debates over how spectators respond to
images of sex and violence, for example depictions of rape in ‘new French
extremity’ cinema or the use of non-simulated sex scenes in von Trier’s
Antichrist (2009) and Nymphomaniac (2014) (see Frey 2014; Horeck and
 What is Cinematic Ethics? 229

Kendall 2011), or the rise of what Lübecker (2015) has called the ‘feel-bad’
film or ‘extreme cinema’, which deliberately places spectators in positions of
extreme discomfort (Brown 2013b; Lübecker 2015). The ethics of cinematic
spectatorship remains a central concern in recent film theory, an approach
that attracts much attention in research on the relationship between film and
ethics (see Chadhuri 2014; Choi and Frey 2014; Stadler 2008; Wheatley
2009).
Film theory, moreover, has also been long concerned with the broader
social, cultural and political implications of cinema. Since the 1970s it has
emphasised 3) the ethics (and politics) of cinema as a medium symptomatic
of broader ideological discourses (such as feminist analyses of gender and
Marxist analyses of ideology). Among many possible examples, let us take
Kathryn Bigelow’s films on the war in Iraq, The Hurt Locker (2008), and the
hunt for al-Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty (2012).
These films were both celebrated for their cinematic accomplishment as
powerful and suspenseful action/war movies, but also criticised for offering
ideologically slanted depictions of American soldiers fighting an ‘irrational’
enemy in Iraq and a controversial account of the ‘War on Terror’. Zero Dark
Thirty, for example, implies that the ‘heightened interrogation techniques’
deployed by the CIA ultimately led to the capture of Osama bin Laden. It thus
offered a dubious utilitarian ‘moral’ justification (the ‘ticking bomb’ scenario)
for the use of torture in prosecuting the so-called ‘War on Terror’ (see Westwell
2014). At the same time, Bigelow’s focalising of the narrative through female
CIA operative Maya [Jessica Chastain], who doggedly pursues bin Laden
when her male peers have given up (reminiscent of Clarice Starling [Jodie
Foster] in Silence of the Lambs (1991)), lends this film an interestingly feminist
slant that complicates – generically and dramatically – the straightforward
ideological critique of the film as an apologia for American militarism. Much
recent work in film theory continues the cultural-political critique of cinema
as a medium of ideological communication and manipulation, shaping
emotional responses, beliefs and attitudes towards an array of social-cultural
identities, moral issues, identity politics or cultural-political concerns (see
Cunliffe 2019; Mulvey and Backman Rogers 2015; Smelik 2016).
What are the dominant philosophical ways of exploring cinema and
ethics today? We can identify the following theoretical approaches, which
also span the Continental philosophy/analytic-cognitivist film theory divide.
Since the retreat from so-called ‘Grand Theory’ (during the late 1990s and
2000s), the Deleuzian perspective has become highly influential in film
theory and film-philosophy (see Boljkovac 2013; Deamer 2016; Del Rio
230 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

2012; Flaxman 2000, 2011; Martin-Jones and Brown 2012; Pisters 2012;
Rizzo 2012; Rodowick 1997, 2010, for representative texts). As discussed
previously, Deleuzian cinematic ethics has been recently championed by
Rodowick (2010, 2014, 2015), who takes Deleuze’s cine-philosophy as a
predominantly ethical mode of thinking (cinema as exploring what Deleuze
calls immanent ‘modes of existence’, as communicating thought or giving us
‘reasons to believe in this world’ through new forms of movement- and
time-image cinematic narration). From a philosophical perspective, there is
also more attention being given to Cavellian film-philosophy (cinema as
exploring scepticism, philosophy and the everyday, and moral perfectionism),
which Cavell first introduced in the 1970s, during the highpoint of so-called
psychoanalytic-semiotic film theory (see LaRocca 2020; Read and
Goodenough 2005; Rugo 2016; Shaw 2019; Sinnerbrink 2014b; Wheatley
2019). Since the 2010s, phenomenological and post-phenomenological film
theory (focusing on subjective and intersubjective experiences of affect,
perception, emotion, embodiment and how these relate to moral-ethical
experience in cinema1) has become prominent, with numerous studies
focusing on the ethical dimensions of cinematic affect and embodied
spectator engagement with cinematic worlds (see Barker 2009; Chamarette
2012; Ince 2017; Marks 2000, 2002; Phillips 2019; Shaviro 1993; Sobchack
1992, 2004; S. Walton 2016; Yacavone 2015). Finally, cognitivist film theory
has emerged as an alternative paradigm to theorising cinematic experience,
focusing on emotional engagement, moral imagination and the ethical
evaluation of cinema (see Bordwell 1985, 1989a; Bordwell and Carroll 1996;
Carroll 1990, 1998, 2003, 2008; Currie 1995; Plantinga 2009a, 2018; Plantinga
and G. Smith 1999; Shimamura 2013; M. Smith 1995, 2017; Taberham and
Nannicelli 2014; Tan 1995). As we saw, cognitivist film theories tend to adopt
‘naturalistic’ accounts of cognition in order to theorise our affective and
emotional response to film, along with more reflective, higher-order
cognition, which taken together provide an account of moral allegiance with
character and broader ethical evaluation in response to narrative cinema.
All of these approaches offer valuable theoretical insights for understanding
cinema and ethics. All sorts of ‘crossovers’, moreover, are possible between these
approaches – for example, Cavellian-Deleuzian, Cavellian-Wittgensteinian,
phenomenological-cognitivist, French feminist-film-philosophical, Deleuzian-
phenomenological, Deleuzian-cognitivist approaches and so on (see Abbott
2016; Bolton 2011; Brown 2013a; Cooper 2019; Laine 2011; Marks 2000, 2002;
Pisters 2012; Rushton 2011; Stadler 2008). At the same time, each approach
foregrounds a different aspect of the film/screen/spectator/context relationship,
 What is Cinematic Ethics? 231

sometimes emphasising thematic concerns within the narrative, sometimes the

spectator’s response, sometimes a conceptual framework applied to the film,
sometimes the significance of our affective or emotional engagement with it.
What is less common is thinking through these distinctive but interrelated
dimensions of ethics in cinema, which is what I shall explore via a brief
discussion of the idea of cinema as a medium of ethical experience.

Cinema as Medium of
Ethical Experience
What is the significance of the ‘ethical turn’ in recent film theory? One
response is to point out that cinema has always been concerned with ethics,
or that moral concerns have always been brought to the study of cinema.
Early film theorists, for example, were concerned with the ethical potential
of cinema, either as an aesthetically powerful way of cultivating moral
sensibilities or as a pernicious, morally corrupting form of mass distraction
(see Sinnerbrink 2013b). These ethical and moral concerns were displaced
during the 1960s and 1970s by a turn towards more explicitly political and
ideological agendas, a tendency manifested by the rise of Lacanian-
Althusserian ‘psycho-semiotic’ and feminist film theory. With the historical
collapse of communism and decline of Marxism as a theoretical paradigm
during the 1990s, a renewed focus on ethics – on questions of human rights,
democracy, concern for the Other and our responsibilities towards nature
and the environment – became a distinctive feature of many forms of social,
cultural and political discourse. Within the academy, the reigning paradigm
of film theory came under attack during the 1980s and 1990s, being
subjected, as Rodowick remarks, to ‘a triple displacement – by history,
science, and finally by philosophy’ (2015: 6). At the same time, however,
ethical questions concerning cinema became more prominent and continued
to reverberate with the emergence of film-philosophy, most notably in the
work of Cavell and Deleuze (see Elsaesser 2019; Rodowick 2015; Sinnerbrink
2011b).
Such a shift could also be discerned in contemporary cinema across the
globe, which is rife with films dealing with ethical issues, moral problems or
cultural-political concerns. Indeed, contemporary cinema is where many
socially charged ethical problems and cultural-moral debates today are most
creatively explored; it is where cultures across the globe can find imaginative
232 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

narrative ways to address, reflect upon, question and explore some of the
most important moral-ethical and cultural-political issues of our times. This
is evident in the rise of new ethically and politically engaged cinema,
particularly within diverse cultural traditions and social contexts, amidst the
dissemination of what is often loosely called ‘world cinemas’ (see Chadhuri
2014; Martin-Jones 2011, 2018; Nagib 2011).
The idea of cinema as a medium of ethical experience offers a way of
understanding what cinema can do: its transformative potential to sharpen
our moral perception, challenge our beliefs through experiential means and
thus enhance our understanding of moral-social complexity. In some cases,
it can also provoke philosophical thinking through morally confronting or
provocative forms of ethical experience conveyed and evoked through film.
In this way it can bring together the three important aspects of the cinema-
ethics relationship: ethical content in narrative cinema; the ethics of
cinematic representation (from filmmaker and spectator perspectives); and
the ethics of cinema as symptomatic of broader cultural, social and
ideological concerns. To these three dimensions we can add a fourth: the
aesthetic dimension of cinema – in particular the role of aesthetic form in
intensifying our experience, refining and focusing our attention, and thus of
conveying complexity of meaning through manifold means – as a way of
evoking ethical experience and thereby inviting further critical reflection. In
sum, the question of ethics in cinema, or of cinema as ethical, is not exhausted
by narrative explorations of ethics, or questions of production and
consumption, or by the ethics of spectatorship, or by the ideological-political
dimensions of cinema. Rather, it is important to understand how aesthetics
and ethics are productively related: how the particular aesthetic elements
and features of a film are articulated with each other, and how these together
serve to communicate ethical meaning via aesthetic means.
The concept of cinema as a medium of ethical experience is one way of
trying to articulate these elements – from the singular to the universal; from
the embodied spectator to the cultural-historical world – so as to open up
new ways of thinking and thus of realising cinema’s ethical (and political)
potential. This idea has three interrelated aspects: 1) the depiction of ethical
experience undergone by characters within a film narrative, typically in the
form of decisions, choices and actions within morally charged dramatic
situations; 2) the reflexive presentation of ethical experience in the filmmaking
process, that is, processes and techniques that distance the spectator from
what they are viewing and challenge his or her assumptions or expectations
(for example, the devices of reflexive documentary); 3) the intentional effort
 What is Cinematic Ethics? 233

to evoke the ethical responses of the spectator (ethical spectatorship) via a

variety of cinematic devices and aesthetic strategies in film, including camera
placement, mise-en-scène, lighting, sound and music, framing and shot
length, montage combinations and rhythms, in order to prompt reflection on
the ethical significance of what we have experienced cinematically. All three
aspects of this relationship are related: the depiction of ethical experience
within narrative film is aimed at eliciting an ethical response from the viewer,
but also raises questions about the filmmaking process or about both
filmmakers’ and viewers’ relationships with the image. All three aspects, it is
important to note, are elicited or expressed by aesthetic means: ethical
experience in the cinema does not generally involve an intellectual or abstract
reflection on moral problems or ethical dilemmas but unfolds, rather, through
a situated, emotionally engaged, aesthetically receptive response to images
that work on us in a multimodal manner, engaging our senses, emotions and
powers of reasoning. It involves cinema’s power of stimulating sensation,
affective response, emotional engagement and cognitive understanding, all
of which work together to elicit ethical experience via aesthetic means.

Roma
Alfonso Cuarón’s award-winning domestic drama and memory film Roma
(2018) provides a fascinating case study in cinematic ethics. Set in 1970–
1971 in the Colonia Roma neighbourhood of Mexico City, Roma focuses on
a year in the life of indigenous Mixteca housekeeper/nanny Cleodegaria
‘Cleo’ Gutiérrez [played by Yalitza Aparicio, a non-professional actress]. Cleo
serves an upper middle-class family comprising matriarch Sofía [Marian de
Tavira], her absent husband Antonio [Fernando Grediaga], a doctor and
their four children, Toño [Diego Cortina Autrey], Paco [Carlos Peralta],
Pepe [Marco Graf] and Sofi [Daniela Demesa]. The family also lives with
Sofia’s mother Teresa [Verónica García] and another maid/cook, Cleo’s
friend Adela [Nancy García]. Taking an episodic narrative form, the film
shows Cleo’s daily routines, the cycle of repetitive domestic duties that span
everything from cleaning, cooking, caring, washing and shopping, to child-
minding. These routines are interspersed with important events from Cleo’s
own submerged personal life – her friendship with fellow maid Adela, and
her relationship with troubled boyfriend Fermín [Jorge Antonio Guerrero]
– a life that barely impinges on the family’s awareness, however much they
claim to care for her, as though she only existed to serve their needs. She falls
234 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

pregnant to Fermín, who discreetly dumps her in a cinema as soon as she

reveals her condition, disappearing until she finds and confronts him after
one of his martial arts training performances taking place in his impoverished
village. His brutal, aggressive dismissal – threatening to beat her should she
come by again with her child – foreshadows a later menacing encounter in
which Cleo accidentally meets Fermín again during a violent student
demonstration (based on the Corpus Christi massacre in June 10, 1971, in
which 120 students were killed) and points a gun at her face. The shock of
the violent encounter – Cleo and Grandmother Teresa are in a furniture
store choosing a crib – triggers Cleo’s waters to break followed by an
excruciating attempt to get to the hospital in the catastrophic traffic caused
by the protest and massacre. In one of the film’s most devastating sequences,
a harrowing long take spanning many minutes, we are taken through the
entire process of Cleo’s emergency birth, which ends tragically with her baby
daughter being stillborn and swiftly taken away from her.
Cleo’s numbness and shock barely register with the family, who then
depart for a seaside holiday, ostensibly to have a break together but actually
so that estranged husband Antonio can return to the family home and collect
his remaining property. The second climactic sequence, Cleo’s rescue of Paco
and Sofi at the beach – bravely saving them from drowning, despite her
stated inability to swim – parallels the tragic birth scene, and offers a
powerful, but ambiguous, image of self-sacrificial devotion and powerful
emotional bonds binding Cleo with the family. These same bonds, however,
are soon loosened again, as we see the family’s prompt reversion to their
conventional role of privileged masters calling up Cleo to serve them as
soon as they return home. The film concludes with the family arriving home
after their holiday, excitedly telling Grandmother Teresa how Cleo saved
Paco and Sofi from drowning, while asking Cleo to go and prepare smoothies
for the children and fetch sweets for the family. Cleo retreats to the kitchen,
telling Adela that she has much to tell her about what happened while they
were away. In a conscious inversion of the opening shot, we see Cleo slowly
disappear from view while ascending the stairs with dirty laundry to take to
the rooftop washing area, as the camera holds on the steel staircase and open
air, showing aeroplanes crossing the sky above the family home.
Shot in luminous and sharply defined black-and-white (on an ALEXA
65 digital camera, according to the credits (see also Marcantonio 2019: 40)),
the film is marked by impressively composed long takes, detailed mise-en-
scène, revealing tracking shots, naturalistic performances, complex crowd
and urban scenes and historically accurate soundtrack usage of music,
 What is Cinematic Ethics? 235

contemporary media and found sound. As has been frequently noted, it has
a strongly personal and autobiographical basis, based on Cuarón’s own
experiences and familial memories, and is dedicated to Cuarón’s own
childhood nanny, Libo (who provided many anecdotes and detailed stories
serving as the basis for the depiction of Cleo’s life and routines). At the same
time, it indirectly reveals the social divisions and political turmoil marking
this turbulent period of Mexico’s recent history. As de la Mora notes (2019:
46–47), it takes place at the end of the ‘economic miracle’ period under
President Luis Echeverría Álvarez, whose Institutional Revolutionary Party
(PRI) had been ruling Mexico for many years, and the rise of the student
movement following 1968, with the subsequent authoritarian crackdown
under President Echeverria, exemplified by the Corpus Christi massacre
(which is depicted in the film).
The film focuses intently on Cleo’s perspective, using long takes, slow
pans and extended tracking shots to follow her movements, reveal her milieu
and show her daily activities. This personal focus creates a powerful sense of
domestic space encompassing the two-storey family home with its courtyard
and garage entrance, populated by pets (a bird and the family dog, Borras),
along with the extended household, including family members, the two
maids, and other domestic workers. The film also renders the eponymous
neighbourhood of Roma in rich visual and aural detail, creating a vivid
sense of the social world in which Cleo’s personal narrative is embedded.
This is achieved visually through the use of long takes and tracking shots
depicting crowds of individuals going about their daily business and aurally
via an impressively detailed soundtrack composed of period-specific audio
samples of radio and television programmes, popular period songs, down to
the melodic whistling tunes used by local street vendors) (see Avila 2020).
Particular attention is given to the musical scoring, which is diegetic in
keeping with the film’s realist style, but also serves as both social-historical
background and commentary on the emotional expression of individual
characters (for example, when Cleo sings along to Juan Gabriel’s popular
period song, ‘No Tengo Dinero’ [‘I don’t have any money’] as she washes
laundry on the family home’s rooftop) (Avila 2020: 250–251). This
combination of neo-realist style (the use of black and white imagery, long
takes, non-professional actors, loosely episodic narrative structure, diegetic
sound and music, and local Mixteca dialect) coupled with melodramatic
narrative content (familial and marital breakups, domestic drama, focus on
female relationships, the tragic loss of a child), qualifies Roma as a moral
melodrama with a realist style (see Sinnerbrink 2016a: 139–164). In this
236 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

manner, the film is able to show how, to quote a phrase, ‘the personal is
political’, using a personal domestic drama, shot in realist style, as a way of
obliquely or indirectly revealing the social divisions and ethico-political
injustices shaping the experiences of an individual in this particular social
world.
The opening credits sequence is remarkable, consisting of a single static
long take of a tiled floor that is about to be washed clean with soapy water.
The offscreen diegetic soundtrack richly fills out the image: the sound of
footsteps descending a staircase, a metal bucket being filled with water,
birdsong, a brush or mop being pushed across the tiles, dogs barking, the
distant rumble of a jet plane, the sounds of cleaning and brushing as the
morning domestic routine begins. As we hear these sounds and watch
the criss-cross geometrical pattern of the floor tiles, water sweeps across the
screen, like foamy waves, a skylight in the roof creating a reflection centre-
screen where we can see the sky above. A jet airplane becomes visible in the
watery reflection, rumbling slowly across the reflected frame, hinting at a
freedom that remains remote, as the earthbound/housebound offscreen
presence continues her cleaning. Wave after wave of foamy water sweeps
across the frame, suggesting the waves and seaside that will feature in a
climactic sequence later in the film. Her work continues, in silence and out
of sight, from morning to evening. This is a domestic drama grounded in the
daily tasks and routines that she performs ‘invisibly’, as someone who
ordinarily remains out of sight, who does not typically feature in film, but
whose story will reflect the social and historical world in which the family’s
daily life is embedded. Along with its Italian neo-realist resonances, the film’s
title, Roma, refers to a whole neighbourhood and specific historical moment,
a complex social world, one that relies on those whose presence and labour
remain invisible but which make possible the daily life and social dramas of
those more typically featured on screen.2
After the credits, the camera tilts up, revealing that we have been observing
the tiled floor of a covered driveway the film’s protagonist, Cleo, has washed
and cleaned. As the remaining water drains away, she walks back through a
courtyard with her bucket and brush, the camera panning and following her
as she greets the family dog and goes to the bathroom. The camera waits
patiently, holding a static shot of the courtyard and side of the house, waiting
for Cleo to return to her tasks and enter the house proper. Now we are shown
the interior of the downstairs rooms, clearly an affluent family with a
beautifully tended house, stacked with solid wooden bookshelves, the walls
adorned with paintings, Asian statues and tasteful decor. The camera cuts to
 What is Cinematic Ethics? 237

Cleo continuing her tasks upstairs, now in the early afternoon, continuing
the slow, cross-frame panning movement that will feature and continue
throughout the film. It follows her routine closely, showing her performing
her daily tasks, as she sings along to contemporary Mexican popular tunes,
all of which gives us a rich sense of the domestic space and milieu she
inhabits. The upstairs lounge room is messy, food and toys littering the floor,
beds unmade, piles of unwashed laundry strewn about, all of which Cleo will
have to do before the family returns. Another female voice calls out – her
friend Adela, the other housekeeper/cook, who calls Cleo ‘Manita’ –
reminding Cleo that it is 1pm, as she dashes out of the house, into the street,
in order to pick up the youngest child, Pepe, from school. Background
sounds enrich the sense of space – a street vendor, traffic, birdsong, dogs
barking, chatter – as Cleo and Pepe return home. There is a phone call for
Cleo from her boyfriend Fermín; it turns out that Adela and Cleo do not
always speak Spanish but use the dialect Mixteca when together at home.3
Overhearing Cleo talking on the phone, young Pepe is irritated, telling her
‘not to speak like that’, a pointed indication of the casual way in which the
racialised subordination of housekeeper/nannies like Cleo and Adela is
deeply ingrained within Mexican familial and social life.
The rest of the family arrive home and sit at the table for lunch, chatting
about school and asking Cleo for snacks and strawberries. Cleo and Adela
promptly tend to their needs, as we are introduced to the servant’s area and
kitchen at the back of the house. Sofia asks Cleo to dry clean her husband’s
suits as he will need them for a conference in Quebec. The family is relaxed
and familiar with Cleo but it is clear that she is there to serve them and
attend to their needs. We cut to the rooftop some time later in the afternoon.
Cleo is now doing laundry in an outdoor basin while listening to a popular
tune on the radio, ‘No Tengo Dinero’ [‘I don’t have any money’] with its
plaintive and poignant lyrics: ‘When I tell you that I’m poor/You won’t ever
smile again/I long to have it all/And lay it at your feet/But I was born poor/
And you’ll never love me’. As Cleo works, Paco and his younger brother Pepe
bound up to the roof area, playing cops and robbers. Paco storms off in a
huff after being defeated by his younger brother, who lies on a concrete block
in the sun, playing dead. Cleo takes a break from her laundry to join him,
head to head, lying on the block, playing dead as well. The symmetry of maid
and boy lying in the sun head-to-head is striking, but the camera then pans
upwards, revealing the broader background, as we hear the sound of the
radio, dogs and a host of other neighbourhood maids talking while also
doing their laundry as the camera pans across the neighbourhood rooftops.
238 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

Cleo’s story is but one of many similar stories in this environment,

representative not only of a singular family but a whole social world and
complex way of life.
This scene is representative of both why the film has been highly praised
and sharply criticised. Roma attracted both ‘hyperbolic’ praise and sharp
criticism (de la Mora 2019: 46):4 praise for its cinematic realist style, emotional
power, moral-political dimensions and visual beauty, but also criticism for
being a bespoke Netflix production with limited cinematic release, its
‘romanticised’ depiction of an indigenous domestic maid and its implicit
sexual-racial politics. On the one hand, critics lauded Roma for its stunning
cinematography, meticulous mise-en-scène, its realist style, offering both
socio-historical verisimilitude and evocative expressive power, its emotional
depth and its cinematic craft (see, for example, Bradshaw 2018; Darghis 2018;
de la Mora 2019; Marcantonio 2019). On the other, some critics took it to task
for a host of reasons: for aestheticising poverty and social exploitation,
allegedly ‘normalising’ the racialised subordination of indigenous
housekeeper/nannies like Cleo, for failing to offer any revolutionary political
solution to an endemic social and racialised problem, peddling in a fake or
inauthentic empathic politics, and even for ‘denying Cleo a voice’ (see, for
example, Brody 2018; Tafoya 2018). The polarised critical response to the film,
which otherwise enjoyed remarkable popularity and groundbreaking
Academy Award success, is surprising and intriguing. As I discuss further
below, the debates centre on the relationship between the aesthetic style of the
film, the powerful forms of emotional engagement it fosters and the moral-
political significance, implications and responses generated by it. I shall
suggest that the film’s aesthetic style and power of emotional engagement are
central to its ethical (and political) significance. Indeed, the debate generated
by the film – symptomatic of many aesthetic and cultural-political debates
today in response to cinema – reflects assumptions about aesthetic moralism
(the view that morally laudable traits of a work are also, or contribute to, the
work’s aesthetic virtues or value) and assumptions about the relationship
between aesthetic value and ethico-political meaning (that they should always
align in ‘good’ works of art or clash in the case of ‘bad’ ones).
A number of film scholars specialising in Latin American and Mexican
cinema have responded to these criticisms and defended the film (de la Mora
2019; Marcantonio 2019; Palou 2018). Carla Marcantonio focuses on the
socio-political discourses surrounding Roma, which the film itself has helped
to spark. Referring to various public Q&A sessions she attended (serving as
lead actress Yalitza Aparicio’s interpreter), Marcantonio noted that much of
 What is Cinematic Ethics? 239

the discussion of the film focused on ‘the relationship between the two
women in the film, Cleo and Sofia (Tavira) – specifically, their parallel
struggles in their relationships with men and the quiet solidarity that develops
between them’ (2019: 39). The film’s clear social justice roots and orientation
– its partnership with social activist platform Participant Media and the
National Domestic Works Alliance (NDWA) – was overshadowed by the
heated debate (certainly in the United States) over the role played by Netflix
in producing and distributing the film (which thereby curtailed its availability
to the public via general cinema release). Indeed, most of the critical discourse
on the film has either praised it for foregrounding the story of an indigenous
maid/nanny in a strongly sympathetic way within a realist 1970s Mexican
setting, or else criticised it for romanticising, aestheticising or normalising
her role as indigenous subordinate enabling a privileged bourgeois family to
enjoy its way of life. These starkly opposed ways of interpreting and evaluating
the film suggest that broader ethical, political and ideological issues are at
play, not only within the film and in relation to its context, but also with
regard to critical and theoretical assumptions shaping its reception.
The political context of this domestic familial drama, for example, and its
overt political content, has tended to be ignored or swept aside in favour of
other concerns. As de la Mora notes, the film is ‘set in Mexico City during
1970–71, the tail end of both the so-called Mexican economic miracle
(1940–60) and the beginning of the end of the political domination of the
PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party that governed Mexico for seventy
one years’ (2019: 46). Although the narrative focus of the film is Cleo and her
life as a domestic maid, as de le Mora remarks, ‘Roma keeps politics in its
peripheral vision, showing how domestic and personal politics reverberate
with the public and exterior’ (2019: 46). The student protest depicted in the
film, for example, is based on the Corpus Christi massacre of 1971, in which
around 120 protestors were killed (including a 14-year-old boy). Cleo’s
traumatic encounter with Fermín, now part of the Los Halcones [The
Hawks] paramilitary group that shoot dead one of the student protestors
who had fled inside the furniture shop, underlines the intertwining of
domestic and public politics, the way the personal sphere is shaped and, at
times, violently disrupted by politics. This traumatic encounter also suggests
why Fermín and Cleo cannot be together, not simply because he fails to take
paternal responsibility for her pregnancy but because of the constraints of
class and poverty (he grew up amidst crime, violence and drugs, still lives in
a slum, finding purpose in martial arts). Indeed, these aspects are intertwined:
his aggressive misogyny is coupled with an ardent desire to escape poverty
240 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

and oppression through disciplined self-transformation (martial arts). The

latter, however, is also what also makes him an ideal candidate to be recruited
into the violent paramilitary gang (Los Halcones), who provided ‘muscle’ for
the brutal government crackdown on the student protest movement.
The failed relationship between Cleo and Fermín therefore needs to be
understood in in this complicated context. There is Cleo’s servitude and lack
of options (although she is given medical care and not turned away by the
family, she is still expected to continue serving them and remain dependent
on them – baby or not – for her survival and employment); but there is also
the ongoing impact of Fermín’s poverty, anger and resentment, culminating
in his opportunistic recruitment into a paramilitary gang. As Marcantonio
observes, ‘the scene in question is perhaps key to understanding how
intrinsically the politics of motherhood are interwoven with the political
‘backdrop’ of the film and why the film is ultimately a more complex visual
testament than a mere register of the director’s memories could convey’
(2019: 39). Far more than a nostalgic memory film, Roma’s historical and
political context, along with its sexual politics, are essential to the film’s
narrative meaning, and are clearly signalled in sequences such as these. At
the same time, the intensely personal yet detached focus on Cleo’s life and
daily routines emphasises Roma’s ethical orientation, which encourages
both an immersive engagement with the details of Cleo’s everyday social
worlds and a sympathetic emotional engagement with her character in the
midst of her personal struggles and unjust treatment.
Critics such as Richard Brody, however, claimed that Roma is flawed
because it effaces Cleo’s character and denies her ‘a voice’ (2018). He claims
that the lack of dialogue attributed to Cleo, or voiceover/reflection perhaps,
means that Cuáron’s film therefore reduces her to a ‘bland and blank trope’, a
cipher representing a middle-class stereotype of the strong, silent, Stoic
‘domestic angel’ (2018). As a result, so Brody claims, Cuáron as a filmmaker
is unable to fathom, let alone convey, ‘her inner life’ (Brody 2018). Brody
draws on interview material where Cuáron discusses his childhood,
complaining that the film omits important contextual historical and political
details (concerning abortion laws in Mexico at the time, details of the reasons
behind the Corpus Christi massacre, details about the landowners’ dispute
alluded to by the film, the CIA’s role in training the paramilitary groups and
so on). As a result, he claims that the political dimension is ‘strictly personal,
de-ideologized, dehistoricized’ (Brody 2018). Had the film taken a more
didactic or documentary approach, giving Cleo direct speeches (or
voiceovers) explicitly describing her ‘inner life’, or more obvious factual
 What is Cinematic Ethics? 241

detail for the (non-Mexican) viewer concerning the Mexican historical, legal
and political milieu at the time, the film, presumably, would have been more
aesthetically as well as morally and politically successful (in Brody’s view).
As other defenders of the film have remarked, however, Brody appears to
misunderstand the film’s particular use of sound, image and genre, which are
specifically deployed in order to create a rich and densely detailed social and
historical world (Marcantonio 2019: 40 ff.). Roma uses long takes, slow pans
and tracking shots, episodic narrative structure, period sound and music,
and understated ‘naturalistic’ performances to present a detailed but
detached portrait of Cleo as an indigenous maid whose life circumstances
and social situation precisely prevent the kind of emancipatory political
speeches, gestures or revolutionary transformation that Brody and other
critics desire. In this respect Cuáron’s film recalls Italian neo-realist cinema,
which similarly offered realist depictions of a social and historical world,
everyday situations inhabited by characters representing both individuals
and social types – often played by non-professional actors – whose life, work
and subjectivity is presented through action, gesture and situation rather
than dialogue, dramatic resolution or heroic individualism. Antonio and
Bruno in de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves are ‘everyman’ social type characters, rather
than finely wrought, psychologically rounded, individualised characters
more typically found in popular narrative film. Such films rarely follow the
conventional narrative structure of a resolute individual triumphing over
their unjust social world, opting rather for a realist presentation of their
situation with its contradictory demands and unresolved dilemmas. As de la
Mora (2019), Marcantonio (2019) and Palou (2018) all point out, Brody
ignores or underplays the importance and significance of presenting the
story of an indigenous housekeeper/nanny as its central narrative and moral
focus. Cleo is an individual who also represents a social type, instantiating a
social role in Mexican society, whose ‘inner life’ is made apparent through
her behaviour in response to circumstances rather than via declamatory
or dramatic speeches. Indeed, Brody’s critique seems to confuse the film’s
detailed and focused presentation of how embedded the racialised
subordination is in Mexican society with an uncritical endorsement or
tacit ‘naturalisation’ or decontextualisation of such subordination. Focalising
the film via Cleo’s perspective, foregrounding her daily activities, personal
life and struggles, along with her employers’ casual, racially inflected
subordination of her, is itself a subtle ethico-political stance inviting the
viewer to evaluate, reflect upon and respond to the depicted narrative events
and situations.
242 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

Brody’s misguided criticisms of the film, however, do point to an

important issue: assumptions concerning what a ‘political’ or ‘ethically
responsible’ film should do or look like; and assumptions concerning the
idea that aesthetic qualities, emotional engagement and moral evaluation
should align in certain ways. The ‘Brechtian’ legacy concerning the ‘political’
effects of (emotional and psychological) distanciation, narrative interruption,
explicit self-reflexivity, the undermining of visual or narrative pleasure, or
explicit ‘consciousness raising’ (which today tends towards a recrudescence
of didactic moral-political pedagogy), still marks much critical and
theoretical discourse on popular narrative film as well as contemporary ‘art
cinema’. Ethical films, however, do not necessarily need to provide pedagogical
instruction concerning social, historical and political circumstances. They
do not have to give characters explicit dialogue in order to ‘give them a voice’
to convey a didactic message. And they do not necessarily have to depict
edifying, affirmative or revolutionary role models where oppressed or
marginalised individuals are shown heroically triumphing over economic
exploitation, political disenfranchisement, identity prejudice or social
discrimination. Simply showing what the characters’ experiences are, how
they are situated within a world, how they respond to their situation, how
they are treated, what social and cultural-ideological conditions they have to
contend with and so on, can serve as an ethical stance or implicit form of
political critique.
Films that align viewers with the perspective of marginalised characters,
for example, and focalise the narrative in order to generate emotional
engagement and moral sympathy, can not only give insights into their
experiences, situation and world but also generate affirmative moral-political
responses in response to narrative drama. One does not have to witness a
social change or political revolution occurring within the film-world in
order to adopt a moral response, change one’s attitude or engage in action in
response to a depicted wrong. In fact, showing the inability of a character to
change their circumstances or transform themselves because of the
constraints and limitations of their social world can itself serve as a form of
implicit critique motivating the desire for social or political change. This
indeed appears to have been the response to Roma, which in fact prompted
activist movements to not only recognise the plight but to improve the
situation and recognise the rights of indigenous housekeepers/maids in
Mexico and the United States (see Marcantonio 2019).
Slavoj Žižek (2019) offers a more intriguing critique, acknowledging the
cinematic power and aesthetic excellence of the film, but also noting the
 What is Cinematic Ethics? 243

manner in which the dominant strain of adulatory critical reception tended

to miss what he took to be the film’s implicit political dimension. The film is
being celebrated, Žižek claims, ‘for all the wrong reasons’, focusing on the
familial drama and reading it as a loving tribute to Cleo’s selfless devotion
and loyal servitude. This kind of reading would indeed lend some credence
to Brody’s critical dismissal, but it thereby also misses the implicit political
background that frames the familial drama and pervades the social world
the film so carefully depicts. As Žižek remarks, ‘this focus on intimate family
topic makes the oppressive presence of social struggles all the more palpable
as the diffuse but omnipresent background’; the Real of History, Žižek claims
(referring to Frederic Jameson), resists direct representation but can only be
represented indirectly ‘as an elusive background that leaves its mark on
depicted events’ (Žižek 2019).
There are obvious ‘false notes’ sounded throughout the film, for example,
which support this claim: the manner in which the family will momentarily
relax the ‘formal’ employer/master stance towards Cleo, watching television
with her in a familiar way as she pauses during her duties, only to causally
but abruptly remind her to prepare snacks and sweets for the children. Or
accompanying Cleo to the hospital and efficiently tending to her medical
needs after she falls pregnant, only then to expect her to continue her
domestic duties as per usual soon after having tragically lost her baby. Even
the fateful trip to Tuxpan to let Cleo ‘recover’ is a pretext to allow estranged
husband Antonio to remove his things from the family home. At a more
cinematic and aesthetic level, Žižek points to the formal features of the film
which also signal the ‘false notes’ being sounded in respect of the superficially
sympathetic depiction of Cleo’s selflessness and loyalty to the family. There is
an unsettling dissonance between form and content in key sequences of the
film, such as the devastating labour and birth scene, which ends with Cleo’s
stillborn baby being taken away from her, and the near-drowning at the
beach scene, where Cleo, despite being unable to swim, risks her life to rescue
Paco and Sofi struggling in the surf. Both sequences, as I detail below, are
shot in detached, almost unedited realist-style long takes, and eschew
emotional dramatisation in favour of social documentation. These sequences,
while visually powerful and emotionally devastating, are shots in ways that
undercut sentimentalised or personalised forms of moral sympathy and
suggest, at a deeper level, an implicit social or political critique.
Let us consider these two famous sequences more closely. Both are
presented as continuous long takes, without melodramatic embellishment,
musical accompaniment or intercutting to focus on Cleo’s emotional responses
244 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

or those of the people around her. In the hospital sequence, the camera remains
immobile, showing Cleo prone on a hospital bed as doctors and nurses work
frenetically to deliver her premature baby. The infant makes no sound after its
birth; the doctors realise that there is no heartbeat evident and try desperately
to revive it. The emergency medical measures taken to revive the infant are
shown, in real time, in a detached and objective manner. After much activity,
which is focused but frantic, efficient but clinical, it becomes clear that there is
nothing to be done, and the baby is declared dead. The combination of static
camera, the extended long-take structure and the real-time procedures being
executed efficiently but hurriedly upon Cleo’s vulnerable, inert body, create a
devastating sense of helplessness and loss, heightened by the calm, distanced,
neo-realist style characterising the whole film. It is not Cleo’s inner life that is
at issue here, nor the emotional relationships between her and the family, but
rather a traumatic, everyday medical experience that is at once deeply personal
and impersonally institutional, viscerally physical and socially unremarkable
– just another tragic case in the daily experience of the many Mexican women
in Cleo’s vulnerable social situation.
This unsettling combination of formal distance and emotive scenarios,
coupled with potentially melodramatic, even traumatic content, is also
evident in the famous beach sequence near the end of the film. The children
have been pestering their mother to be allowed to play on the beach. They
are on their way home from the town of Tuxpan, and pass by the beach
where the children were desperate to swim the day before. Sofia reluctantly
agrees and asks Cleo to look after them as they take to the water, even though
Cleo makes it clear that she cannot swim. The sequence consists of an
extended tracking shot that moves from the beach shoreline, into the water,
and back again. The camera tracks the children as they run into the water
and frolic in the shallows, tracks back as Cleo takes Pepe out of the water and
back up to the shore, then tracks back again as she turns her attention, after
a couple of minutes, to Paco and Sofi who are still in the water. The camera
tracks slowly, in real time, as Cleo realises the children are in trouble,
following her as she enters the water and battles the waves, remaining at a
discreet distance from Cleo, always framing her in relation to her
environment, so as to more carefully document what she does and the milieu
in which she acts. In a gut-wrenchingly suspenseful sequence, the camera
tracks Cleo in tandem as she battles the threatening waves and somehow
manages to reach both children in distress and drag them back to shore.
This strongly neo-realist depiction of the rescue is encapsulated in the
signature shot (used for the movie poster) of Cleo being embraced, but also
 What is Cinematic Ethics? 245

smothered, by the distressed and relieved family on the beach. As Cuáron

remarked, the ambivalence of the emotional bonds between the family and
Cleo as domestic servant – bonds that tie her to the family emotionally but
that also subjugate her socially and economically – are subtle but pervasive:
‘That embrace is as much a hug as a cage’.5 After the emotionally draining
rescue, there is a remarkable shot of Cleo, looking pensively out of the car
window, with her arm around one of the sleeping children an enigmatic
half-smile on her face. This apparently authentic expression of gratitude and
emotional solidarity is then undercut by the almost immediate reversion to
master/servant dynamic between the family and Cleo once they return
home, even as they convey to the grandmother how Cleo bravely rescued the
children from drowning. This inherent ambivalence between emotional
bonds and economic coercion, family membership and social exploitation,
socially habituated routines and the legacy of colonialist oppression, is
inherent to Roma’s cinematic ethics: its heightening of emotional engagement,
stylised neo-realist depiction and subtle ethico-political critique.
This ethical reading of the film chimes with Marcantonio’s critical point
about the overwhelming focus on gender and female relationships in the
film – both the parallels and contrasts between the experiences and social
situations of Cleo and Sofia – which has also obscured the ‘overt political
content’ and socio-historical context of the film that escaped many non-
Mexican critics (2019: 39–40). It also resonates with de le Mora’s claim that
the film powerfully centres and visualises ‘how Indigenous domestic and
intimate labor has been racialized and gendered in Mexico’ (2019: 47).
Indeed, with its combination of emotional engagement, aesthetic stylisation,
melodramatic content and historico-political framing, Roma focuses on the
complexity and ambiguity of ‘intimate labour’ (Boris and Parreñas 2010):
namely, all manner of domestic ‘work assumed to be the unpaid responsibility
of women, and consequently a nonmarket activity or an activity of low
economic value that should be done by lower classes or racial outsiders’
(Boris and Parreñas (2010: 20); quoted in de la Mora (2019: 47)). Roma is a
film focusing on the dialectic of intimacy and distance that characterises
intimate labour, a dialectic portrayed in films depicting the social situation
and personal experiences of Latin American domestic servants (D. Shaw
2017). Roma shows in depth and detail the ambiguous attachments and
complex social dynamics between Cleo and her employers/family members;
they treat her as both a servant and as a family member, yet do not fully
recognise her as a person nor respect her autonomy and rights (her situation
is thus typical of indigenous maids/domestic servants and an expression of
246 From Cognitivism and Phenomenology to Film-Philosophy

the normalisation of racialised social subordination as a legacy of colonialist

oppression).
Why has the film proven to be so popular, receiving widespread critical
acclaim, yet also troubled certain critics as to its moral-political dimensions?
Here I would like to consider the role of aesthetic stylisation and emotional
engagement in generating responses to narrative film. Indeed, I would like to
suggest that Roma pointedly raises the issue of how an ethical and politically
oriented narrative film might use emotional engagement to develop moral
sympathy but also explore the forms of moral-cognitive dissonance we
might experience in confronting a clash between our emotional, moral and
ideological-political responses. Most critics objected to the way in which the
film’s strongly emotional scenes and sympathetic portrayal of Cleo were
coupled with a lack of explicit criticism or denunciation of her employer
family or the Mexican social class system as exploitative and racist. As
remarked, these criticisms generally tend to downplay or ignore the historical
context and political content of the film, but nonetheless point to a pervasive
assumption: that emotional engagement is always tied to moral allegiance in
straightforward ways, and that emotional sympathy cannot co-exist with
critical reflection or moral-ethical critique. One of the striking features of
the film, however, is its capacity to present and elicit emotional ambiguity
and moral ambivalence. It shows the ambiguous emotional bonds between
Cleo and the family, sympathetically portraying her care and devotion, while
also presenting the complex social-historical context and implicit political
significance of her situation, without explicitly ‘denouncing’ either her family
or Cleo herself. Are we supposed to ‘approve’ of her family or ‘condemn’
them? Are we supposed to sympathise with her plight while admiring her
moral character or criticise her conformity and ‘failure’ to revolt? The lack of
a clear resolution – the film’s ambiguous concluding lines, Cleo’s remark to
her friend, ‘I have so much to tell you’ – could suggest either a continuation
of the status quo or a significant change in Cleo’s situation and future.
That Roma refrains from a simplistic moralising portrayal of her family
as exploiters and of Cleo as either long-suffering victim or as proto-
revolutionary is taken as a criticism of the film rather than as a sign of its
moral-ethical complexity – its invitation to engage in critical reflection on
what we have experienced in watching this remarkable film.
It is Roma’s emphasis on rich descriptive presentation of Cleo’s daily
experience of domestic servitude, including the complex emotional bonds with
her employer/family coupled with their causal exploitation of her, which allows
the film to create a space for ethical experience and critical reflection. It is not
 What is Cinematic Ethics? 247

by way of didactic denunciation of her employers’ racism or of Cleo’s subjugation

and dehumanisation, but the emotionally compelling depiction of the daily
reality of social/class division and broader political turmoil that generates
emotional engagement and moral sympathy coupled with a ‘distanced’ aesthetic
presentation encouraging thoughtful reflection. Roma thus recalls and repeats
the traditions of Italian neo-realism – think of the depiction of the melancholy
young maid Maria [Maria-Pia Casilio], who, much like Cleo, also finds herself
pregnant, in de Sica’s Umberto D. (1952). Roma shows rather than explains the
plight of underprivileged or marginalised characters, the complexity of their
social relationships and the seemingly intractable social and class divisions
shaping their world. It is curious how little attention, however, has been given to
Roma’s obvious homages to neo-realist cinema (to Rossellini, de Sica, Savattini
and early Fellini), which are artfully blended with tropes belonging to Mexican
soap opera or telenovelas. Recalling the tradition of neorealism, Roma’s subtle
ethical achievement is to invite emotional engagement with the quiet but
expressive protagonist. The film’s patient and intimate yet distant and detached
depiction of her domestic routines within a richly rendered social world also
serves a moral evaluation of her dignity, and an implicit critique of the family’s
– and Mexican society’s – failure to recognise her autonomy and humanity.
From this point of view, the ‘naturalisation’ of class privilege and colonialist
forms of racially marked oppression in the film are difficult to miss. Moreover,
the fact that Roma remains entirely focused on Cleo’s experiences as an
indigenous maid – one of a multitude of similar stories making up this world
– is itself an important ethico-political gesture made in emotionally compelling
and cinematically distinctive terms.
Despite misguided charges that Roma represents nothing more than an
aestheticised apologia for colonialist racism, the film has been remarkably
successful in promoting the kind of political responses that such critics have
called for. It has raised awareness of the exploitative conditions faced by
domestic maids/servants, the racist and colonialist history and underpinnings
of the practice and the urgent need for reform and political change in
contemporary Mexico (Marcantonio 2019). Because such social and
political ‘solutions’ are missing in the film, Roma’s realistically documented,
aesthetically immersive and morally sympathetic depiction of Cleo’s domestic
situation – presented in a neo-realist/familial melodramatic mode
memorialising her story as representative of other indigenous women –
invites us ethically to reflect upon, shift our attitudes, even take action in
response to her story. That is why Roma is a remarkable case of cinematic
ethics in action.
248
 Part III
Cinematic Thinking

10 Photobiographies: The ‘Derrida’

Documentaries as Film-Philosophy
11 Planet Melancholia: Romanticism, Mood and
Cinematic Ethics
12 Television as Philosophy: Reflections on
Black Mirror

Having examined the analytic-cognitivist turn (Part I), and new approaches
defining contemporary philosophies of film (Part II), including an
exploration of cinematic ethics, Part III of this book attempts to put into
practice the film-philosophy/cinematic ethics approach explored in the
preceding two chapters. Film-philosophy emphasises the importance of our
aesthetic experience of particular films, defending whatever theoretical
claims one might make with reference to the film-philosophical readings
that one offers. I take as my guide here Mulhall’s idea of ‘the priority of the
particular’ (2008: 129 ff.). As discussed in Chapter 8, the claims made in film-
philosophy cannot be decided purely on theoretical grounds but require, as
Cavell also claims, recourse to philosophical film criticism (1981: 1–42;
1996: 3–45); that is, the testing of one’s aesthetic experience with particular
films via philosophical interpretation and critical reflection. I also draw on
Deleuze’s claim that cinema can enact a ‘shock to thought’ (1989: 189–224):
that it performs a cinematic thinking in images that both challenges and

249
250 Cinematic Thinking

resists philosophy, provoking us to think in response to what film enables us

to experience, without, however, reducing cinema to a mere reflection of an
assumed philosophical thesis or theoretical framework. Taken together,
these ideas present the most promising guides to performing what I am
calling (romantic) film-philosophy.
Although Cavell and Mulhall (see also Peretz 2008) have focused on popular
genres and films for their philosophical readings, I have chosen a variety of
cinematic case studies: two contrasting philosophical documentaries about the
life and thought of a philosopher (Derrida and D’ailleur, Derrida), an art
cinema/crossover (or generically hybrid) film (Lars von Trier’s Melancholia
(2011)) and an innovative dystopian television series, Charlie Brooker’s Black
Mirror (2011–2019). One can imagine a straightforward criticism of this
approach. By choosing philosophical documentaries or ‘art films’, even ‘quality
television’, a critic might object, you are skewing the film-philosophy relationship
in favour of philosophy by avoiding, in typically elitist fashion, dealing with
popular genres and films. Such elitism, our critic might continue, simply
reproduces the kind of philosophical disenfranchisement of film that you claim
is overturned by the film-philosophy approach. Even if you were able to show
that some films can ‘do’ philosophy, our critic might continue, say art films that
may or may not have such philosophical pretensions, this would not show that
‘cinema in general’ can be philosophical, which is presumably what philosophical
readings of popular genres and films (or even television) intend to show.1
Mulhall (2008), for example, defends his choice of films belonging to
popular genres along precisely these lines. If one can show that films such as
Mission: Impossible can be taken seriously as philosophy, then the same can
be said, a fortiori, for films and auteurs belonging to the ‘philosophical canon’
(say Bergman, Godard, Tarkovsky, Antonioni, Malick, Rashomon, Blade
Runner, The Thin Red Line, Memento, Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine
of the Spotless Mind and so on). While I take Mulhall’s point, there is no
reason to therefore avoid responding to such films, especially when they are
among the most challenging and rewarding instances of ‘philosophical’
cinema. Moreover, there is no reason to assume that the ‘film as philosophy’
thesis must be made a fully generalisable claim. Indeed, there may well be
only select instances of filmmaking that elicit suitably ‘philosophical’ forms
of criticism or that count as cases of cinematic thinking. Like aesthetic value,
philosophical value may be an evaluative, rather than objective, property of
individual works, which is to say more a matter of experiencing, interpreting
and analysing a work in certain ways rather than detecting and defining
some pre-existing property within it.
 Cinematic Thinking 251

In any event, I would admit that there is a degree of “elitism” (which I take
to be more a moralising accusation than a philosophical objection) in
choosing certain films rather than others (exercising one’s aesthetic or
philosophical tastes cannot help but be so). This is an “elitism”, however, that
is plural and open-ended, an elitism of aesthetic, artistic and philosophical
achievement, rather than one of pernicious ideological exclusion. Excellence
in cinematic art can be achieved in many ways, in many styles and in many
genres (in popular romance as much as experimental film, in horror as much
as documentary, in self-reflective art film as much as action or science fiction
genres, in cinema as in television). Moreover, as Cavell remarks (1979: 219),
films that take the condition of film as their subject enjoy an inherent
philosophical advantage or greater degree of self-understanding than other
less self-aware or self-questioning works. It is only fitting that films inviting
the viewer to think, to feel and to question should have their invitations
accepted.
As far as the choice of a television series like Black Mirror is concerned,
one could imagine sceptics of the ‘film as philosophy’ idea being even less
convinced by the choice of a television series, especially one that adopts an
anthology series format rather than the much vaunted long-form, continuous
television serial. The latter have come to represent the standard of artistic
excellence in narrative television, with examples such as The Wire (2002–
2008), The Sopranos (1999–2007) and Breaking Bad (2008–2013) being the
subject of numerous studies (see, for example, Crosby, Vannatta and Bdzak
2013; Decker, Koepsell and Arp 2017; Greene and Vernezze 2004; Williams
2014). These focus not only on their artistic achievement but the manner in
which the long-form, multiplot narrative enables complex varieties of
emotional engagement, dynamic and varying character arcs, exploration of
moral ambiguity and the descriptive disclosure of cinematic worlds and
social-historical milieu in ways not available to most narrative films.
Although I accept the importance of the long-form television serial, I would
like to defend the philosophical significance of the short-form episodic
television series. It is precisely through its more compact ‘thought experiment’
format – exploring hypothetical possibilities in circumscribed scenarios,
where character-driven narrative is eschewed in favour of compact narrative
situations that extrapolate from our present social reality – that Black Mirror
is better able to imagine alternative presents and explore ‘near future’
possibilities in response to contemporary technological, social and ethical
challenges. This remarkable case of ‘television as philosophy’ is the subject of
my final chapter, which allows me to revisit the discussion of cinema as
252 Cinematic Thinking

moral-philosophical ‘thought experiment’. It also enables me to suggest ways

in which Black Mirror episodes might not only offer philosophically
challenging televisual thought experiments but also, through acknowledging
and reflecting on their own status and conditions of possibility, offer striking
examples of (modernist?) television existing ‘in the condition of philosophy’
(Mulhall 2002: 6; 2008: 7).
I would add that there is also an ethical decision at stake in devoting time
and thought to films or television shows that deliberately take the path less
chosen, that question established conventions and that experiment with
evoking new ways of thinking and feeling. In a global cultural and economic
marketplace dominated by certain types of stories or ideological points of
view, there is ethical purpose in devoting attention to the more marginal,
more questioning, more aesthetically and intellectually demanding films
that one encounters.2 This is one reason why I chose to discuss two
independent, lesser known philosophical-biographical documentaries,
Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman’s Derrida, and Egyptian poet and
filmmaker Safaa Fathy’s D’ailleur, Derrida. Although documentary film has
become globally popular in recent years, documentaries focusing on
philosophers remain a lesser-known but innovative and important subgenre
that offer ideal cases for exploring the film-philosophy relationship.
Why choose these particular case studies for more extended reflection?
There are three main reasons. 1) These are films/works in which the filmmakers
explore non-mainstream narrative, while engaging, more or less critically,
with the Hollywood tradition, or which push established forms (in
documentary or television) in new directions. 2) They are generic hybrids
(blending genres in novel, aesthetically challenging ways), which also explore
a variety of issues or themes of philosophical interest, including their own
status as cinematic/audiovisual works. 3) They address philosophical questions
or ethical problems in original and creative ways, offering what I call (in regard
to the ‘Derrida’ documentaries) instances of ‘performative philosophy’ on film.
In doing so, they also display a striking ‘resistance to theory’, which makes
them challenging test cases to explore the hypothesis of cinematic thinking: a
non-conceptual or affective thinking in images that resists cognitive closure or
theoretical subsumption. Moreover, there is an urgency in dealing with the
more pressing issues facing us within our technologically mediated world –
such as the ecological and environmental crises, the social and cultural
implications of new technologies – that makes film and television dealing
with these issues both philosophically and ethically significant. The social and
technological challenges demand imaginative and ethical responses, works of
 Cinematic Thinking 253

art responding to the relentless acceleration of technological transformation

and its impact on culture and subjectivity, sociality and politics, cinema and
ethics. This is what makes Black Mirror, which appropriates cinematic narrative
into a televisual anthology format, offering performative critical engagements
with contemporary digital media culture and technology, such an appropriate
choice for my final case study. Generically hybrid works such as these –
spanning biographical documentary, art film, art horror, disaster film, science
fiction and speculative fiction genres – allow us to explore contemporary
instances of cinematic thinking by way of detailed film-philosophical and
ethical criticism as responses to the powerful aesthetic experiences they afford.
254
 10
Photobiographies:
The ‘Derrida’ Documentaries
as Film-Philosophy

Chapter Outline
Performative Philosophy 258
The ‘Derrida’ Documentaries 259
Spectres of Derrida 261
Cinema as ‘Ghost Dance’ 263
The Sex Lives of Philosophers 265
Improvisation 266
Echo and Narcissus 268
D’ailleurs, Derrida [Derrida’s Elsewhere] 270
Performance versus Performativity 274
Epilogue: In Praise of Amateurs 276

Although the question of film and philosophy has attracted much attention,
most discussion concerning the ‘film as philosophy’ debate has focused
on narrative film with only occasional references to documentary (see,
for example, Constable 2009; Livingston 2009; Mulhall 2008; Read and
Goodenough 2005; Sinnerbrink 2016a; Wartenberg 2007).1 Even less
attention has been given to a small but growing number of non-fictional
films that focus specifically on philosophers and their work, films that deploy
creative cinematic means for the exploration of philosophical ideas.2

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256 Cinematic Thinking

Consider Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein (1993), which takes a creative

dramatisation approach to selected vignettes from Wittgenstein’s life –
focusing as much on his repressed sexuality as on his thought and social
milieu – or Sophie Fiennes’ two films on Slavoj Žižek, The Pervert’s Guide to
Cinema (2006) and The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012), which both feature
Žižek discoursing on the construction of desire through cinema or the role
of ideology in structuring social reality while ‘acting’ as himself within
cleverly staged parodic scenes from famous but relevant movies (Psycho, The
Matrix, The Birds, They Live and Titanic). In a more conventional biographical
documentary vein, Gorav and Rohan Kalvan’s Badiou (2018) focuses on the
life and personality of French philosopher Alain Badiou, giving him ample
screen time, through interviews and lectures, to articulate his thought and
politics, discuss his childhood, and to present an accessible and unadorned
portrait of the ageing thinker’s personality and views. Margarethe von
Trotta’s Hannah Arendt (2012) is a more ‘classic’ biopic, featuring key episodes
in the life of Arendt, especially the controversy surrounding the publication
of her work Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963),
based on her articles covering Eichmann’s trial for war crimes and analysis
of the ‘banality of evil’ that he represented. The film concludes with a
powerful lecture given to her students at the New School which both
communicates and enacts Arendt’s conception of politics as the public
presentation of speech and action oriented towards an acknowledgment of
history and courage to create the new.
Another such biographical documentary, but more philosophically
daring, is Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman’s Derrida (2002), a film
focusing on the late Jacques Derrida’s life and work, which drew ambivalent
responses from viewers and critics. Some acknowledged the film’s attempts
to explore the boundary between the biographical and the philosophical,
and to evoke the thought of deconstruction via its reflexive staging of the
various interviews, lectures, readings and reality TV vignettes composing
the film. David Roden (2003), however, echoes many critics in lamenting the
film Derrida’s failure to engage in ‘philosophical discussion and analysis’,
hence criticises it for being ‘insufficiently philosophical’. By contrast, a related
philosophical documentary, Egyptian poet, playwright and filmmaker Safaa
Fathy’s D’ailleur, Derrida [Derrida’s Elsewhere] (1999), has been praised for
precisely the opposite reasons, namely for succeeding in both revealing its
subject on screen, the philosopher Jacques Derrida, focusing attention on his
Algerian background, his life in Paris, personal background, complex
identity (Derrida regarding himself, like Spinoza, as a Marrano Jew), while at
 Photobiographies 257

the same time finding cinematic ways of presenting essential elements of

Derrida’s deconstructive mode of thinking.
David Wills, for example, comments on the film’s success in presenting
the idea of an ‘elsewhere’ that is related to Derrida’s notion of writing
[écriture] as the displacement of speech (by juxtaposing shots of the different
contexts in which Derrida is filmed, such as his childhood home in Algeria,
the École normale supérieure where he taught for 30 years, his private library,
garden and home, with images of Derrida speaking to camera, articulating
his thought in filmed verbal presentations, and featuring various
‘displacements’ of Derrida to locations ‘elsewhere’, such as Spain, desert
landscapes, seasides and the like, rich with historical, literary and cultural
associations yet also resonant with his philosophical thought). He also
praises the film’s success in conveying cinematically the ethical ideas of
confession/writing/autobiography, witnessing, hospitality and forgiveness:
by removing the filmmaker from the filmmaking process, D’ailleur, Derrida
creates a space for Derrida to speak and philosophise freely, ‘scripting’ the
film himself, so to speak, thereby opening up an ‘elsewhere’ between speech/
writing and image that complicates the relationship between Derrida’s
biographical background and the philosophical trajectory of his thought.
The film is accompanied by a co-authored book, Tourner les mots: Au bord
d’un film [Shooting Words: One the Edge of a Film] (2000), where Fathy and
Derrida engage in a parallel deconstructive dialogue exploring both themes
articulated in the film and the divergent and dissonant character of the
relationship between ‘the Author’ (Fathy) and ‘the Actor’ (Derrida) as a
complex interplay of identities and differences, presences and absences,
translations and presentations, words and images.
I take this intriguing philosophical reception of the two Derrida films as
an invitation to ask what it means for a film depicting ‘the life of a philosopher’
to either succeed or fail as a work of film-philosophy, that is, as a work that
communicates, or enacts, philosophical ideas via cinematic means. How does
a philosophical documentary – one taking a living philosopher as its subject
– achieve a cinematic articulation of his or her thought? In what follows I
explore these questions by taking these two films – biographical documentaries
that also attempt to articulate their subject’s philosophy – as my case studies.
Rather than judging the films Derrida and D’ailleur, Derrida according to
traditional critical discourses, my discussion will consider the problem of
understanding what I shall call ‘performative philosophy’ in and through
film: the filmmakers’ contrasting attempts to present aspects of the life of the
philosopher while ‘screening’ their thought via cinematic presentation. These
258 Cinematic Thinking

two intriguing philosophical-biographical documentaries highlight decisive

issues in the ‘film as philosophy’ debate, especially when broadened to include
non-fiction films and the idea of ‘performative philosophy’. The alleged
‘failure’ of Dick and Kofman’s Derrida as ‘insufficiently philosophical’, and the
apparent ‘success’ of Fathy’s D’ailleur, Derrida in communicating philosophy
cinematically (both claims that I question in what follows), raise the question
of the relationship between film and philosophy, and how we might think
through this relationship as a cinematic performance of thought. I suggest in
conclusion that, while both documentaries can be described as ‘performative’
– combining non-traditional documentary techniques, narrative elements
and reflexive presentational styles – Dick and Kofman’s Derrida enacts a
deconstructive ‘performativity’ – presenting cinematic performances of
philosophy while reflexively contesting these performances – that is closer in
spirit to Derrida’s deconstructive mode of thought. On the other hand, Fathy’s
D’ailleur, Derrida, is more respectfully attuned to Derrida’s thought,‘following’
him in thought, word and deed allowing him as ‘the Actor’ to ‘script’ the film
in concert with ‘the Author’. This ‘subordination’ of the film to the philosopher
thereby allows for a more complex exploration of Derrida’s identity as an
‘outsider’ not only within the French and Anglophone philosophical worlds,
but in relation to his background as an Algerian Jewish/Marrano thinker –
someone concerned to probe the boundaries between philosophy and its
other, between Europe and the Jewish-Muslim Mediterranean worlds. At the
same time, this very ‘success’ in faithfully portraying Derrida’s life and thought
also marks a certain ‘failure’ to contest – in a performative manner – Derrida’s
deconstructive thinking. Although both films engage in cinematic thinking,
I shall suggest that Dick and Kofman’s Derrida is more engaged with and
attuned to the performativity of deconstructive thought.

Performative Philosophy
Interest in the relationship between film and philosophy has focused largely
on fictional narrative film. Far less attention has been given to documentary,
where recent work has focused on questions of truth and representation, the
distinction between fiction and non-fiction, the possibility of objectivity
versus the role of subjectivity, and the ethics of representation and of
spectatorship (see Carroll 1997; Cooper 2006; Currie 1999b; Nichols 2001;
Plantinga 1996; Renov 2004; Saxton 2008; Winston 2000). It is striking,
moreover, how little attention has been given to recent documentary film
 Photobiographies 259

that explicitly engages with philosophers and their work, films that examine
and enact, by cinematic means, the relationship between film and philosophy
and whether film can contribute to philosophical understanding.3 The most
interesting examples of such film focus not only on the ‘persona’ of the
philosopher, his or her manner of articulating and communicating ideas, but
attempt to stage a dialogue between filmmaker and thinker (as well as the
viewer), or between image and idea. They do so in order to communicate not
only the living presence of the thinker but also to convey, using cinematic
means, something of the conceptual meaning and abstract complexity of
their thought. Such films should make inviting case studies for the exploration
of the relationship between film and philosophy, and indeed invite such
responses not only from viewers but, I would suggest, from philosophers
themselves.
With a growing number of these films being made, some by highly
celebrated filmmakers – such as Michel Gondry’s Is the Man That Is Tall
Happy? (2014), a whimsical and imaginative animated film-philosophical
conversation with Noam Chomsky – it is worth giving them the philosophical
attention they deserve. Are such films too obviously or directly ‘philosophical’
to be of interest to philosophers? Is it that they are deemed manifestly
pedagogical or populist and so beneath philosophical notice? I take this
relative silence on the part of philosophical film theorists as an invitation to
open up a dialogue with these films and to explore the manner in which they
might be understood as ‘performing’ philosophy or engaging in what I shall
call ‘performative philosophy’ on film.4 I do not mean that they simply show
philosophers engaging in philosophical discussion but rather that they
respond to and communicate philosophical ideas in creative cinematic
terms. These films are philosophical insofar as they enact or perform
thinking via cinematic means, and at the same time heighten our
responsiveness to the world via aesthetic sense-making practices. They add
important insights to the ‘film as philosophy’ debate, and thus deserve
further attention from philosophers and film theorists alike.

The ‘Derrida’ Documentaries

The relationship between film and philosophy arises as a compelling question
as soon as one considers non-fictional films that take philosophers as their
subject. What would it mean to perform philosophy on and with film? Are
philosophical documentaries possible? These questions haunt Kirby Dick
260 Cinematic Thinking

and Amy Kofman’s Derrida (2002), which takes as its subject the life and
thought of the late French philosopher.5 This unremarkable and conventional
title, however, encrypts the film’s difficult, even irresolvable, question: What
is the relationship between ‘Derrida’, signifying the archive of texts signed by
the author Jacques Derrida; ‘Derrida’, signifying the manner and movement
of thought for which the term deconstruction has come to stand; and
‘Derrida’ as the proper name designating the author of those works as well as
the empirical individual, born in Algiers in 1930 and who died in 2004, a
couple of years after the film was completed. A film like Derrida seems to
address these related meanings at once, the name ‘Derrida’ serving to
encompass them all as well as naming the enigmatic ‘subject’ whose
distinctive face, voice and gestures provide, for the most part, the visual and
dramatic subject-matter of the film.
Composed of a heterogeneous assemblage of interviews, seminar
recordings, vérité footage, staged improvisations and lyrical sequences
framed by quotations from Derrida’s texts, the film is also accompanied by
an evocative musical score composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto. It joins a small
body of films that take as their subject living philosophers, and which
thereby provide a rich opportunity to explore the relationship between
philosophy and film. We might call this microgenre of non-fiction films one
that explores ‘performative philosophy’: films that attempt to ‘perform’
philosophy on and with film, indeed to show instances of ‘performance
philosophy’ in a manner akin to performance art.6 They depict philosophers
‘performing’ their ideas on camera but, more importantly, explore different
ways of communicating or conveying (that is to say, performing) these ideas
via audiovisual means. Although mostly based on interviews combined with
voiceover recitations of philosophical texts, some also deploy fictional
elements in order to portray (dead) philosophers or imagined episodes from
philosophers’ lives. Among these I would include Ken McMullen’s Ghost
Dance (1983), Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein (1993), Richard Linklater’s
Waking Life (2001), David Barison and Daniel Ross’ The Ister (2004), Astra
Taylor’s Zizek! (2005) and Examined Life (2008), Sophie Fiennes The Pervert’s
Guide to Cinema (2006), Michel Gondry’s documentary on Noam Chomsky,
Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? (2010), Tao Ruspoli’s Being-in-the-World
(2010), as well as Safaa Fathy’s Derrida’s Elsewhere [D’ailleur, Derrida]
(2001).7
Like many of these hybrid films – neither strictly documentary, biopic,
essay film nor fictional work but combining elements of each – Dick and
Kofman’s film Derrida has elicited ambivalent responses among viewers and
 Photobiographies 261

critics. Perhaps the dominant tone in most critical responses was a noticeable
discomfort concerning the question of its philosophical, rather than
cinematic, status. This ambivalence is clearly evident, for example, in Roden’s
review article (2003) in the online journal Film-Philosophy. As remarked, he
acknowledges the film’s attempts to explore the boundary between the
biographical and the philosophical, indeed its ambitions to perform a visual
deconstruction via its reflexive framings of the various interviews, lectures,
quotations and reality TV vignettes composing the film.While acknowledging
its sensitivity to the ‘constructed or mediated nature of the image’, Roden
(2003) echoes many critics in lamenting Derrida’s failure to engage in
‘philosophical discussion and analysis’, hence dismisses the film for being
‘insufficiently philosophical’. This is a curious but revealing criticism: it is
clear that the film is assumed to be presenting philosophical ideas, and that
in order to do so it must find ways to articulate and explain such ideas. The
criticism assumes, however, that it is clear what such a cinematic presentation
of ideas should be or to what extent the documentary is obliged to
contextualise, describe or explain such ideas in recognisably ‘philosophical’
terms. It is far from obvious, however, what it means to deal with the
relationship between film and philosophy, or what it means for a film to deal
with all of the issues – philosophical, biographical and cinematic – clustered
around the name ‘Derrida’ in the senses I have noted above. The manner in
which philosophical ideas might be ‘screened’ or projected via cinematic
means is what such a documentary both raises and puts into question.

Spectres of Derrida
Roden’s critique, moreover, raises the question of what it means for a
documentary concerned with a philosopher to succeed or fail‘philosophically’
(which is a different question as to whether it succeeds cinematically).
As remarked, the assumption here is that such a film should engage in
‘philosophical discussion and analysis’, via cinematic means, yet in a manner
also recognisable as ‘philosophy’. As we saw in Chapter 8, this is a contestable
claim; there are many debates both examining and challenging the view that
film can, let alone should, make something like philosophical ‘arguments’
albeit by visual means (see, for example, Livingston 2006; Mulhall 2008:
129–155; Sinnerbrink 2011a: 120–135; Smuts 2009b; Wartenberg 2007: 15–
31). Moreover, there is the question of how to make a film about a thinker
who contested the notion of autobiography and radically questioned our
262 Cinematic Thinking

culture’s tendency to anchor the meaning of a work to an author’s intentions,

psychology or biography (see Derrida 1993). What happens when a film is
made about an author whose work does not readily yield to cinematic
translation, yet whose persona presents a fascinating occasion for cinematic
portraiture and visual archiving?8 The temptation to ‘hero worship’ is ever
present, one that such documentaries on the ‘lives of the philosophers’ must
always strive to avoid, which Dick and Kofman try to do, although not always
successfully.9
On the other hand, as Derrida remarks in the film (and in his work),
philosophy, unlike, say, literary criticism or art history, has traditionally
avoided admitting the personal, the biographical or the psychological into
the sphere of critical analysis or interpretation. We do not usually credit, say,
Kant’s punctiliousness concerning his famous afternoon stroll, Hegel’s
fathering of an illegitimate child, Marx’s youthful efforts at poetry, Nietzsche’s
unrequited passion for Lou Salome, Hannah Arendt’s affair with Heidegger
(see Ettinger 1997) or Foucault’s LSD trip in Death Valley (see Penner 2019)
with having any explicit philosophical significance, whatever other
psychological, biographical or cultural insights these intriguing and
fascinating biographical events might offer.10 Despite the ancient tradition of
instruction through philosophical example – the pedagogy of the anecdote,
found in classic texts such as Diogenes Laertius’ Lives and Opinions of
Eminent Philosophers – modern philosophy eschews any consort with
biography as strictly outside the domain of philosophy proper. Even today,
philosophical or intellectual biography, while persistently popular, is
sometimes regarded with both acknowledgment and ambivalence from a
philosophical point of view.11 Nonetheless, these fascinating texts, combining
narration, biographical detail, literary anecdote, and philosophical
interpretation remain borderline or hybrid disciplinary works, texts whose
status between philosophy and non-philosophy remains contested,
uncertain, perhaps undecidable – features that are compounded further
when such a project is translated into the medium of cinema.
Indeed, matters become more complicated, in a different way, when we
consider what happens when a filmmaker attempts to produce a philosophical
documentary not on one of ‘the mighty dead’ but on a still-living philosopher,
capturing his or her persona, physiognomy, mannerisms, speech, gestures
and vital presence on film (as Astra Taylor’s philosophical documentaries do
so successfully). What happens when a film is made about an author whose
oeuvre is not yet closed, whose chosen medium of thought (the written text)
does not readily offer itself to translation into the medium of film, yet whose
 Photobiographies 263

persona presents a fascinating occasion for cinematic portraiture and visual

archiving? What can film do with such a philosopher/philosophy?
Some of these questions are touched on, albeit obliquely, in Derrida’s own
work. His co-authored text with Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television
(2002), for example, explores the deconstructive dimensions of televisual
technology as a form of prosthetic mediation that creates the illusion of
presence while collapsing time and distance via audiovisual representation.
Using filmed interviews with Derrida and textual transcriptions of their
discussions, Stiegler and Derrida articulate, in a performative manner, the
intermedial complexities that arise in the technologically mediated
translation between image and writing. Derrida, moreover, has appeared on
film before, notably in Ken McMullen’s Ghost Dance (1983). As Derrida
remarks, in a well-known vignette from Ghost Dance, cinema is ‘an art of
ghosts, a battle of phantoms’.12 The fascination of cinematic presentation lies
in the play between presence and absence, the image of an absent figure who
possesses a ghostly presence, the impression of immediacy and virtual
reality we experience that depends upon mechanical or digital recording,
editing and screening. And the complexities multiply with a documentary
presenting the figure of the philosopher, documenting the individual behind
the texts, while emphasising the constructed character of this persona and
the enigmatic relationship between image, word and idea within any such
audiovisual presentation.

Cinema as ‘Ghost Dance’

Cinema is a medium in many senses: of the moving image, of the living
dead; a presentation, through moving images extended in time, of an absent
presence; it discloses a world, or worlds, to which we remain forever absent;
it opens up a visual, temporal, memorial communication with the spectral
dead, who are nonetheless ‘present’ in the image, indeed both present and
absent at once. Derrida, the film, cannot help but confront these ghostly
presences, submit to this battle of phantoms, staging an encounter in which
we remain unsure whether we are witnessing an act of love or of hostility, of
antagonism or of acknowledgment. Are we witnessing a filmmaker trying to
‘capture’ the reluctant philosopher or the artful philosopher trying to dodge,
resist or subvert this act of representation? It is this very drama unfolding
between filmmaker and subject that constitutes much of the dramatic, and
even philosophical, interest (and meaning) of the film.
264 Cinematic Thinking

Indeed we might describe the phantom presences haunting the film

Derrida as philosophy and film themselves: partners but also adversaries
who establish an intriguing but ambivalent relationship. As we have seen,
film and philosophy seem, at first glance, to be foreign, even incompatible
media; ever since Plato’s Cave, the relationship between images and ideas has
been a fraught and difficult one. In the case of a film focusing on a thinker
and his thought, it is hard to say whether this is a contest between rivals or a
communion between friends or even lovers. Certainly the amorous intention
is to be found more on the filmmakers’ side rather than the philosopher’s.
Throughout the near decade it took Dick and Kofman to make Derrida,
Derrida, the film’s central but elusive ‘subject’, frequently shows his reluctance,
discomfort and exasperation with the intrusions and demands involved in
being the subject of the film, and in being asked to do or perform certain
things, repeatedly, before the camera. A constant refrain throughout concerns
‘difficulty’: ‘It is very difficult’, Derrida remarks, whether in response to a
question concerning how he and his wife, Marguerite, met, or being suddenly
asked to improvise ‘anything you like on love’. ‘Amy, you can’t do this!’ Derrida
objects. ‘At least ask me a question!’ Derrida’s reluctantly improvised soliloquy
on love, which concerns the difference between the ‘who’ and the ‘what’,
loving someone for their absolute singularity or for their attributes and
qualities, is discomfiting to watch. One has the impression of having intruded
into an uncomfortably personal but fractious space between filmmaker and
subject, as though we were witness to a personal conflict, even a lover’s
quarrel. I shall return to this question of love, for the film, in a sense, is a love
story between film and philosophy, albeit a tale of unrequited love, where the
lover, as Roland Barthes observes, is the one who waits, and where the object
of that love – ‘Derrida’, and all that the name stands for – tries to elude, thwart,
or resist that offer of love. What unfolds on screen in Derrida is suggestive of
a (philosophical) melodrama - scenes from a marriage.
Derrida, as both Goodenough (2005: 6) and Strathausen (2009) remark,
is therefore clearly something other than a conventional documentary: it
does not simply record the philosopher’s response to interview-style
questions, but reflexively deconstructs the very act of trying to film such a
figure, drawing attention to the mediated, staged and rehearsed character of
the philosopher’s speech and performance on screen (as I discuss at greater
length below). Critics who claim that Derrida is insufficiently philosophical
have overlooked this important aspect of the film. They have not attended to
the reflexive devices and strategies the film adopts that contribute to
reflecting or enacting a form of thought that both ‘mirrors’ what Derrida is
 Photobiographies 265

saying but also puts these speech acts into question. It is the ‘performative’
nature of this task, I suggest, that constitutes the philosophical significance
of this Derrida documentary, although one should use the term ‘philosophical’
here with caution. After all, Derrida is a philosopher whose work is dedicated
to the deconstruction – the reversal/undermining and displacement/re-
inscription – of key conceptual foundations within Western philosophy, and
so hardly a thinker whose work could be called ‘philosophical’ without
further ado.
This is why I approach Derrida as an attempt to ‘perform philosophy’ on
film, to ‘screen’ philosophy by way of cinematic presentation, which can also
mean to represent, stage or mimic philosophy, without being identical to
philosophy as such. From this point of view, the film shows the impossibility
of fully representing the life of a philosopher, or the performance of
philosophical thought, in a manner recognisable as ‘philosophy’. Does this
make the film a failure? Paradoxically, we could say that its ‘failure’ as a work
of cinema is also a mark of its success as a film-philosophical work. Its
deconstructive aspect is not only found in the film’s reflexive framing of
Derrida’s interviews, lectures and texts, but in Derrida’s own complex ‘ghost
dance’ with the film, with his own image and with the filmmakers: a case of
deconstruction enacted via cinematic and philosophical performance.
The paradox to which the film opens itself could be put as follows: to
succeed as a philosophical documentary would be to fail to deconstruct this
genre, for then the film would have demonstrated the sufficiency of the
genre to address its subject – namely, the life and thought of the philosopher,
Derrida. To fail as a philosophical documentary, by contrast, opens up the
possibility of deconstructing this genre, of the film deconstructing itself as a
philosophical documentary, which would be to demonstrate the impossibility
of the very task that the film seeks to undertake – namely, to show the
manner in which the life and work of a thinker might be captured adequately
on film. To succeed is to fail, whereas to fail is the only way, perhaps, the film
can succeed in its task, even though it remains unclear what it would mean
here, precisely, to succeed. What appears as a love story is perhaps also a
tragic one.

The Sex Lives of Philosophers

What kind of tragic love story unfolds for us here? The question of love is
broached several times in the film, notably during one of the more intriguing
266 Cinematic Thinking

interviews that punctuate it. Amy Kofman, the filmmaker herself a character
in the film, asks Derrida what sort of question he would like a philosophical
documentary to have asked of one the great dead philosophers, say Hegel,
Heidegger or Nietzsche. After a telling pause, improvising ‘a quick answer’,
Derrida replies: ‘their sex lives’. ‘Why?’ Kofman asks. ‘Because they don’t want
to talk about it’, Derrida explains, with an almost defiant glance, knowing what
the reply will be. When Kofman responds by asking whether he would like to
answer such a question, Derrida shifts tack, replying that he didn’t say he
would answer such a question. Truth, after all, prefers to remain veiled; decency
demands a respectful distance. But as Derrida goes on to remark, if we are to
get further into the question of the relationship between biography and
philosophy, it will require of us a certain impoliteness, overcoming that
politeness which excludes the personal, the amorous, the sexual, from the
domain of philosophy proper. At this point, the film takes up the cause, holding
its ground against Derrida’s subtle attempt to both control and defuse the
situation. Now it is the film that must violate the cordon sanitaire protecting
the philosopher in his ascetic mastery; it too shall have to be impolite,
indiscreet or indecent. There is more to this ghost dance than meets the eye.
Kofman’s retort to Derrida’s provocation, the film’s insistence on questioning
the philosopher and undermining his subtle attempts to control the narrative,
are telling: although they make for a ‘lesser’ cinematic experience – the film is
more fractious, disjointed, conflictual and ‘improvised’ than Safaa Fathy’s
more artfully composed, poetic and respectful collaboration with Derrida –
the film performs a more explicitly thought-provoking form of ‘cinematic
thinking’. Film here refuses to be a silent or passive (dance) partner to
philosophy.

Improvisation
There is an important sequence in the film where this question of love,
of the amorous but ‘difficult’ relationship between film and philosophy, is
addressed in a manner that is at once explicit and reserved. It serves
as an illuminating instance of what Stephen Mulhall (2008: 3–11) has called
‘film in the condition of philosophy’: film questioning itself as to its nature,
its possibilities as a medium, in this case, of how film might perform
philosophy, or what I am calling ‘performative philosophy’. The sequence in
question is framed by a fascinating one on the topic of ‘improvisation’,
another theme explicitly addressed within the film. Here too the film
 Photobiographies 267

attempts to perform what it depicts; a performance, rather than mere

recording, of philosophy. Against a jerky, blurry sequence of images,
deliberately refusing us a clear ‘masterful’ or ‘professional’ view of the scene
(Derrida on his couch watching television and opening his mail), Kofman
recites a text taken from an unpublished 1982 interview with Derrida dealing
with improvisation:
It’s not easy to improvise; it’s the most difficult thing to do. Even when one
improvises in front of a camera or a microphone, one ventriloquises, or leaves
another to speak in one’s place, the schemas and languages that are already
there. . . All the names are already pre-programmed. It’s already the names
that inhibit our ability to ever really improvise. One can’t say whatever one
wants; one is obliged, more or less, to reproduce the stereotypical discourse.
And so I believe in improvisation and I fight for improvisation; but always
with the belief that it’s impossible. And there where there is improvisation, I
am not able to see myself; I am blind to myself. . . It’s for others to see. The one
who has improvised here, no, I won’t ever see him.
Derrida 2002, 59:44–1:01:18
Here, as in other sequences, the film fitfully enacts the ‘impossibility’ of
improvisation, its condition of possibility requiring the reiteration pre-
existing forms of discourse, of history and culture, of proper names; yet also
the necessity of acknowledging improvisation as an expression of spontaneity,
creativity and invention that is worth affirming, preserving and defending.
This becomes even more acute once we consider that improvisation could
also be described as something that philosophy has traditionally repressed
(argument is hardly improvised), regarding it, perhaps, as something
belonging more to (modern) art, theatre and music (or film!). The film,
moreover, keeps forcing Derrida to improvise, a forcing that Derrida both
refuses and repeats, improvising despite himself, a forced improvisation
that is hardly in the spirit of the term, performing for the camera in a
manner that is controlled or even, at times, contrived. This performative
demonstration of the ‘impossibility’ of improvisation that Derrida’s texts
describe is a striking instance of how the film’s ‘failure’ is, paradoxically, also
a mark of its success. A perfectly executed instance of philosophical
‘improvisation’ – carefully prepared and subtly edited – would hardly count
as what Derrida claims improvisation to be; by contrast, the forced, difficult,
even ‘failed’ improvisation that the film captures – awkward and messy as it
is, riven by gaps and underlying conflicts, while nonetheless composed
and edited as all shots and sequences are – gets closer to the ‘truth’ of the
paradoxical character of improvisation. This is especially true of an
268 Cinematic Thinking

improvisation of philosophical discourse that is explicitly presented as part

of a documentary film exploring the difficult relationship between film and
philosophy, while also attempting to enter into a cinematic dialogue with the
philosopher’s distinctive mode of thought.

Echo and Narcissus

To return to love, the film then follows, or perhaps echoes, the sequence on
improvisation with one on the myth of Echo and Narcissus. Here again it is a
question of film ‘in the condition of philosophy’, or what I am calling, rather,
film as performing philosophy. It is not simply a matter of illustrating but of
attempting to perform – enact or actualise – via cinematic means the kind of
thinking that Derrida is articulating. What such an approach involves is a kind
of cross-medial dialogue, a performative interaction or audiovisual ‘dance’
between image and concept that attempts to display, elaborate and
communicate thinking using the devices of the medium in conjunction with
the discourse of the philosopher. The myth of Echo and Narcissus thus serves
as a suggestive metaphor for the kind of complex interaction that unfolds here
between filmmakers and their subject, or between film and philosophy more
generally.
Framed by a scene showing, from below, the camera crew in a room,
Derrida appears standing aside a mirror, playing Narcissus to Kofman’s Echo
as he ‘improvises’ a response to her question concerning the myth in question,
which Derrida reads as a parable on the relationship between image and
voice, ‘between light and speech, between the reflection and the mirror’. This
question is prefigured earlier in the film when Derrida is asked about his
response to a portrait presented to him by an artist-friend. ‘It is uncanny, but
I want to say, j’accepte, I accept. . . Little narcissist that I am!’ he jokes. In the
Echo and Narcissus sequence, the camera pans from Derrida’s reflection in
the mirror to his ‘original’ image and back again, the philosopher and his
double; the double being not only his image but that of film itself as double
or echo of philosophy, of the (narcissistic) philosopher improvising a
performance on film. This is both a cinematic and philosophical performance
meditating on the relationship between image and voice, light and speech,
reflection and mirror; but it is also one in which the film itself reflects upon
the philosopher’s discourse, offering a visual or cinematic accompaniment
or response to the verbal presentation of ideas. Such a task is of course
difficult and risky: difficult to do justice to the complexity of philosophical
 Photobiographies 269

discourse, and risky in the sense of always courting the charge of ‘mere
illustration’ or obvious visual exemplification. It is also difficult to watch the
filmmakers and the philosopher engaged in this complex dance, one that
threatens to express tension and misunderstanding as much as dialogue or
communication. The sequence also echoes the myth: the film as Echo and
the philosopher as Narcissus, the one doomed to repeat the phrases of the
other, the other to contemplate his own reflection, his image, without being
able to get beyond himself, his own mirror of self-presentation, ultimately
rejecting Echo’s vain – and truncated – offer of love.
Narcissus remains forever trapped by his own reflection: the tears of
Narcissus, Derrida remarks, are thus tears of a solipsist; Narcissus (and
perhaps also the philosopher reflecting on him) cries because he can only
ever see himself (or his own image). As Derrida remarks, this is precisely
what is happening in this scene, in this film, Kofman posing questions,
Derrida repeating answers (now claiming the role of Echo), the camera
panning between image and reflection, although here it is philosophy who
plays both Echo and Narcissus – another instance of the philosopher’s
solipsism, perhaps. Echo, however, in her loving cleverness, finds a way to
catch Narcissus. She speaks by reciting his words, words that, through this
recitation, become her own, a way of signing or marking her love. The film
too repeats Derrida’s words, echoes his image, his improvisation, and in
doing so makes them belong to film; the image becoming philosophical just
as the philosopher’s performance echoes his own image, which is thereby
undone. To speak is not to see, Derrida observes. Does Derrida not see what
his words are saying, what his image is showing, in Echo’s repetitions of his
words, his image, her signing of her love?
The film stages and reflects the scene of Echo and Narcissus as an instance
of film performing philosophy: an invitation for philosophy to open itself to
the performances of film, and for film to adopt and repeat (‘echo’) the
performances of philosophy. Kofman and Derrida, Derrida and Derrida, are
like quarrelling friends or lovers who speak to, and talk past, each other, and
yet who, for all their intimacy, cannot see each other. The film and the
philosopher echo each other, becoming bound through repetition, yet
remaining as blind to each other as they are to themselves. How can two
blind people love each other? Derrida asks. That is the question. How can
Echo and Narcissus, film and philosophy, love each other? The film’s answer
is evident in this awkward and difficult encounter: an ambiguous exchange
between image and word, between filmmaker and philosopher, yet one that
is also a cinematic performance of thought.
270 Cinematic Thinking

D’ailleurs, Derrida
[Derrida’s Elsewhere]13
The other Derrida documentary I wish to discuss presents a fascinating
contrast. Egyptian poet and filmmaker Safaa Fathy’s D’ailleurs, Derrida
[Derrida’s Elsewhere] (1999), which received far less critical attention than
Dick and Kofman’s Derrida, is in many ways a superior film.14 As Marguerite
La Caze observes, if one had to categorise it, ‘it would be as a documentary
art film that could be treated as a meditation on philosophical themes from
Derrida’s work, weaving and juxtaposing these themes with the biographical
elements and creating a poetic and evocative work of art’ (2019: 155). It
offers an eloquent portrait of Derrida, giving him ample space to discuss his
ideas, showing different facets of his identity as an Algerian-Jewish
philosopher, both personal and institutional, ethical and cultural-political,
while expressing the idea of an ‘elsewhere’ central to how the images and
spoken words are articulated in the film. It successfully relates thought and
image, film and philosophy, in a harmonious and respectful manner, where
the filmmaker discreetly veils her perspective, subordinating the film’s
images and sound to the thinker’s words and gestures.
Is this the best way, however, to think about the relationship between
film and philosophy, image and thought? Although far from the ethical ideal
of mutual recognition and respect, one might wonder whether this
relationship between film and philosophy functions ‘better’ when one
partner subordinates their perspective to that of the other. What happens
when film ‘subordinates’ itself to philosophy, or the documentary image
allows itself to be ‘scripted’ by the thinker? We observe this intriguing
interaction in D’ailleurs, Derrida, which was praised as succeeding
(cinematically and philosophically) whereas Dick and Kofman’s Derrida was
said to have ‘failed’. As remarked, it is difficult to define what, precisely, is
meant by evaluations of each film’s relative success or failure in this respect,
but at the very least it implies that the film succeeds (or fails) to not only
convey the life of the thinker but to reflect and express in specifically
cinematic terms their philosophical thinking. It would mean succeeding as
‘film-philosophy’ in the sense of communicating philosophical ideas via
cinematic means. As remarked, we might find that the ‘success’ of a film in
performing ‘cinematic thinking’ may not correspond with its cinematic
success. Alternatively, a cinematically successful film might involve a less
successful mode of cinematic thinking, suggesting that there are cases where
 Photobiographies 271

philosophical and cinematic aims may be at odds, or where succeeding in

one respect involves compromising the other.
Nonetheless, most critics assume that there is a consonance or
correspondence between the philosophical and cinematic dimensions of
such documentaries concerned with the life and thought of a philosopher.
Indeed, the film, as La Caze adroitly observes, is less a philosophical
biography than ‘an attempt at a genuine collaboration to explore the relation
between philosophy and film, where Derrida reflects on film and its unique
qualities, and Fathy enables spectators to understand and question Derrida’s
philosophy’ (2019: 155). In his thoughtful and nuanced review discussion of
D’ailleurs, Derrida, for example, David Wills (2004) concurs with this
assessment, drawing the following conclusion about the film’s achievements:
Safaa Fathy. . . makes a film that preserves on one level the coherence and
cogency of Derrida’s work, highlighting it against a vivid series of
autobiographical backdrops, particularly the North African, and the triple
elsewhere of Abrahamic cultures – Islamic, Jewish and Christian – that is
Toledo. In this way she manages to double the biography of Derrida with her
own Egyptian background. But she succeeds also in another more powerful
doubling, what amounts to a double writing, that of a cinema of her own that,
while following Derrida, both his body and the logic of his words, fills the
screen with images, of desert, of ruins, and of the ocean, that appear as
something like the aporetic hauntings of those words, something perhaps of
their excised unconscious, something that functions within the perspective
of a pardon and a healing.
Wills 2004: Paragraph 10

Wills alludes here to Fathy’s success in preserving and articulating

Derrida’s philosophical work against the backdrop of his biographical
history in Algeria and the threefold cultural ‘elsewhere’ of Islamic, Jewish
and Christian culture in Spain. The filmmaker’s own background shadows
or ‘doubles’ Derrida’s biographical ruminations, while the film itself, in
‘following Derrida’ (literally, metaphorically, as well as conceptually) offers a
cinematic reflection or meditation on his work – figured in poetic images of
desert landscapes, melancholy ruins, the volatile sea, which offer a visual
accompaniment to his discourse, another perspective that displaces the
philosopher’s words to a (cinematic) ‘elsewhere’. This thoughtful comment
on Fathy’s film, moreover, is supplemented by further examples of the film’s
subordination of its own perspective to that of Derrida, foregrounding his
autobiographical reflections and his discussion of philosophical ideas. For
Wills, this perspective involves an acknowledgment of the Other that moves
272 Cinematic Thinking

beyond conventional documentary and echoes the (Derridian/Levinasian)

notions of ‘witnessing’ and ‘testimony’:

Safaa Fathy has been particularly sensitive to that question [the question of
‘speaking as a witness’] in making her film, and in making the choices of her
film, reducing to a minimum her own interventions so as to produce an
archival document that is neither biography, curriculum vitae, or even précis
of an oeuvre, but first and foremost testimony.
Wills 2004: Paragraph 115

There is no doubt that Fathy’s film has a poise and lyricism that deserves
praise; it establishes a relationship between filmmaker and subject that is
revealing and intimate, an act of witnessing or of ‘testimony’ regarding
Derrida that is more harmonious and respectful than what one finds in Dirk
and Kofman’s Derrida. Although sharing much with the latter, D’ailleurs,
Derrida is nonetheless a more conventional philosophical biography that is
at pains to foreground Derrida the man, his physical presence and manner
of speaking, focusing on his Algerian heritage and familial memories, using
visual imagery and temporal sequencing to evoke a sense of place, to probe
the complex notion of identity (including ‘philosophical’ identity as a
Marrano Jew) and to question the legacy of colonialism/post-colonialism in
a European/North African context. It also explores, both via Derrida’s
expository discourse and via audiovisual means, the ideas of confession,
witnessing, place, autobiography and the ‘elsewhere’ that haunts personal
identity as well as philosophy itself.
The marrying of image and idea, of film and subject, in D’ailleur, Derrida
is poetic and expressive: there are long shots of Derrida walking alone
against a desolate windswept ‘Algerian’ landscape (although actually filmed
in Spain), accompanied by atmospheric and poignant soundtrack; talking
thoughtfully to camera against a picturesque ocean background, framed by
cliffs, sky and palm trees; a domestic sequence where Derrida takes the
filmmaker – who remains deliberately absent, except for a couple of
‘accidental’ moments, from the frame – on a revealing tour of his personal
library (which he describes as ‘sublime’ in the sense of nearing a limit of
imagination and sense), ruminations on El Greco, even a touching sequence
showing us (and her), along with his wife Marguerite, the improvised
backyard graveyard for their pet cats. There are moments of subtle but
candid self-reflection, as when Derrida, framed against a background of fish
swimming serenely in a public aquarium, remarks that he feels the same as
they do, sequestered behind glass, a captured creature on display for the
 Photobiographies 273

scrutiny of others; or when the camera continues to roll after one of Derrida’s
soliloquies, capturing him commenting and ‘directing’ the filmmaker, saying
that he wants a certain sequence or comment to stay in the film. And so on.
In this respect D’ailleurs, Derrida is, on the one hand, a more engaging
cinematic presentation of Derrida as its (philosophical and biographical)
subject; but, on the other, in subordinating itself to its philosophical ‘subject’,
it is not as successful, I suggest, in performing Derrida’s thought on film. For
it lacks those moments of interruption, displacement or subversion within
the complex encounter or ‘ghost dance’ between philosopher and filmmaker.
It avoids ambiguity or dissonance in presenting the relationship between the
film and its philosophical subject, moments where the camera shifts from a
relationship of recording, following or witnessing, and enters instead a space
of commentary and counterpoint, disputation or disagreement – moments
of evocative encounter where a ‘cinematic thinking’ between film and
philosophy can occur.16
As David Wills notes (2004: Paragraph 1), Fathy’s film must navigate
between competing demands: those particular to any cinematic work (‘its
cinematic quality’); those particular to the person of Derrida himself; and
those specific to Derrida’s demanding form of thought. Fathy’s film responds
to this threefold challenge by subordinating its ‘cinematic’ status to those of
its philosophical subject and his mode of thinking: by allowing Derrida, the
man and the thinker, to ‘script the film’, so to speak, Fathy gives Derrida the
central role, the authoritative voice and presence that defines the film. In
doing so, however, in anchoring the film firmly within the horizon and
perspective of the biographical-philosophical ‘subject’ Derrida, I suggest that
her film subordinates those questions of communication and contamination,
of difference and repetition, of intervention and performance that are
inevitably encountered in the complex encounter between film and
philosophy, especially in a philosophical documentary – moments that are
explicitly manifested or performed in Dick and Kofman’s Derrida.17
It is not a question, to be sure, of deciding whether one film is ‘better’ than
the other, since these are two films with different cinematic aims and
philosophical orientations. Nonetheless, the question of value and evaluation
here is still relevant; for one film might be regarded as ‘better’ cinematically
but not necessarily ‘philosophically’, and vice-versa. Although D’ailleurs,
Derrida is arguably a more accomplished cinematic presentation of Derrida,
we could also claim that, thanks to its explicit subordination of cinematic to
philosophical concerns, or its use of more conventional cinematic
presentation while allowing Derrida – the man, his persona and his speech
274 Cinematic Thinking

– to script or ‘direct’ the film, it is less bold or risk-taking, less disruptive,

more deferential, less provocative than its rival. It eschews the possibility of
questioning or provoking the thinker, but also commenting on, and
elaborating cinematically, aspects of Derrida’s thought – and in that sense
less a case of performance philosophy than of philosophical (auto)biography
in a more conventional sense.
In this ‘ghost dance’ between film and philosophy, the more ghost-like the
filmmaker, the more prominent the thinker; the more absent the filmmaker,
the more present the philosopher; the more harmonious, expressive, poetic
and complementary the image, the more forthright, articulated and
independent the expression of philosophical ideas. For some viewers, this
might be the source of the evaluation that D’ailleurs, Derrida succeeds
‘philosophically’ whereas the other Derrida documentary fails. For others,
by contrast, we could say that its success cinematically also marks a certain
‘failure’ as a work of film-philosophy, which is an encounter in which both
are transformed: a complex aporetic relationship that articulates what
Derrida’s deconstruction is about, that enacts or performs it in cinematic
terms. To be sure, both films are marked by an acknowledgment, care,
respect, friendship, even a love for Derrida, for his subversive confrontation
with philosophical tradition; but one is more willing to risk the relationship,
strain the friendship by contesting the philosopher, to perform these gestures
of (deconstructive) disruption or questioning than the other.

Performance versus Performativity

One way of summing up the difference between these two approaches is to
invoke the distinction between performance and performativity: ‘performance’
as the conventional notion of dramatic enactment using all manner of
physical, gestural and expressive elements to solicit affective-emotional
responses and convey meaning; and ‘performativity’ as referring to a reflexive,
reiterated enactment of varieties of meaning through action, gesture, speech
and expression, which draws attention to its own constructed, conventional
or artefactual character. The most basic (Goffmanesque) definition of
performance – as encompassing any form of physical action or expression
that has the capacity to influence the response of others – has, as is well
known, been adapted and refined for the specific contexts and purposes of
dramatic and cinematic performance. Although usually theorised with
respect to fictional narrative film, documentary theorists such as Bill Nichols
 Photobiographies 275

and Stella Bruzzi have cited ‘performance’ as a key mode of contemporary

documentary filmmaking practice (see Bruzzi 2000 and Nichols 1991, 2001).
Indeed, the notion of performance as an important element of documentary
style has been explored within recent documentary theory (see Bruzzi 2000;
Grindon 2007; Marquis 2013; Nichols 2001; Waugh 1990).18 We could extend
this discussion of performance in documentary to include that of
philosophers on screen: the specific manner in which philosophical
documentaries both present their subjects, showing how a philosopher
performs on screen, but also the way that the film presents this performance,
framing or commenting on it in various ways. From this point of view,
Derrida’s performance represents a key element in both films’ attempts to
articulate, or even question, the thinker’s ideas. Both films could be described
as documentaries that feature a performance of philosophy: not only how
Derrida communicates his thinking through speech, gesture and expression,
but also the manner in which the film frames or articulates this performance
of thinking on screen.
To capture this dimension of performance it is useful to turn to the
concept of ‘performativity’, one that is itself strongly associated with
Derridian deconstruction. Popularised by Judith Butler’s (1990) account of
identity as based on the role of reiterative socially coded performances of
gendered comportment, the notion of performativity refers to the manner in
which repeated self-reflexive performances of speech, action and gesture can
both convey meaning as well as draw attention to its conventional or
constructed character.19 Derrida and Stiegler (2002) both allude to this
dimension of performativity as constitutive of audiovisual media, which
convey a sense of presence, immediacy and coherent meaning, while being
thoroughly mediated, constructed and conventionalised. Although both
Derrida documentaries use and foreground the role of performance in their
presentation of their subject, Dick and Kofman’s Derrida is more explicitly
performative in the sense of enacting a deconstructive performativity: it not
only highlights but also reflexively frames and subverts Derrida’s verbal
performance of thought before the camera in a manner that is cinematic
rather than discursive.
This offers us a lucid way of distinguishing between these two otherwise
comparable philosophical documentaries. On the one hand, we have Fathy’s
respectful witnessing of Derrida as hybrid philosophical subject, an
anomalous thinker whose identity is always already marked by an ‘elsewhere’;
a cinematic gesture of acknowledgment or witnessing that allows the
philosopher’s words and gestures to direct or ‘script’ the performance of the
276 Cinematic Thinking

film as an expression of the ‘elsewhere’ shaping Derrida’s life, identity

and thought. On the other, we have Dick and Kofman’s Derrida as a
case where performance and performativity interfere with one another in
the deconstructive encounter, creating a more ambiguous, inconsistent,
disruptive presentation of Derrida: one that thereby remains more ‘true’ to
deconstructive thought in destabilising the coherence of the philosophical
‘subject’ it attempts to portray.
We can thus return to my original comments on the relative failure and
success of these two films from the viewpoint of film-philosophy: Fathy’s
D’ailleurs Derrida succeeds in being more successful in capturing the
performance of thinking through film, but at the cost of downplaying the
deconstructive performativity that this thought attempts to articulate. Dick
and Kofman’s Derrida ‘fails’ as a work of cinema in that it is more inconsistent
and interruptive in its documentary engagement with its subject, but in so
doing it succeeds in articulating the deconstructive performativity of
Derrida’s thinking, finding specifically cinematic means of articulating the
operation of deconstructive thought, even where this interferes with
Derrida’s performance on screen. In this sense, it succeeds as a work of film-
philosophy despite its shortcomings from a strictly cinematic point of view.
No less than one would expect from a documentary work dedicated to
performing cinematic thinking.

Epilogue: In Praise of Amateurs

Philosophy has always had a vexed relationship with autobiography. Indeed,
biography has sometimes been regarded as the preserve of ‘amateurs’ in the
etymological sense, namely, those with a love or passion for their subject,
who remain on the fringes of academe precisely because of this passion. A
frequent criticism of Derrida, the film, for example, was its all-too-palpable
passion for its subject, its flirtation with ‘hero worship’, its indulgence in the
‘cult’ of the master thinker, its ‘lack of competing voices’ – in a word, its love
for ‘Derrida’, in all senses of the name. D’ailleurs, Derrida too expresses a
great devotion to its subject, a deference and acknowledgment that could
also be described as an expression of love or friendship. One might say that
both films are the work of devoted ‘amateurs’ (amateur derives from the 16th
century French term meaning ‘one who loves’, ‘lover’), as opposed to the
‘professional’ documentarian, critic or philosopher, whose passion must
remain discreetly veiled, politely excluded from the work of filmmaking,
 Photobiographies 277

criticism or philosophy, which, according to convention, should adopt a

professionally competent, detached distance from its subject matter.
At the same time, however, such love or passion does not necessarily
equate with devotion or respectful acknowledgment; it may also involve
questioning, conflict and ambivalence. In this respect, both films offer us
different senses of the film-philosophy relationship in the biographical
documentary. The one is poetic, articulate, deferential and respectful; the
other contestatory, disruptive, awkward and ambivalent. Both articulate
different although complementary ethical and aesthetic stances towards
the subject of ‘Derrida’ (the man, the thinker, but also the founder of
deconstruction), and both can be regarded also as works of love,
expressing both a love of philosophy and of film, and of the possibilities of
communication, however ambiguous and conflicted, between them.
How to film a philosophical (auto)biography? How to create a work of
cinematic thinking? Should one be ‘professional’ or an ‘amateur’? As Roland
Barthes writes in his own autobiography (1977: 52): ‘The Amateur (someone
who engages in painting, music, sport, science, without the spirit of mastery
or competition)’, is one who repeats or ‘renews his pleasure (amator: one
who loves again and again); he is anything but a hero (of creation, of
performance); he establishes himself graciously (for nothing) in the signifier’,
which is to say, within cinema. For us, this means in the image, in the
performance of thought, or indeed within cinematic thinking. We can see
this in both Derrida documentaries, however they differ in showing and
examining both the performance and the performativity of deconstructive
thought. Let us praise, then, those remarkable cinematic ‘amateurs’ who have
dedicated their love to filming the spectres of ‘Derrida’, and those anonymous
lovers of film and philosophy who remain captivated by, but also question,
this love.
278
 11
Planet Melancholia:
Romanticism, Mood and
Cinematic Ethics

Chapter Outline
‘Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Cinema . . .’ 280
Romanticism 284
A Cognitivist Interlude 287
Melancholia 291
Melancholy Moods: Melancholia’s Cinematic Ethics 294
Epilogue 300

Lars von Trier’s Melancholia is not only a remarkable study of depression, it

offers a fascinating exploration of cinematic romanticism and the aesthetics
of cinematic moods. With its peculiar fusion of Dogme-style melodrama
and apocalyptic disaster movie, Schopenhauerian pessimism and German
romanticism, Bergmanesque psychodrama and art cinema experimentation,
Melancholia projects an enchanted cinematic world dedicated to the
disenchanting idea of world-destruction. The film does so by presenting a
devastating portrait of depressive melancholia, dramatizing the main
character Justine’s [Kirsten Dunst’s] pathological experience of a ‘loss of
world’ that finds its objective correlative in a sublime cinematic fantasy of
world-annihilation. This strong parallel between feminine depression and
the idea of world-sacrifice, between Justine’s experience of depressive

279
280 Cinematic Thinking

melancholia and the destruction of the Earth by the planet Melancholia,

evokes a remarkable experience of aesthetic sublimity.1 In what follows I
analyse some of the aesthetic and philosophical strands of Melancholia,
focusing in particular on the film’s remarkable Prelude, arguing that it
explores the experience of nihilism and performs a complex ethical critique
of rationalist optimism in the guise of a neo-romantic allegory of world-
destruction. At the same time, Melancholia is a work dedicated to the
traumatic ‘working through’ of the loss of worlds – cinematic but also
cultural and natural – that characterises our historical mood, one that might
be described as a deflationary apocalypticism or a condition of melancholy
mourning. Indeed, a number of critics have noted not only the aesthetic and
theological aspects of Melancholia but also its environmental and ethico-
political resonances (Latour 2011; Matts and Tynan 2012; Read 2014). In my
exploration of the aesthetic, philosophical and ethical strands of Melancholia,
I reflect upon its use of romanticism and of cinematic mood, showing how
different readings of the film – from cognitivist analyses (Grodal 2012) and
anti-capitalist (Shaviro 2012) to ecocritical interpretations (Read 2012) – are
responding to its arresting evocation of mood which has both aesthetic
and ethical significance. Von Trier’s film explores not only the aesthetics
of melancholia but its ethical dimensions, creating an art disaster movie
whose sublime depiction of world-destruction has the paradoxical ethical
effect of revealing the fragility and finitude of life on Earth and our duty to
care for it.

‘Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently

Adopted in Cinema . . .’2
One of the more intriguing phenomena in contemporary cinema has been
the resurgence of the apocalyptic disaster movie (see Sinnerbrink 2014d).
This has been a recurring topic in the movies, a subgenre of science fiction
typically featuring religious, ideological and, more recently, economic and
ecological themes. Apocalyptic fiction, in the modern sense, dates back to
the 19th century. The most famous exemplar is Mary Shelley’s novel, The
Last Man (1826), a post-apocalyptic ‘last man standing’ narrative including
critical reflections on romanticism and humanism.3 We could also mention
Edgar Allen Poe’s early science fiction story, ‘The Conversation of Eiros
and Charmion’ (1836), in which the two eponymous characters have a
 Romanticism, Mood and Cinematic Ethics 281

posthumous conversation about the response of humankind to the

destruction of the world due to a comet strike.4 As is well known, movies
have long been fascinated by apocalyptic tales. The 1950s saw a wave of
popular apocalyptic disaster movies, typically featuring alien invasion/War
of the Worlds scenarios, or fatal viral-biological epidemics, but also exploring
cosmic catastrophes in which a random astronomical event destroys life on
Earth. Rudolf Maté’s When Worlds Collide (1951), for example, features a
newly discovered planet, called Bellus, set on a collision course with the
Earth. The impending catastrophe provides the backdrop for an anarchic
Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’ as desperate individuals vie for a place in
the ‘arks’ that will set forth for another planet and thus save the human race
from extinction.
From mid-1980s, the apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic movie made
something of a comeback, typically centred on the threat and aftermath of a
global environmental or nuclear apocalypse. Two representative examples
are Geoff Murphy’s post-apocalyptic love triangle scenario, The Quiet Earth
(1985), a contemporary remake, set in New Zealand, of a 1950s movie, which
dramatically articulated the all-too-palpable fears of a pending nuclear war
and its aftermath in the mid-1980s;5 and Steve de Jarnatt’s Miracle Mile
(1988), a chronicle of the last night on Earth before nuclear war erupts, a
scenario in which a wide range of characters respond in very different ways,
evincing shock, panic, despair, suicide, denial, maintaining normality,
pursuing pleasure and committing heroic acts. Don McKellar’s cult film,
Last Night (1998), a classic ‘last night on Earth’ scenario, features, for example,
a failed suicide pact as the film’s central couple decide to embrace and kiss
before their (and the world’s) definitive destruction. Abel Ferrara’s 4:44: Last
Day on Earth (2011) is a contemporary revisiting of this theme, again centred
on a central couple, a successful actor [Willem Dafoe] and his artist girlfriend
[Shanyn Leigh] in New York City, whose lovemaking after observing the
shocked and panic-stricken responses of those around them concludes their
intimation of mortality.
In recent years, however, another kind of apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic
movie has appeared.6 These movies tend to thematise more explicitly
contemporary anxieties over environmental devastation, geopolitical threats
and economic crises, often by way of religious-theological speculation. This
is not surprising, given our contemporary ideological-historical mood,
which Žižek (2009) recently described as the cultural experience of ‘living in
the end times’. A good example of this kind of apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic
fantasy is Alex Proyas’ Knowing (2008), a film that stages the destruction of
282 Cinematic Thinking

the Earth and of all life on the planet as a spectacle that certain privileged
characters – and viewers – are able to enjoy; an apocalyptic fantasy laced
with vaguely metaphysical speculation over free will and determinism,
religious themes of prophecy and salvation, and the Darwinian indifference
of nature to human suffering. Blockbuster post-apocalyptic movies, such as
Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day (1996) and 2012 (2009), take a more
practical approach, affirming their faith in the nuclear family, in the American
Way, in the United States Government, military technology and macho
action heroes, reinvesting (ideological) belief in the world-saving virtues of
what Deleuze called the sensory-motor action schema. Their redemptive
version of post-apocalyptic renewal typically features enterprising
individuals, ‘love conquers all’ couples, even the American President, as stock
characters cast in mythic roles as unexpectedly all-powerful heroes who
avert catastrophe and re-found humanity by purifying acts of violence
against alien forces, aided by an unstable blend of fringe science and esoteric
religious prophecy.7
Adam McKay’s satirical apocalyptic disaster movie, Don’t Look Up (2021),
which critics have taken as an allegory of climate change inertia, explores a
very different but scarily familiar scenario. What if, when faced with the
scientifically credible warning of an existential threat, politicians and the
public reacted with indifference or denialism? What if politicians treated
scientists either as inconvenient truth-tellers who can be demonised or
dismissed, or as convenient ‘influencers’ who might be co-opted into a
media narrative designed to gain political advantage? How might public
opinion be manipulated in order to block collective action? Don’t Look Up
uses the discovery of a large meteor hurtling towards the Earth (a ‘planet-
killer’, we are told), to explore these questions. It stages a darkly comic but
plausible version of how, in our media-saturated, ‘post-truth’ political
world, governments and the public might spectacularly fail to respond to a
catastrophic global threat. Although critics have rightly seen the film as
a climate change allegory, Don’t Look Up deals more broadly with the
intersection between the media, politics, big business and science
activism. It questions the pervasive science scepticism and demonisation of
‘expert culture’ within our ‘post-truth’ world. It examines the pernicious
nexus between the media, governments, business and populist politics
that have created an environment where the circulation of ‘fake news’,
infotainment and political spin neutralises and undermines factual reporting,
responsible democratic debate and the possibility of co-ordinated political
action.
 Romanticism, Mood and Cinematic Ethics 283

It will not be surprising to observe that von Trier’s Melancholia offers a

challenge to conventional apocalyptic disaster movies, a determinate
negation of popular cinematic apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fantasies. It
is a resolutely tragic film that refuses any humanistic consolation or
metaphysical comfort afforded by post-apocalyptic redemption fantasies. It
eschews any reassuring humanist visions that might reconstitute the couple,
the family or civilization as we know it after the ‘divine’ violence of cosmic
catastrophe. What Melancholia shares with more arthouse ‘end of days’
movies, however, is the manner in which the apocalypse – in the biblical
sense of a revelation of all secrets, and in the generic sense of a fantasy of
world-destruction – is reflected or refracted by a familial drama or
melodrama. Michael Haneke’s remarkable post-apocalyptic film, Time of the
Wolf (2003), is noteworthy here, with its ‘biopolitical’ focus on a mother
[Isabelle Huppert] and her two children reduced to the status of ‘bare life’
(Agamben 1998), struggling to survive as refugees in a makeshift lawless
‘camp’ following an unspecified social/ecological disaster. Terrence Malick’s
cosmic epic, The Tree of Life (2011), also includes, following the familial
melodrama, evolution of life and memory film sequences, Jack’s [Sean
Penn’s] apocalyptic vision of the destruction of the Earth and eschatological
vision of redemption through love. Jeff Nichols’ Take Shelter (2011) is
another interesting case, centring on the possibly schizophrenic visions of a
character, the breakdown of his family, work and personal life as he
obsessively constructs a storm shelter, and concluding with what appears to
be the film’s confirmation of his apocalyptic visions of preternatural storms,
waterspouts and tsunamis.
This fascination with the ‘end of the world’ topos inflected through
familial melodrama is significant for a number of reasons. On the one hand,
it reflects culturally pervasive anxieties over a variety of social, cultural,
economic, political and environmental concerns (threats to the nuclear
family, fragile social and cultural identities, psychological and social
dislocation due to globalisation, geopolitical terrorist threats, economic
crises, climate change and environmental threats). On the other, we can also
read such films allegorically, that is, as reflecting a sense of cultural and
political paralysis, scepticism or deadlock. As some critics remark, the ‘end of
the world’ serves as an allegory of the unsustainable character of globalised
consumer capitalism, and of our inability to envisage a different world as our
own confronts the threat of cascading ecological, economic and geopolitical
crises (as Shaviro 2012 claims is the case with Melancholia). Whereas some
films opt for a fragile, ambiguous political possibility (Haneke’s Time of the
284 Cinematic Thinking

Wolf), and others for moral-religious forms of transcendence (The Tree of

Life or Take Shelter), von Trier’s Melancholia refuses any straightforward
political, religious or ideological solution. Instead it reworks the neo-
romanticist strategy of staging the ‘end of the world’ as a sublime aesthetic
spectacle, one that refuses any form of psychological or moral comfort to be
drawn from the devastating thought of world-annihilation. As I discuss
below, it does so, moreover, in a highly reflexive manner, staging this aesthetic
spectacle of world-sacrifice as a metacinematic reflection on the corruption,
and possible redemption, of art (cinema) today.

Romanticism
What does it mean to describe von Trier’s Melancholia as neo-romanticist?
According to early German romantics such as the Schlegel brothers, the
romantic work of art is capable of disclosing the nature of being indirectly
via aesthetic means. These include the aesthetic use of the fragment, of
transcendental irony as a way of combining poetic and philosophical
discourse, and the poetic merging of aesthetic figures, rhetorical forms and
conceptual reflection (see Sinnerbrink 2012b). Romanticism is dedicated to
creating poetic yet philosophical works that achieve what idealism sought
but failed to secure: an (indirect) revelation of being (or what the German
idealists and romantics alike called ‘the Absolute’) (see Critchley 2004; Nancy
and Lacoue-Labarthe 1988). Although often overlooked, the link between
cinema and romanticism remains profound. As Rancière remarks (2006:
166), the cinema is an artform whose principle, ‘the unity of conscious
thought and unconscious perception’, was worked out one hundred years
before its advent, namely in Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism
(1794). With its capacity to combine the mechanical recording of events
with the conscious intentionality of the filmmaker, ‘cinema, with its
unconscious eye. . . enacts the romantic conception of the work as the
identity of an unconscious process and a conscious process’ (Rancière 2009:
225).8 The conscious intentionality of the filmmaker combines with the
unconscious capturing of an ambiguous reality, the aesthetic manipulation
of the images merging with the tapping of ‘unconscious’ currents of mood
and meaning made manifest via aesthetic and technological means.
Let us consider, in this light, Melancholia’s remarkable Prelude, set to the
Prelude of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (1859). This is not the first von Trier
film to begin with a prelude: Antichrist (2009) commences with a striking
 Romanticism, Mood and Cinematic Ethics 285

series of black and white images, shot using the super slow-motion Phantom
HD Gold camera, set to Handel’s aria ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’ from the opera
Rivaldo (1711).9 Dogville (2003) commenced with an overture set to
Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, and von Trier’s early film Epidemic (1987) – his viral
contagion meets metacinematic scriptwriter drama – featured the Prelude
to Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Even Breaking the Waves featured tableaux vivants
in the ‘intertitle’ sections introducing the various chapters of the movie, set
to evocative popular songs of the period (by David Bowie, Procul Harum
and Jethro Tull, for example).
Melancholia’s remarkable Overture consists of 16 colour slow-motion
shots, slowed to near stasis, creating an uncanny tableaux vivant effect,
accompanied by Wagner’s Vorspiel to Tristan and Isolde (1859). The opening
image is a close shot of a woman’s face [Kirsten Dunst], her head slightly to
the left of mid-screen, opening her eyes and gazing directly at the camera,
her face pale, tired, blank. A moment later dead birds fall from the sky behind
her, an apocalyptic sign in many mythologies of God’s disapproval of the
conduct of humankind. The second image depicts a symmetrically arranged
front lawn, flanked by rows of trees, with a large sundial magnified in the
foreground (reminiscent of Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1966)). In the
background a tiny figure can be seen swinging a child around, like a tiny
clock movement. Also striking are the dual shadows that the trees and other
objects cast on the ground, anticipating the revelation of the planet
Melancholia, its soft blue light rivalling the sun and the moon.
The third shot is of a painting, Pieter Brueghel’s Hunters in the Snow
(1565), showing a weary band of hunters and their dogs, cresting a hill and
about to trudge home to their village, dormant in a small valley under a grey
winter sky. Ashes appear in the front of the image, falling gently like snow, or
like the dead birds, as the image slowly turns to flame. Brueghel’s Hunters in
the Snow also features prominently in Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) and in
Mirror (1975). Von Trier’s homage is thus twofold: to Brueghel’s early
modern depiction of the mood of melancholia and the spiritual vacuity of
crass materialism (later we see Justine’s advertising image of sprawling
models, modelled on another Brueghel painting, The Land of Cockaigne
(1567)); and to Tarkovsky’s art cinema of the 1970s, to moving images now
sacrificed, reduced to ash, a cinematic world consumed in the transition to
post-classical digital imagery. The Prelude cuts to a cosmic image of an
enormous blue planet slowly wending its way around a red or orange star.
This image (and a later one) rhymes with the opening shot of Justine’s head
and face, thus drawing the visual parallel between the melancholic
286 Cinematic Thinking

Justine and the planet Melancholia, a cosmic pre-figuration of the mood of

impending doom and disaster.
The next shot is an oneiric portrait of Justine’s sister, Claire [Charlotte
Gainsbourg], clutching her son, and trying to make her way across the
golf course, her boots sinking into the grassy ground. The image features a
suspicious flag, the nineteenth hole, which refers, von Trier remarks, to
limbo (theologically, the ‘border zone’ between heaven and hell inhabited
by lost souls).10 This is followed by an image of a black horse, Justine’s
beloved Abraham (recalling the many horses in Tarkovsky’s films but also
reversing Muybridge’s classic study of animal motion), falling to the
ground beneath a night sky glowing with northern lights. This is followed by
an image of Justine standing in the golf course, arms outstretched like
Christ, as moths dance around her (perhaps a biblical reference to a passage
in Isaiah, referring to moths and mortality in the face of God’s infinite
power).11
A striking tableau vivant follows, one of the signature shots in the film.
We see the gloomy castle at twilight, with the bride Justine, young Leo and
Claire, arrayed symmetrically on the lawn, barely moving, flanked by rows of
trees. Twin sources of nocturnal light, Melancholia’s blaues Licht (blue light)
and the moon’s eerie glow, lend the scene a strongly romantic cast, reminiscent
of Caspar David Friedrich. This cuts to another image of the planets in their
danse macabre, the planet Melancholia, dwarfing the Earth, performing its
teasing fly-by, followed by a shot of Justine, her hands slowly rising, electricity
sparking from her fingertips and from the light poles behind her. The
interaction between the planets, their mutual attraction, transfigures both
nature and culture, transforming the manicured golf course into an elemental
cauldron of energy, and Justine into a lightning rod for the catastrophic
collision to come.
The images in this Prelude, however, are not arranged chronologically,
tracking the movement of the narrative. They cross back and forth, rather,
between different temporal frameworks of the film, from the narrative time
of Justine’s disastrous wedding reception, the psychological or subjective
time of the characters’ anxious wait for the impending catastrophe, to the
cosmic time that frames the final collision between the Earth and
Melancholia. An image evoking the first part of the film appears, one that
captures the oppressive feeling of time slowing and one’s physical energy
ebbing; a nightmarish but beautiful vision of Justine in her wedding dress,
striding against skeins of black, weed-like strands, wrapped around her
limbs and holding her back, but also unfurling from the trees, as though
 Romanticism, Mood and Cinematic Ethics 287

nature itself were refusing to let her go. Another shot of the planets Earth
and Melancholia appears, looming larger this time, the parallel now explicit
between Justine’s psychological state, her physical distress, a generalised
Weltschmerz and the cosmic cataclysm to come. A shot from inside one of
the melancholy rooms in the castle, a Baronial style interior framed by
archways and intricate window-frames, reveals a burning bush in the garden
outside, another image combining a biblical reference with an elemental,
Tarkovsky-like evocation of fire. We then cut to a romantic image of the
drowning bride clutching her wedding bouquet, half-immersed in a watery
pond, slowly sinking amidst the lily pads and wavering weeds, reminiscent
of John Everett Millais’ pre-Raphaelite homage, Ophelia (1852).
The oneiric vision flashes forward to Justine and Leo in the forest, Justine
approaching from a distance, Leo whittling a stick he will offer for Justine’s
‘magic cave’ that the surviving trio will build for their final moments together.
What becomes clearer with hindsight is that these are prophetic images of
events still to come (Justine, seated on a stone wall will watch Claire return
carrying her son during a hailstorm; Justine’s horse Abraham that will fall to
the ground rather than cross the bridge to the village; Leo whittling sticks in
the forest in preparation for the final collision between Melancholia and the
Earth). This vision of world-destruction weighs heavily upon Justine and is
perhaps the deeper reason for her profound melancholia, the lost object here
being not only her own life (her marriage, career and family) but sheer
attachment to the world itself. Leo looks up from whittling wood and gazes
off into the distance, just as the image cuts to a long shot of Melancholia
approaching the Earth; the Prelude now swelling to its climax, the image
suggests a perverse cosmic embrace as Melancholia pulls the Earth into
itself, a Liebestod to end all others. As the image fades to black the Prelude
ends with a primordial rumbling that persists beyond the void, accompanying
the painted screen title: ‘Lars von Trier Melancholia’.

A Cognitivist Interlude
What are we to make of this remarkable neo-romanticist vision of sublime
world-destruction? Although there are many sophisticated interpretations
of the film, Torben Grodal (2012) has published one of the few unabashedly
cognitivist analyses of Melancholia (see Sinnerbrink 2016b). According to
Grodal (2009), art cinema films, such as those of von Trier, generate their
aesthetic effects by blocking the ordinary processes of cognition, what he
288 Cinematic Thinking

calls the ‘PECMA flow’: the circuit linking perception, emotion, cognition
and motor action. Interestingly, Grodal’s cognitivist approach parallels, in
striking fashion, Deleuze’s analyses of the breakdown of the sensory-motor
action schema that defines the post-war emergence of time-image cinema
(1986: 197–215). According to both Grodal and Deleuze, most narrative film
follows a conventional ‘sensory-motor’ circuit: perception elicits affective/
emotional responses linked with cognition that are expressed in actions (in
non-spectatorial contexts). Classical narrative film emulates the PECMA
flow via the devices of continuity editing, character-driven action and
narrative closure (what Deleuze calls the ‘sensory-motor schema’ defining
classical ‘movement-image’ cinema) (1986: 155–159). Art cinema, by
contrast, blocks or impedes the PECMA flow: motor action is interrupted,
which generates dissociated perception, ‘saturated’ affects or emotions, and
open-ended reflection oriented towards the search for ‘higher order’
meanings. This account accords well with Deleuze’s analysis of the effects of
the breakdown of the sensory-motor action schema, which, in like fashion,
interrupts the circuit between perception and action, thus realising varieties
of affect, thought and temporal experience (expressed in time-images)
ordinarily subordinated in ‘movement-image’ cinema. Deleuze’s concern,
however, is not with the affective-cognitive processes involved in our
response to art cinema with its emphatic use of time-images; rather, it is to
articulate an alternative semiotic typology of image-signs corresponding to
different modalities of cinematic expression. Von Trier’s films are replete
with such time-images, which open up aesthetic experiences – of affect,
memory and time – that resist explicit discursive articulation, and thus
chime with the tradition of romanticist theories of art indebted to Kant’s
(romantic) account of aesthetic ideas (1987 [1789]: 215–217) – indeterminate
but aesthetically rich ideas that invite open-ended interpretation – as
elaborated in the Critique of Judgment.
Grodal (2012) analyses the ‘prologues’ to von Trier’s Antichrist (2009) and
Melancholia (2011) from a cognitivist point of view that, nonetheless,
resonates with aspects of Deleuze’s account of the ‘pure optical and sound
situations’ defining time-image cinema (1989: 13–24). Both films commence
with super slow-motion sequences using arresting visual imagery (black-
and-white and colour respectively) and affectively charged music (Handel’s
‘Lascia ch’io pianga’ and Wagner’s Prelude to Tristan and Isolde). They both
block action, principally through ultra slow-motion imagery, suggesting but
also thwarting narrative and symbolic meaning, thus evoking saturated
affect, ‘global’ (rather than personalised) emotions and what Grodal calls the
 Romanticism, Mood and Cinematic Ethics 289

quest for ‘higher-order meanings’. In both Preludes, moreover, the play

between movement and stasis both stimulates and checks strong emotions
such as panic and anxiety, emotions that Grodal (2012: 49 ff.) attributes to
von Trier as creative but tormented cinematic auteur who uses these aesthetic
strategies in the service of his cinematic art.
The forward thrust and affective charge of the romantic music, Grodal
notes (2012: 48), is checked by the arresting of movement in the images,
resulting in a simultaneous intensification of perception, affect and
reflection.12 In this regard, for Grodal (2012: 48), the Preludes reflect four
general strategies evident in von Trier’s films for coping with strong or
destructive emotions, particularly anxiety and panic: aesthetic stylisation
and containment (or what we might otherwise call sublimation) through
beauty or poeticism; sublime submission to a powerful force or higher order
of meaning; manipulating the reality status of the image; and obsessive
control of the image’s aesthetic elements. Shifting between the film’s aesthetic
style and von Trier’s own famously troubled psychology, Grodal concludes
that the Overture of Melancholia, like that of Antichrist, is a way of controlling
the disturbing emotions of panic and separation anxiety, solicited and
managed within a highly controlled aesthetic construction. The pointed use
and display of romanticist imagery, for example, both by von Trier in the
Wagnerian Overture and by Justine in her angry outburst in the library,
serves to both express and allay anxiety and panic by way of aesthetic
containment. Using beautiful imagery in a highly controlled and manipulated
manner is a way to defuse anxiety, to sublimate panic and to solicit reflection
in the service of an ambiguous ‘submission’ to higher orders of meaning. As
Grodal remarks, alluding to the aesthetic experience of cinematic sublimity:

Trier’s use of romantic imagery is an effort to produce humility and also a

way of inscribing the prologues in an art film tradition that often caters to a
quasi-religious submission to higher meanings.
2012: 50

In addition to the strategy of submission to sublime meaning, the images

not only arrest movement but drain colour from the image and stylise the
composition of the frame through arresting, unusual or striking elements
disrupting balance, symmetry, formal expectations and visual conventions.
The result is a manipulation of the reality status of these images, which
occupy an ambiguous position somewhere between dream and fantasy, art
historical allusion and melancholy reverie. Even the otherwise terrifying
images of the Earth being dwarfed by the planet Melancholia are rendered
290 Cinematic Thinking

as arresting and beautiful. They are accompanied by the romantic Wagner

Overture, defusing the sense of panic or anxiety such images might otherwise
induce and replacing these with a ‘derealised’ aestheticised image suggesting
sublimity or other symbolic meanings. The entire sequence, moreover, amply
displays von Trier’s own ‘obsessive control’ over the aesthetic elements of
image, with its self-consciously stylised composition, pictorial and cinematic
allusions, complex aesthetic problem-solving approach, ambiguous reality
status and indeterminate connotative meanings spanning narrative, poetic
and symbolic dimensions.
Indeed, like other von Trier films, Melancholia works with self-imposed
rules generating a complex series of artistic experiments grounded in the
imposition of rules and elaboration of games expressing what a number of
theorists have described as ‘creativity under constraint’ (see Elsaesser 2015,
2019; Hjort 2008).13 Acknowledging but also subverting a European tradition
of art cinema and pictorial representation, von Trier’s aesthetic game-playing
involves a complex series of aesthetic strategies designed to both intensify
and dissipate the emotions of anxiety and panic, providing an aesthetic
transformation of these emotions in a manner that sublimates their negative
affective valency towards poetic experience and symbolic meaning. Taken
together, Grodal’s cognitivist analysis offers an enlightening ‘naturalistic’
account of the underlying perceptual-affective-cognitive processes at play
and artfully manipulated by von Trier’s distinctive audio-visual sequences in
films like Melancholia and Antichrist.
Interestingly, Grodal’s analysis not only accounts for some of the
underlying affective and cognitive processes involved in our aesthetic
response to the von Trier Overtures; it also recalls, ironically, psychoanalytic
film theories that applied a similar diagnostic to the analysis of cinematic
images (sublimation, fetishism, fantasy projection) and to film auteurs
(Hitchcock’s alleged voyeurism, perversity and misogyny, for example).
Grodal too tends towards a ‘pathologisation’ of von Trier’s aesthetic of
romantic sublimity, suggesting that the film evinces von Trier’s own obsessive-
compulsive tendencies, using art as a way of coping with his much-publicised
depression (2012: 51).14 Unfortunately, however, Grodal’s cognitivist-
auteurist analysis says almost nothing about the very mood, aesthetic
sensibility or emotional condition one would expect to be addressed in
analysing such a film: melancholia. How do these aesthetic strategies, and
more particularly the evocation of a specific mood, express and evoke a
state of melancholia that carries subjective, aesthetic and metaphysical
connotations? What is specific about the evocation and exploration of
 Romanticism, Mood and Cinematic Ethics 291

melancholia as both affective-psychological and aesthetic-metaphysical

state? Grodal’s analysis also refrains from addressing the film’s broader
cultural and ideological significance. It does not address the film’s
allegorisation of Justine’s experience of melancholia to capture the apocalyptic
cultural-historical mood of the present; to critique the vacuity of a naïve
rationalist optimism in the face of the contemporary ‘crisis of world’ reflecting
twinned ecological and globalised threats; and to explore the putative ‘end of
film’ within a neo-romantic aesthetic of cinematic sublimity. In what follows
I shall address these questions with respect to the concept of cinematic
moods, and explore both psychological-aesthetic and ethico-cultural
dimensions of the film’s presentation and exploration of melancholia.

Melancholia
There is no doubt that one of the most impressive features of the film is its
remarkable presentation of the experience of melancholia. For all the
brilliance of Kirsten Dunst’s performance, however, it would be a misleading
to interpret the film solely as a psychological study of depression. Rather,
melancholia is evoked in the film as a mood, an aesthetic sensibility, a way of
experiencing time; a visionary condition and aesthetic experience of
revelatory temporality that contemporary cinema has all but forgotten.
Chiming with Kristeva’s (1989) remarkable meditation on depression and
melancholia, von Trier attempts to reclaim the romantic association of
melancholia with prophetic vision and artistic genius (hence the references
to Brueghel, Wagner and Tarkovsky). It not only explores the subjective
experience of this distinctive mood or state of mind, it evokes melancholia
as an aesthetic, historically resonant mood expressing contemporary
cultural-historical anxieties, while also commenting on the corruption and
possible redemption of cinema in the digital age.
That Justine is both a melancholic and an advertiser, for example, should
give us pause. She has a refined aesthetic sensibility, ‘knows things’, but
cannot cope with the everyday world of work, refusing to give her boorish
boss, Jack [Stellan Skarsgård], the ‘tagline’ he so desires (on her wedding
night no less, a signal that commerce really controls art). Still, Justine
eventually gives him an acerbic (and rather Heideggerian) tagline – ‘Nothing,
just Nothing’ – one that best describes what Jack stands for (the nihilistic
corruption of art through advertising). Jack is the embodiment of a relentless
drive to work, universal commodification, an expression of the new spirit of
292 Cinematic Thinking

capitalism, a destructive force bent on annihilating anything that stands in

the way of business. It is this world that Justine sacrifices, renouncing her
promotion (as ‘artistic director’), insulting her boss, losing her job, thus
negating the entire sphere of her social and professional identity, everything
binding her to the empty world of wealth, work and advertising with its
nihilistic corruption of aesthetic experience.
One way of reading this episode is to treat it as von Trier declaring his
conflicted persona as director: encompassing Justine, melancholic artist/
advertiser (‘artistic director’), and Claire, caring sister and anxious organiser
trying to oversee the event (the wedding ritual or wedding movie cum
metaphysical disaster movie). If Justine and Claire are contrasting aspects of
von Trier’s directorial persona, we could take the film’s presentation of
melancholia as an allegory of the corruption of cinema as art; a self-critique
of von Trier’s own ambivalent role as melancholic artist, anxious controller
and cynical manipulator of images – a loss resulting in a melancholic act of
(cinematic) world-destruction.
At the same time, Melancholia reinvents the possibilities of art cinema in
a commercial-digital age by channelling modernist cinematic masters, while
fusing genre cinema with hybrid forms (domestic melodrama meets
metaphysical disaster movie). In an important scene, Justine, having
withdrawn from her own wedding celebration, reacts violently to the pictures
of modernist art in the books on display in the library, replacing them with
pre-modern and romantic images (Brueghel, Millais and so on); as though
her melancholia were itself a symptom of the decadence of modernist
optimism, its corruption into contemporary advertising design. There is
something rotten, for Justine, at the heart of modernism and its degeneration
into consumer culture, just as there is something rotten in the humanist
myth of progress, our rationalist faith in redemption from catastrophe
through science and technology. Indeed, Justine’s gesture of refusal and
negation signals that these ideas – the corruption of modernist art by
advertising, and the need to retrieve romanticism as an antidote to the myth
of progress – prefigures the destruction of the image-world that is soon to
come (recalling the image of Brueghel’s Hunters in the Snow being consumed
by flame and turning to ash).
What is it that defines Justine’s and indeed the film’s melancholia?
According to Freud (1917: 237–258), melancholia is a pathological condition
resulting from the inability to ‘work through’ the loss of a loved object
through the normal processes of mourning that would allow the subject to
detach herself from it. In mourning, the subject’s basic capacity for affective
 Romanticism, Mood and Cinematic Ethics 293

engagement with the world remains intact. In melancholia, the loss is so

catastrophic that the subject negates its own self and withdraws herself from
the world. It involves a negation of the self so radical that it leads to a
complete negation of social reality as such. In Melancholia (the film), Justine’s
negation of self and failure to participate in the rituals of everyday life – like
her own wedding reception – leaves her bereft of the capacity for affective
engagement and meaningful social agency. She strives to play the smiling
bride, but like the oversize limousine that gets stuck on the way to her
wedding reception, she no longer fits the social milieu in which she now
exists: the social rituals strike her as empty, trivial and absurd. In the course
of the evening, she withdraws from the wedding reception, withdraws from
her husband, rejects the demands of her boss, loses her career, seduces an
underling and prompts her husband to leave her, is abandoned by her family
and falls into a deep depression that leaves her unable to speak or to move.
The next day she can barely make it out of bed and into a taxi, let alone walk
or talk. She spends her days sleeping. When finally roused out of bed by the
promise of her favourite dish (meatloaf) and half-carried to the table by her
sister and professional assistant ‘Little Father’, Justine can barely swallow a
mouthful of the meal before beginning to weep, declaring that her food
‘tastes like ashes’.
This melancholia, however, is not only confined to Justine’s crippling
depression but pervades the entire world of the film. Melancholia is a mood
that imbues the world with a distinctive sensibility, congealing the present,
negating the comportment defining everyday activity, thus revealing the
emptiness of our everyday busy-ness (not to mention business) as well as
opening up an uncanny, ‘prophetic’ dimension of temporal experience.
Justine’s self-negation extends from her family and work to her investment
in the world itself. It is thus with a sense of relief that she learns of the
impending collision of Melancholia with the Earth. Her sister Claire becomes
increasingly anxious and frightened about what is to come, while her
husband, initially reassuring, clings to his faith in reason and science, only to
fall into despair once he realises that the collision is inevitable, that his faith
in scientific mastery and rational control was misplaced. He commits suicide
rather than face his family and the humiliating certainty of their deaths, not
to mention the collapse of the rationally optimistic worldview to which he
clings. Shattering our myths of progress, von Trier seems to suggest, could
well lead to a cultural nihilism, a collective depression, if not societal self-
destruction. Justine, by contrast, slowly emerges from her depression, gains
a quiet strength and becomes almost calm and contemplative. Seduced by
294 Cinematic Thinking

the presence of the vast planet, she bathes nude in its eerie blue light, beguiled
by its growing presence as it hurtles towards the Earth, pulling our planet
into its fatal embrace. Justine’s melancholia takes on cosmic dimensions, her
negation of self and world enveloping the world itself. Her melancholia thus
achieves its end, just as the planet Melancholia destroys the Earth, along with
Justine, Claire and Leo in their ‘magic cave’, and just as the film Melancholia
annihilates the image-world it had so beautifully composed for us.

Melancholy Moods: Melancholia’s

Cinematic Ethics
It is clear already from its Overture that Melancholia is a film concerned with
the evocation of mood. Although it deals with the psychological aspect of
mood (melancholia), it is also concerned with its aesthetic aspect, taken as
an expression of aesthetic sensibility, a way of disclosing or revealing the
world and time – an aesthetic experience of movies that is usually overlooked
in favour of movement and action. As distinct from the clinical notion of
depression, the film explores, in an evocative fashion, the existential kinship
between melancholia and artistic creativity, the kind of mood conducive to
aesthetically mediated ways of knowing. As Justine says, ‘I know things’,
alluding not only to her capacity for intuitive knowledge, as linked to her
melancholic disposition, but to her knowledge of the inevitability of the
planet Melancholia’s destruction of the Earth. As I shall suggest, moreover,
one of the most striking aspects of Melancholia’s aesthetics of mood concerns
the manner in which it also evokes an ethical sensibility or acknowledgment
of the fragility, vulnerability and irreplaceability of life on our planet. How
are these aesthetic and ethical aspects of mood related in the film?
One obvious way is via Melancholia’s powerful evocation of the mood of
melancholy, both as communicating Justine’s own experience of profound
depression and as an expressive aesthetic feature of the film’s cinematic
world. Here it is important to distinguish between moods attributed to a
character perspective and moods expressed by the work of art itself. Indeed,
a common conflation that occurs in discussions of mood concerns the
difference between a subjectively experienced mood elicited by a work, and
the aesthetic mood expressed by the work. Plantinga (2012) has usefully
elaborated this distinction between human moods (experienced by a
subject) and art moods (the pervasive affective tone, atmosphere or
 Romanticism, Mood and Cinematic Ethics 295

attunement conveyed by a work), what I have elsewhere discussed, drawing

on early film theorists, as the Stimmung of a cinematic work (Sinnerbrink
2012a). As Plantinga (2012) notes, the mood of a work is distinct from the
mood of the spectator, even though the work’s mood – expressing, for
example, the perspective of the film’s narration, of a narrator, or a character
– usually aims to elicit certain moods from its audience. I can recognise the
mood of gloomy dread or acute anxiety expressed by a horror film without
actually experiencing that mood myself while watching the film; or I can be
experiencing a certain mood that does not necessarily correspond with that
expressed or communicated by the film (a nostalgic mood while watching
an old slapstick comedy, for example). In sum, mood primes or orients us
emotionally (and cognitively) towards perceiving or attending to certain
elements, emphases or aspects of a film-world, preparing us for an appropriate
engagement with the emotional modulations and dynamics that unfold over
the course of the narrative.
The two parts of Melancholia, for example, are designed to express and
evoke different moods. The warmly lit, animated hand-held camera of Part I
(Justine) conveys the conviviality and attempted merriment of the wedding
(which soon turns sour as familial tensions surface, Justine’s Boss harasses her
for his ‘tagline’ and Justine slides into depression). The ‘cooler’, darker, more
subdued mood of Part II (Claire), by contrast, with its colour-coded
costuming, less animated camera work, and subdued lighting (initially more
naturalistic, more monochromatic and less vibrant), also features blue-filtered
light that starts to pervade later scenes, reflecting both the planet Melancholia’s
ominous presence and Justine’s own state of mind. All of these features give
the second half of the film a darker, unsettling, melancholy atmosphere. The
final part of the film, which centres on the inevitability of the devastating
destruction of the Earth by the planet Melancholia, collapses the distinction
between the mood of melancholia attributable to Justine and the mood of
melancholia expressed by the film. By the film’s extraordinary final sequence,
Justine’s mood has itself been alleviated, as she manifests a Stoic calm or
existential resoluteness in the face of impending disaster. Her ‘subjective’ state
of melancholia now pervades the film’s cinematic world (the blue light bathing
each scene, the rumbling sound of the approaching planet and the recurrence
of the Tristan and Isolde overture lending the final sequence a tragic-romantic
atmosphere of life and death entwined).
Mood, however, is not only an aesthetic dimension of cinematic worlds
and the experience of spectator involvement in such worlds. It plays a
significant role in what I have called ‘cinematic ethics’: cinema’s potential as
296 Cinematic Thinking

a medium of ethical experience. By this I mean films that use the aesthetic
power of cinema to elicit ethical experience, or to draw our attention towards
phenomena and perspectives that we might otherwise overlook or
undervalue, inviting affective-cognitive forms of engagement directed
towards new forms of perception, the exercise of moral imagination or
alternative ways of thinking. Cinematic ethics, from this point of view,
expresses cinema’s power to evoke an ethical experience that can prompt
aesthetic, moral-psychological, even cultural transformation; the aesthetic
‘conversion’ of our feelings and perceptions, attitudes and orientations – the
transformation of our ways of apprehending the world (see Sinnerbrink
2016a: 3–24).
There are three primary but related ways in which mood can evoke ethical
experience in film (see also Plantinga 2012). The first is the ‘subjective-
phenomenological’ aspect of mood (showing what something is like, how it
feels to experience X, presenting a distinctive experiential perspective on Y),
which typically unfolds as part of a dramatic narrative scenario expressing
either the perspective of a character or the worldview articulated by a film.
The second is the ‘moral-psychological’ aspect of mood (how it affects our
moral sympathies and antipathies again towards characters, situations, ideas
or worldviews, how it affects or orients moral judgments, how it exercises or
stymies moral imagination, potentially shifts ethical attitudes and moral
convictions, even alters our disposition towards action). The third is the
‘ontological-aesthetic’ dimension of mood (how it contributes to the
composition of a meaningful cinematic world, draws our attention to certain
features of the world, makes things salient, affectively charged or matter to
us). This third dimension of mood generally remains at a remove from
narrative representation since it pertains to the expression or disclosure of a
cinematic world rather than to the elaboration of its narrative content.
To say a few words about the first aspect, mood not only orients us within
a cinematic world, it can open up a space (and time) of engagement in which
we can experience phenomenologically the subjective (or ‘what it is like’)
dimension of a certain experience, say of grief, loss or depression. Here
mood works most closely with the elicitation of emotion, operating in the
ways that provide an affectively rich means of orienting us towards certain
kinds of cognitive or emotional responses. As many commentators have
noted, one virtue of Melancholia is its impressively authentic depiction of
depression, rendering powerfully and vividly the ‘what it is like’ aspect of this
subjectively debilitating form of experience (see Read 2014; Shaviro 2012).
Justine’s attempts to maintain a facade of cheerful involvement, her increasing
 Romanticism, Mood and Cinematic Ethics 297

inability to see the relevance or significance of the rituals she is performing,

her inexorable slide into a state of detached indifference, followed by bodily
inertia and utter affective disengagement – all of these aspects of her
experience are rendered in detail, thanks to Kirsten Dunst’s remarkable
performance. The scenes showing Justine’s inability to catch a taxi despite
her sister’s encouragements, her complete lack of energy and inability to
enter the bathtub and her failed attempt to enjoy a family meal, rejecting her
favourite dish as tasting ‘like ashes’, all highlight the experiential difficulties
of suffering depression. As remarked, the mood of the transitional sequences
between the end of Part I and beginning of Part II also underline the
subjective sense of a world that has lost its colour, texture, flavour and vitality.
The lighting and colour scheme retreat to dark and drab tones, gloomy
interior and exterior shots, ordinary ambient sound being dispersed by an
ominous background rumble, with the increasingly pervasive blue of the
planet Melancholia paralleling Justine’s affective, bodily and ‘existential’
sense of melancholia.
The second aspect (the moral-psychological dimension of mood) is the
primary focus of discussions of the role of mood, affect and emotion (e.g.
empathy and sympathy) in rhetorically ‘moving’ viewers towards changes in
their moral attitudes, the exercise of moral imagination or the slanting of
our stances towards ideological worldviews. This is the aspect of mood most
relevant to recent discussions of affective engagement with cinema, notably
the focus on affect, empathy or sympathy, and the manner in which emotional
alignment and moral allegiance are generated through cinematic means (see
Sinnerbrink 2016a: 87–95). This is the aspect that Plantinga (2009a)
foregrounds as having significant potential to understand and explain the
moral rhetoric of cinema and how it can persuade us towards certain social
attitudes or ideological convictions. Melancholia’s sympathetic presentation
of how Justine’s melancholy character develops in strength and resoluteness
as the fatal planetary collision becomes inevitable, comforting her practical
sister Claire who becomes terrified and panicked, is a powerful example of
how mood can elicit sympathy or empathy in affective terms. As (in part) a
familial/domestic melodrama, focusing on the complex relationship between
the two sisters, Melancholia takes great care to present the sisters in a
sympathetic manner. The film focalises the narrative, in Part I, around
Justine’s failed attempts to successfully engage in her own wedding
celebrations. In Part II, it shifts focus towards Claire’s well-meaning but
failed attempts to care for her sister during a depressive bout, while becoming
more frightened and anxious as the inevitability of the looming planetary
298 Cinematic Thinking

collision becomes apparent. Claire’s husband John [Kiefer Sutherland], a

bourgeois proprietor (owner of the manor house establishment with its 18-
hole golf course) as well as a rationalist optimist, has a dogmatically
rationalist faith in science that proves hollow, choosing suicide rather than
face the reality of world-destruction. Justine’s calm acceptance of their fate,
and blunt rejection of Claire’s misguided attempts to mask the reality of the
catastrophe via a pleasant dinner engagement over a glass of wine, culminate
in the film’s concluding sequence. Justine reminds young Leo about the
‘magic cave’ they need to build that will keep them from harm, a fragile
make-believe construction (like a tent or tepee) in which Justine comforts
distraught Claire and frightened Leo during their final moments on Earth.15
There is also a third ethical dimension of mood – more aesthetic,
ontological and existential – that contributes to how a cinematic world is
composed and communicated. This aspect of mood refers to how a cinematic
world is presented holistically with particular elements foregrounded as
affectively charged or emotionally salient: moods that can reveal a world as
meaningful, and that can dispose the viewer to notice, attend to or be moved
by the sheer existence of this world. The manner in which Terrence Malick’s
films, for example, compose a cinematic world presenting the majestic
indifference of nature, the contingency of human identity, the presence of
transcendent beauty and revelatory moments of moral grace, the
metaphysical-ethical as well as romantic-sensual experience of love, are all
dependent on the expression of mood as a constitutive element of the
composition and aesthetic disclosure of a cinematic world (see Sinnerbrink
2019d). Making something beautiful, arresting or memorable makes it
meaningful, shaping how much we care about and thus how we habitually
respond to the world. Mood can make the world – including salient elements
and aspects of it – matter to us in ways that might ordinarily remain
‘backgrounded’ in favour of cognitively driven instrumental relationships
with things and others. The selection of elements and manner of composition
of a cinematic world thus takes on implicit ethical significance as shaping
and orienting our responses to narrative film.
This aspect of the mood of Melancholia is, I suggest, what prompted a
number of critics to interpret the film as having an ethical dimension
pertaining to the threat of ecological and environment destruction figured
through the ‘unthinkable’ scenario of world destruction. We might consider
here Rupert Read’s (2014) therapeutic, personal-philosophical interpretation
of the film as an existential experiment in traversing mortality in order to
affirm existence in an immanent manner. Drawing on Wittgenstein’s
 Romanticism, Mood and Cinematic Ethics 299

conception of a therapeutic philosophy, Read elaborates his reading of the

film as inducting viewers upon an experientially rich learning arc that
traverses Justine’s path from melancholy depression to authentic life-
affirmation in the face of mortality, finitude and the threat of world-
annihilation. Read emphasises, moreover, the profoundly rich depiction of
melancholia (or depression), emphasising both its realism and plausibility;
but he also acknowledges and passionately defends the ethical-allegorical
dimension of the film as depicting the cultural-societal state of denial that
many Western societies display in the face of catastrophic, world-threatening,
environmental danger (catastrophic climate change that threatens future
generations).
This stands in sharp contrast to Steven Shaviro’s (2012) reading of the
romanticist elements of Melancholia as evoking an anti-capitalist critique of
the ‘closed’ world of Western wealth, power and privilege (emphasising the
viewer’s pleasure in seeing the film’s presentation of the affluent but isolated
world of the ‘One Percent’ being utterly destroyed). Shaviro’s claim is based
on the idea of a parallel between apocalyptic ‘end of the world’ scenarios and
the ‘end of capitalism’ as something that remains beyond our cognitive-
imaginative frameworks. Such a catastrophic ‘loss of world’ can only be
evoked indirectly, or allegorically, as evident, for example, in apocalyptic
disaster movies such as Melancholia (and presumably numerous others),
signalling that the ‘One Percent’s’ refusal to forego their wealth and
conspicuous consumption can only end in the utter destruction of our
world.16
Although sympathetic to Shaviro’s claims concerning the film’s critical
stance towards the ‘One Percent’, Read examines more closely the relationship
between Justine’s depression, Claire’s ineffectual attempts to respond to the
imminent catastrophe and the film’s ethical dimension as enacting an
experiential shift in viewers that traverses depression, the thought of world-
destruction, but also guides us towards an ethos of life-affirmation. Indeed,
for Read, the film’s ethical significance ought to be recognised more widely:
its exploration of how an acceptance of finitude opens up an existential
authenticity, an implicit demand to take responsibility for our collective
future (or otherwise) on this fragile, threatened planet. In this respect, Read
offers a persuasive interpretation of Melancholia, one that captures important
aesthetic and dramatic elements of the film, not only as a study in melancholia
and existential authenticity, but as an exercise in environmental ethics and
eco-aesthetics with a subtle political orientation. We might gloss this as the
fragile possibility of a ‘community to come’ (Agamben) figured in the film’s
300 Cinematic Thinking

devastating final image of Justine, Claire and young Leo comforting one
another in their makeshift tepee as the planet Melancholia hurtles into the
Earth, annihilating everything in its path.
What is striking in this ‘ecological’ reading of the film, moreover, is the
manner in which the cinematic mood of existential care for a world under
threat of extinction imbues this metaphysical disaster movie cum domestic
melodrama with an ethical urgency and moral power. The sublime images of
a carefully ordered world under threat, the romantic-melancholy evocation
of nature and the fragility of human life, and the psychologically and
affectively moving depiction of the two sisters striving to cope with the
threat of world-destruction all contribute to a profound sense of concern
over the finitude of life on this planet, threatened by destruction thanks to
forces beyond our control. It is in this sense that Žižek (2012a) described
Melancholia as staging the thought of ‘world-sacrifice’ as an aesthetic
spectacle, one that ‘traverses the fantasy’ of world-destruction but without
the reassuring narrative perspective of a vantage point from which we might
contemplate our own demise.17
All three ethical dimensions of mood work throughout von Trier’s
Melancholia: the subjective phenomenological experience of ‘what it is like’
to experience depression; the moral-psychological aspect of soliciting
sympathy/empathy for Justine’s perspective and experience as a melancholic
(and that of her sister, Claire, a ‘normal’ individual shown trying to cope with
the reality of imminent death); and the existential-ontological dimension of
mood as showing how life itself on the planet is fragile, flawed and finite.
Despite von Trier’s reputation as a cynical manipulator and the film’s critics
describing it as a stylised exercise in nihilism, Melancholia reveals, on the
contrary, the profoundly ethical dimensions of our aesthetic experience of
cinematic moods.18

Epilogue
I have suggested that Melancholia’s staging of the act of world-destruction is
also one of (cinematic) world-sacrifice: von Trier’s destruction of an ‘evil’
world of corrupted or enervated images in order that a new one may emerge;
a world of images born of spirit and born again (as Hegel remarks in his
Aesthetics) from its pulverised ashes (Hegel 1975: 2). The ‘end of the world’
thus becomes an apocalyptic spectacle staged as an aesthetic phenomenon;
a sublime tragedy viewed from an ‘impossible’ perspective – the ‘magic cave’
 Romanticism, Mood and Cinematic Ethics 301

of cinema itself. One could imagine Justine’s ironic tagline for the film: fiat
cinema, pereat mundus.
At this point, a harsh critic might object: this is precisely what makes
Melancholia an exercise in empty nihilism; worse still, it shows that von Trier
is not only a pretentious neo-romantic but a misguided proto-fascist. Walter
Benjamin’s famous words (from the conclusion of the ‘Work of Art’ essay)
could even be cited as evidence:

‘Fiat ars – pereat mundus’, says Fascism, expecting from war, as Marinetti
admits, the artistic gratification of a sense perception altered by technology.
This is evidently the consummation of l’art pour l’art. Humankind, which
once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, has
now become one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached the point where it
can experience its own destruction as a supreme aesthetic pleasure.
Benjamin 2002: 122

To be clear, we should note that Benjamin was talking about the Futurists
and the fascist aestheticising of politics, to which he opposed the communist
politicising of art. It would be misleading, moreover, to graft Benjamin’s
historically specific critique directly onto our contemporary (post-fascist
and post-communist) historical-cultural situation. Nonetheless, there are
critics who would link von Trier’s fascination with romanticism, his
scepticism about utopian politics and his confused relationship with Nazism
and Judaism with a nihilistic aestheticising of violence – like Justine, von
Trier too appears to be ‘longing for shipwrecks and sudden death’, to quote,
as he does, Danish poet Tom Kristensen.19
Such a reading, however, would be mistaken, for a number of reasons. It
forgets that this this is a film about the end of film, about the end of
modernism in film, about the destruction of the image-world and the
possibility of a new one. It forgets, in a word, the ‘magic cave’ that is cinema.
It projects a literal meaning onto the film and thus remains blind to
Melancholia’s mode of aesthetic presentation. It demands moral-political
certainty in art, and thereby ignores the sceptical questioning of the present
and future that defines contemporary aesthetics as much as our melancholy
modernity. As Žižek remarks (2012a), Melancholia is, from a dialectical
point of view, a profoundly optimistic film: one that ‘traverses the fantasy’ of
world-destruction to its end, evoking a shattering spiritual-existential
acceptance of our finitude; an experience necessary for the transformation
and strengthening of our ethical attitude towards a world under threat of
catastrophic destruction. Although the film resonates with contemporary
302 Cinematic Thinking

‘apocalyptic’ themes, there is no didactic political message within it. Rather,

we find within it an ironic critique of a destructive rationalist optimism: the
conviction that, given our irrational faith in the myth of progress, and
destructive fantasies of controlling nature through technology, the only
foreseeable end is a scenario of world-destruction. At the same time, it
resonates with contemporary ecological anxieties concerning the threat of
world-destruction, even the ‘unthinkable’ thought of species extinction.
Melancholia is a film that makes the destruction of the Earth thinkable,
sensible, imaginable, as an aesthetic spectacle; and it does so as an ethical
challenge to a world that refuses to face this threat, one that repeatedly
reverts instead to distracted dismissal or melancholy denial. As Bruno
Latour remarks:
In the amazing final scene of a most amazing film the hyper-rational people
fall back onto what old primitive rituals are supposed to do – protecting
childish minds against the impact of reality. Von Trier might have grasped
just what happens after the sublime has disappeared. Did you think Doomsday
would bring the dead to life? Not at all. When the trumpets of judgment
resonate in your ear, you fall into melancholia! No new ritual will save you.
Let’s just sit in a magic hut, and keep denying, denying, denying, until the
bitter end.
Latour 2011

Melancholia offers us a tragic insight, an ethical experience of sublimity,

of the finitude and fragility of our shared world horizons, which are bounded
the fragility of our shared planet. At the same time, it is expressed via an
aesthetic spectacle of world-sacrifice, a cinematic sacrifice of the ‘corrupted’
image-world defining our melancholy experience of post-humanist
modernity. Just as Justine prepares for the end with Claire and young Leo,
von Trier prepares the spectator for an aesthetic experience of world-
destruction from within the ‘magic cave’ of cinema. Melancholia’s radical
gesture of world-sacrifice thus offers an intimation of the ethical challenge
posed by the thought of world-destruction: the difficulty of imagining a
future beyond the end of the world, which is also the paradoxical intimation
of a post-humanist beginning.
 12
Television as Philosophy:
Reflections on Black Mirror

Chapter Outline
What Is Black Mirror? 305
Black Mirror Thematic Clusters 309
Black Mirror and Film-Philosophical Thought Experiments 323
Conclusion: Black Mirror as Televisual Philosophy 325

The ‘film as philosophy’ debate has thus far featured mainly narrative
fictional films (rather than documentary) with recent work featuring popular
genre films (with some recognition of experimental cinema). Although this
rather narrow construal of the ‘canon’ of philosophical films has begun to
shift (with the inclusion of documentary, arthouse, slow cinema, animation
and world cinemas),1 television is only recently being recognised as worthy
of philosophical consideration for its aesthetic features and ethical aspects
(see Carroll 2001; Engell 2021; Nannicelli 2017). Little attention, however,
has been given to the possibility of including televisual works in the ‘film as
philosophy’ debate (see Coehlo 2019: 319–341). Given the profound shift
brought about by digital media technologies and the rise of cinematic
television as found in the much-praised long-form television serial
(Nannicelli 2017), it is timely to turn to television as offering possibilities to
explore the idea of ‘cinema as philosophy’ in ways that make original and
creative use of the affordances of television as a medium. Far from spelling
the ‘death of cinema’, the mutations of the medium that have flourished in

303
304 Cinematic Thinking

both digital media works and in the televisual domain suggest that the
possibilities for exploring the varieties of ‘cinematic thinking’ across different
mediums have only just begun.2
One such televisual work is the award-winning anthology series Black
Mirror (Brooker, 2011–2019), which has attracted widespread praise and
critical acclaim, inspiring at least two volumes dedicated to exploring its
philosophical dimensions (Johnson and Irwin 2019; Shaw, Marshall and
Rocha 2021).3 Recalling the anthology format of The Twilight Zone, Black
Mirror presents compelling depictions of near future scenarios exploring the
dark side of contemporary digital technology and audiovisual culture.
Although they belong to the genre of dystopian science fiction, we could also
describe the episodes of Black Mirror as works of speculative cinematic
fiction deploying a variety of genres such as psychological horror, science
fantasy and the socio-political thriller.4 The standalone episodes of the five
series of Black Mirror explore the uncanny, the fantastic and the speculative
in fiction but always with specific reference to our technologically mediated
sense of social reality. With their focus on the ethical implications of current
and future technological possibilities, Black Mirror offers a compelling case
study to explore the idea of ‘televisual philosophy’. In what follows I shall
develop this thesis by exploring three related ways of approaching this
acclaimed television series: 1) Black Mirror as thought experiment; 2) as
reflecting a critique of modern technology; 3) as engaged in critical self-
reflection on audiovisual media and on its own status as episodic television.
The episodes of Black Mirror pose sophisticated thought experiments
concerning the ethical implications of modern technology and digital screen
culture. If long-form TV serials like The Wire, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad and
House of Cards recall the extended narrative structure, character development
and complex world-building familiar from 19th and 20th century (realist)
novels, then the anthology format of Black Mirror, focusing on particular
situations, specific characters and well-defined ideas, is more akin to the short
story. In this respect, they not only present compelling televisual fictions but
offer powerful cinematic thought experiments that can serve as productive
ways of engaging philosophical thinking. As we have seen, the idea of ‘film as
thought experiment’, familiar from ‘film as philosophy’ debates (Davies 2019;
Sinnerbrink 2011b, 2014c; Wartenberg 2007), has been renewed in recent
work focusing on complex narratives and ‘mind-game films’ (Elsaesser 2008,
2019). Elsaesser (2019), for example, has argued that cinematic thought
experiments, particularly within European cinema, tend to take more ethico-
political and cultural-historical forms than within Anglophone cinema. He
 Television as Philosophy 305

focuses, in particular, on the ethical aporias and political deadlocks facing

European societies as well as the ‘productive contradictions’ confronted by
contemporary auteurs who turn the increasingly displaced or marginalised
position of European cinematic traditions into a site of artistic possibility and
cinematic creativity.5 Whatever the format, the idea of televisual thought
experiments, emphasising ethico-political, epistemic, metaphysical, as well as
cinematic aspects, offers a productive way of conceptualising Black Mirror
episodes within the more compressed format of serial television. In addition
to testing our moral intuitions, framing alternative realities and exploring
possible outcomes via hypothetical fictional scenarios, cinematic thought
experiments can also provide distinctive contributions to moral-philosophical
reflection as well as pointed ethical reflections on contemporary digital media
and social media technologies.
Indeed, Black Mirror’s pointed critical reflections on the ethical
implications of modern technology often recall but also extend the
speculations of philosophers of technology from Heidegger to Guy Debord
and Jean Baudrillard. In a related vein, Black Mirror allows us to revisit the
debate concerning ‘film in the condition of philosophy’ (Mulhall 2008; Neiva
2019; Smuts 2009b; Wartenberg 2007) thanks to its self-reflexive engagement
with contemporary media technologies. The episodes of Black Mirror reflect
on their own status as audiovisual media, and comment on the role of
television as well as social and digital media as part of an integrated
audiovisual system with disturbing ethical and political implications. By
reflecting upon its episodes’ own conditions, complicity and critical
potentials, Black Mirror displays the kind of aesthetic and cinematic self-
reflexivity that Mulhall (2008: 1–11) claims is one way that cinema – or in
this case television – can be philosophical, namely as existing in the ‘condition
of philosophy’.

What Is Black Mirror?

Originating with British writer Charlie Brooker, Black Mirror comprises five
series spanning 22 episodes that range between 40 and 90 minutes long.
Brooker worked in television as a presenter, comic scriptwriter and online
satirist, becoming infamous for his biting satirical website TVGoHome,
writing and presenting a documentary series, How TV Ruined Your Life
(2011), and writing scripts for the television horror serial Dead Set (where
zombies threaten to invade a Big Brother television set). The crude
306 Cinematic Thinking

descriptions of popular television shows lampooned in TVGoHome and

satirical comic projects such as Nathan Barley (2005) (based on a vapid,
narcissistic media/fashion ‘influencer’) and the fake reality TV show Daily
Mail Island6 explored themes and scenarios that would be treated in more
depth and seriousness in Black Mirror. The first two series, comprising three
episodes each, plus a special (‘White Christmas’) episode, were commissioned
by Channel 4 in the UK (2011 to 2013), while the next three series (six, six
and three episodes respectively), were made for Netflix (2014 to 2019). As I
discuss below, Netflix also features in the interactive ‘television film’,
‘Bandersnatch’ (2018). All are standalone episodes with different characters,
settings and timeframes (generally set in the UK, the US and Europe, from
the 1980s to the near future). Yet various episodes also allude to each other
in implicit ways, including a number of ‘Easter Eggs’ (implicit references,
recurring symbols or sundry connecting details) left for fans of the series to
discover and enjoy. Beyond adding ‘texture’ (as Brooker puts it), the possibility
of cross-referencing features appearing in different episodes also suggests a
more intersecting network or ‘enfoldment’ of references that could be
described as comprising an interactive Black Mirror mediaverse (an idea
explicitly articulated in ‘Bandersnatch’).
The title of the series is telling. Referring to the black appearance of a
device’s screen when switched off, a dark ‘mirror’ in which the user can only
see her face dimly, the title also suggests the metaphor of holding a mirror
up to our fascination with digital media and social media culture. It suggests
the ‘dark side’ of the technological possibilities afforded by modern media
technologies and the social and cultural effects of its ubiquitous presence
and proliferating uses. As Circucci and Vacker point out in their introduction
to a recent volume on Black Mirror (2018), the opening credit sequence
develops this idea in visual form. The black screen appears with a familiar
graphic – the rotating circular figure of the device starting up, otherwise
known as a ‘throbber’ – suggesting obscure digital operations occurring
behind the screen, hidden power and invisible processing of information,
which then disintegrates and reconstitutes itself as the title, ‘Black Mirror’,
accompanied by an ominous throbbing sound as the screen glass suddenly
cracks. Circucci and Vacker draw parallels with the opening sequence of The
Twilight Zone, which, as screenwriter and producer Rod Serling remarked,
allowed contemporary moral and political themes to be explored by
transposing them into science-fiction or speculative genres. Brooker has
taken up Serling’s strategy and developed it into a highly self-reflexive
engagement with the cultural ethics and politics of contemporary digital
 Television as Philosophy 307

culture. As Cerruci and Vacker observe, Black Mirror is ‘The Twilight Zone of
the 21st century’, a ‘philosophical classic that echoes the angst of an era’
(2018: vii). Or as Stephen King tweeted, Black Mirror is ‘like The Twilight
Zone, only Rated R’ (quoted in Harvey 2016), to which we might add that it
also offers a fascinating case study of televisual philosophy.
As commentators have noted, the series is best described as focusing on
the ‘near future’, or an ‘alternative present’, extrapolating from contemporary
social phenomena and technological possibilities that already exist, and
amplifying and examining their potential effects and social implications
now and in the future (Cerruci and Vacker 2018; Martin 2018). This generates
an uncanny ‘anticipatory’ effect or déjà là [pre-emptive or premonitory]
effect that combines both recognisable features of the present with disturbing
yet plausible amplifications of existing technologies in order to explore their
possible social and ethical consequences. The ‘allegorical’ dimension of the
1950s Twilight Zone episodes – using science fiction and speculative fiction
scenarios to comment on contemporary cultural and political issues such as
racism and Cold War politics – has shifted in Black Mirror. The latter adopts,
rather, a reverse strategy to that of allegory: an uncanny simulation involving
slight displacements and amplifications of the familiar but opaque present,
which, in a reflexive and recursive movement – we can see that the show
depicts both our present and an alternative future – is thereby rendered both
familiar and strange, recognisable and threatening. Like the term ‘Kafkaesque’,
‘Black Mirror’ has itself become a byword to describe disturbing developments
involving technological media and their social implications.7
Black Mirror is also indebted, however, to various television and film
genres. These include psychological and social horror (‘Get Up and Dance’,
‘Metalhead’, ‘Black Museum’); the socio-political thriller (‘The National
Anthem’, ‘Hated in the Nation’); domestic social drama (‘Be Right Back’);
elements of the police procedural (‘Hated in the Nation’, ‘Crocodile’);
romance (‘San Junipero’, ‘Hang the DJ’); but also computer gaming
technologies and formats, which feature explicitly in some episodes
(‘Metalhead’, ‘Playtest’, ‘Bandersnatch’, ‘Striking Vipers’). The crossmedial
character of many episodes, combining cinematic, televisual, social media
and computer gaming styles and techniques make these episodes difficult to
classify and are a distinctive feature of the series’ televisual style (which
darkly mirrors or mimics its objects). The episodes in general are
characterised by tight scripting and high production values, using new
directors (along with occasional veterans such as John Hillcoat and Jodie
Foster) along with lesser-known actors playing discrete characters who do
308 Cinematic Thinking

not reappear across the different episodes. Another distinctive feature is the
manner in which individual episodes adopt elements of what we might call
a social media/digital culture style, mimicking some of the aesthetic features
of social media, digital technologies, gaming technology and so on, in the
episodes’ own audiovisual aesthetic presentation (see di Summa 2019).
‘Fifteen Million Merits’, for example, combines a luridly colourful ‘gaming’
style coupled with drab grey clothing and interiors that blends into the
fictional world of the protagonists. They live as virtual prisoners in a digitally
mediatised environment as they earn ‘merits’ by using stationary bike
equipment, and whose only hope of escape is via auditioning for a brutally
exploitative reality TV talent show, Hot Shot (modelled on The X-Factor).
‘Nosedive’, as I discuss further below, adopts a smooth, slick, pastel coloured
style to reflect the ‘Instagrammatisation’ of everyday life that defines the
socially mediatised world of Lacey [Bryce Dallas Howard], desperately
trying to boost her social media ranking in order to get a new apartment and
thereby elevate her social status and economic prospects.8
It is also worth noting how well the short, episodic format fits with the
series’ focus on digital media culture. As opposed to the long-form television
serial, with its multiple narrative lines, extended character development arcs
and complex world-building, the short-form episodic format focuses on
particular characters in specific situations, situated within a briefly sketched
but well-defined context. Characters are rapidly delineated, rather ‘generic’
or typical in presentation (representing a particular social type or
recognisable kind of subjectivity), which means that viewers have less
opportunity for complex forms of emotional engagement compared with
the long-form television serial. Dramatic narrative development is elliptical,
often structured by a conceptual scenario or hypothetical situation, and
swiftly articulated in narrative terms within a tightly defined temporal
frame. Black Mirror foregrounds the role of technology: the relationships
between characters are not only mediated via social media technologies but
their sense of self is essentially dependent on the technologies that shape
and structure both their identity and their social world. In short, the
deliberately ‘flat’‘ presentation of character, sharply delineated narrative
situations, technologically mediated relationships and identities, and
conceptual or idea-driven narrative development make this kind of short-
form episodic series, as I argue below, the ideal medium for staging televisual
film-philosophical thought experiments.
The series is distinguished by its ‘dark’ vision of technology, exploring the
ethical implications of digital technological culture and the ubiquitous
 Television as Philosophy 309

power of social media to shape subjectivity under conditions that Zuboff

describes as ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Zuboff 2019). The latter refers to our
contemporary social, economic and cultural-political situation wherein
techniques of surveillance are applied to the tracking and harvesting of
information designed to influence not only consumer choices but to shape
social conduct, colonise personal identities, monetise data, instrumentalise
culture and manipulate political decision-making. Unlike long-form
television serials, which can compose a complex fictional world populated
by densely drawn characters, Black Mirror constructs its broader ‘global’
perspective in a mosaic or fragmentary manner, isolating particular
problems or possibilities, exploring them within hypothetical social
scenarios and allowing the accumulated perspectives to suggest a
fragmentary constellation that does not constitute a uniform whole. One
way of elaborating this thesis is to identify thematic clusters that recur across
the various episodes, with particular episodes foregrounding particular
themes but that also allow for intersecting, overlapping and corresponding
themes to be explored from different perspectives within particular narrative
situations. In what follows, I outline a range of such thematic clusters, which
represent a ‘clustering’ of cognate themes and ideas that at the same time
coalesce and recur over different episodes and seasons.

Black Mirror Thematic Clusters

A number of thematic clusters recur within and across the stylistically and
generically distinct episodes of Black Mirror, lending the series both
coherence and diversity. The most obvious thematic cluster concerns digital
media thought experiments: film-philosophical fictional situations that
extrapolate from, and explore further, the possible uses, abuses and ethical
implications of existing, as well as slightly amplified, forms of digital
technology and audiovisual media. What if a ‘wearable’ augmented reality
(AR) technology were devised capable of ‘recording’ our experiences, thereby
rendering memories available in digital formats to be reviewed by the user?
What are the personal and social uses to which such AR technology could be
put? What kind of effect would it have on our sense of personal identity and
on our personal and social relationships? ‘The Entire History of You’ [S1 E3]
stages just such a scenario as a film-philosophical digital media thought
experiment, showing how individuals would most likely all adopt the new
technology, outsource their personal memories, and share their experiences
310 Cinematic Thinking

with others (having shared ‘redo’ sessions with friends). Companies could
use this information in the selection and management of employees (as we
see when protagonist Liam [Toby Kebbell] pores over the ‘redo’ of his
workplace performance management meeting). Government and security
agencies could use it to monitor, check and conduct surveillance on members
of the public (as we see during an airport security-check scene in which
Liam is asked to produce his memories of the previous days). It could also
wreak havoc on personal relationships by eliminating the unreliability of
memory or discretionary freedom afforded by forgetting, depicting a
Nietzschean nightmare of objective veridical memory being available for
forensic scrutiny at any time. We experience such a scenario by observing
Liam obsessively reviewing the ‘redo’ of his wife Ffion [Jodie Whittaker]
talking and laughing with a man who turns out to be an old flame, arousing
Liam’s jealous suspicions that they had an affair in the past.
This concern links with another prominent theme, which we could
describe as the concern over waning authenticity/commodified intimacy,
which again pervades many episodes in different ways. ‘Fifteen Million
Merits’ [S1 E2] offers a brutal critique of this tendency, depicting a dystopian
future in which individuals, virtually imprisoned in tiny giant-screen
panelled cells, work daily to gain ‘merits’ by generating energy on exercise
bicycles. Their only form of entertainment, whether on the bike or in their
cells, is a narrow selection of streamed video displays and television shows
ranging from fat-shaming/bullying prank programmes, pornographic
scenarios, to amateur television talent contests that offer the false hope of an
escape from oppressive reality via the fame accrued from winning the fickle
public’s favour. Bing [Daniel Kaluuya], the protagonist, who has accumulated
15 million merits through assiduous training on the stationary bike, meets
and is attracted to Abi [Jessica Brown Findlay], a young woman he notices
singing a soulful 1960s romantic pop song, ‘Anyone Who Knows What Love
Is (Will Understand)’, and the two share an obvious, if forbidden, attraction.
Bing convinces her to try out for Hot Shot, a vicious talent quest programme,
and to sing her song, feeling that its pathos and authenticity offer a tiny
breath of freedom in their oppressively manipulated and automated world,
where individuals are forced to endure wall-to-wall advertising for products
and shows, even in their sleeping quarters.
Sadly, Abi’s beauty and authenticity when performing her song, which
appears momentarily to move the judges, is soon channelled into cynical
and exploitative populist enthusiasm. She is pressured into accepting a role
(having ingested a psychotropic drink before going on stage) on one of the
 Television as Philosophy 311

judges’ pornographic TV channels. Bing, in despair and guilt, sets out to

accumulate enough merits to audition on the show himself. He does so,
cleverly avoiding consuming the compulsory cup of ‘Cuppliance’ – a liquid
drug designed to diminish the contestants’ resistance – and commences a
hip-hop routine that he soon discards. Instead, he launches into a live
television protest, holding a shard of glass to his neck, where he denounces
the oppressive, enslaving social world, speaking the truth to power while
threatening to commit suicide live on television. The judges, initially
nonplussed, seem impressed with his power and authenticity, and offer him
his own television slot – the rebellious protest now seamlessly incorporated
into the entertainment fare on offer as a domesticated release of anger and
dissent amidst the mindless infotainment and exploitative pornography
otherwise on offer. As Adorno and Horkheimer observed back in the 1940s,
the culture industry relentless generates and commodifies novelty, all the
better to appropriate and neutralise dissent: ‘Something is provided for all so
that none may escape; the distinctions are emphasized and extended’
(Adorno and Horkheimer 1991 [1944]): 123). The episode concludes with
Bing having ‘escaped’ his confinement only to reside in an upscale apartment,
his signature glass shard carefully stored in a velvet box, as her performs on
cue for television and enjoys his simulated ‘forest’ view in solitary
confinement. The authentic rebel speaking truth to power is now an
economically comfortable but docile celebrity efficiently co-opted into the
system.
Other episodes stage similar digital thought experiments. ‘Arkangel’ [S4
E2] depicts a parental surveillance device that allows overprotective parents
to track their children via GPS coordinates, but also to edit unpleasant
environmental stimuli by pixelating potential ‘stressful’ perceptions or events
and even occupy their offspring’s subjective point of view (unbeknownst to
the child). This becomes deeply invasive and morally unacceptable when
Marie [Rosemarie DeWitt] tracks her daughter, Sara [Brenna Harding],
whom she suspects of using drugs, only to inadvertently ‘tune in’ to her point
of view while Sara is having sex with her boyfriend. In ‘Rachel, Jack and
Ashley Too’ [S5 E3], a pop performer, Ashley O [Miley Cyrus], whose
consciousness is partially downloaded into a commercially available AI doll,
ends up being replaced by a holographic digitally simulated performer once
she begins to assert her own artistic autonomy. She is rendered comatose
through secretly administered drugs once she refuses to comply with her
record company’s demands, but manages to escape captivity (thanks to the
teenagers enlisting the help of the AI doll, whose consciousness is cloned
312 Cinematic Thinking

from Ashley’s) and expose her captors before a stunned live concert audience.
Adding to the reflexive, philosophical dimension of the episode, Miley Cyrus
plays Ashley O (whose own life partially parallels that of Cyrus and other
female pop performers – like Britney Spears – subjected to familial, economic
or record company control), a performer who rebels against the demand to
produce cynically marketed ‘positivity culture’ pop tunes (her hit song is
actually a reworked Nine Inch Nails track). After being liberated from her
coma and exposing her captors, she ends up performing an ironic grunge-
punk version of the song at the end of the episode.
A related thematic cluster concerns gamification threats: extrapolating
from the increasing popularity of gaming as a paradigmatic form of
audiovisual media and examining the potentially toxic effects that such
immersive, distractive and interactive formats could have, especially within
the context of exploitative neoliberal surveillance capitalism. These episodes
also typically combine or involve digital media thought experiments, and
could be described as exploring the possibilities of a VR/AI ethics that arise
either once such entities develop forms of sentient self-awareness, or if
human consciousness could in some way be digitised or transferred across
different embodied ‘platforms’. ‘Playtest’ [S3 E2] focuses on the scenario of
using a player as a live test subject in an experimental immersive ‘horror’
gaming situation. Test player, Cooper [Wyatt Russell], an American traveller
down on his luck, agrees to be a test subject to pay his way back home after
losing his money. He begins to lose his memories and suffer disruptions of
consciousness, thanks to the augmented reality technology and targeting of
the player’s own personal deepest fears as key elements in constructing the
immersive VR game (psychological black ops applied to computer gaming
technology). In a final twist, we discover that subsequent events we have
seen were simulated; Cooper received a phone call from his mother during
the gaming simulation, an unexpected interruption to the network linking
his neural synapses with the VR simulation that results in his tragic death.
The potentials of interactive gaming, and the significance of interactivity
more generally, often cited as an affirmative counterpoint to the ‘passivity’ of
traditional film and television viewing, is subjected to critical scrutiny in
‘Bandersnatch’. Set in the year 1984, it tells the (interactive/choose your own
adventure) story of a young programmer, Stefan [Fionn Whitehead], who is
contracted by gaming company Tuckersoft to work on a radical new game
based on a cult interactive fantasy novel (Bandersnatch), written by a
reclusive author, Jerome F. Davies [Jeff Minter], who went mad and murdered
his wife.9 Stefan, under increasing pressure to finish the game in time for
 Television as Philosophy 313

Christmas sales, finds his own grasp of reality beginning to slip, the more
immersed he becomes in both creating the game, desperately trying to
resolve problems before the deadline arrives, while suspecting something
more sinister and inexplicable is happening to him and to the game behind
the scenes.
There are, moreover, multiple versions of the story, with different plot
developments depending on the choices made by viewers. This feeds into the
explicitly metafictional element reflecting on the nature of interactive
gaming as well as the status of ‘Bandersnatch’ itself as just such a commercial
product (produced by Netflix, which itself features in the episode). There are
intriguing reflections on free will and determinism within the context of
fictional narrative and gaming culture, culminating in the enfoldment of the
viewer/player within the bifurcating and intersecting fictional world(s) of
Black Mirror/Netflix itself. It becomes apparent that it is not just the deadline
pressures applied by Tuckersoft within the story-world, but the viewer at
home controlling or directing events in the Netflix/Black Mirror story world,
which constitutes the real source of Stefan’s existential unease, his intuition
that he is subject to deterministic forces beyond his control.
As a fictional character, created by a writer/director (Brooker) and
subjected to the commercial and corporate demands of Netflix, Stefan is also
controlled, it turns out, by us as consumers/users of this interactive narrative
– a reflexive structure that foregrounds the ‘cursed’ interactive story Stefan
creates, while also reflecting on the manipulated and ‘determined’ character
of interactive narratives more generally. The viewer too is ‘controlled’ by the
forced narrative choices available, is implicated in the manipulation of
narrative events, meaning and existential choice pre-selected for both
characters and viewers/players via Bandersnatch’s interactive narrative
structure. It becomes clear that we are the ultimate arbiters of the ‘choose-
your-own-adventure’ interactive narrative and manipulated at the same time
by this interactive narrative structure. We are also the teleological endpoint
(‘endusers’) of the accursed videogame platform, from its troubled inception
in the 1980s, thanks to the unfortunate Stefan, to the present time of our
own interactive Netflix viewing in the 21st century – a pre-programmed,
mediatised world wherein our own commodified adventures, it seems, have
already been engineered and pre-ordained for us.
‘Striking Vipers’ [S5 E2] explores a different aspect of gaming, the
intersection between subjectivity, identity and sexuality. It does so through the
story of two college buddies, Danny [Anthony Mackie] and Karl [Yahya Abdul
Mateen II], who renew their friendship in mature adult life, re-establishing
314 Cinematic Thinking

their bond by playing the X-rated version of their favourite martial arts game,
‘Striking Vipers’. Not only do the men become more interested and immersed
in the gaming world than in their real-life personal relationships, they enter
into an ambiguous virtual reality fantasy sexual relationship involving the
crossing of gender and racial lines via their chosen gaming avatars (family
man Danny and playboy Karl adopting the avatars of a heterosexual ‘Eurasian’
mixed-race martial arts couple). Here the idea of technological prostheses
(gaming avatars) becoming subjective supplements/replacements (supplanting
the characters’ real-world relationships and replacing these with the hybrid
identities enacting their sexual fantasies within a digital world) becomes a
focus of participatory involvement and critical attention. They arrive at a
compromise arrangement with their female partners (limiting their online
sexual relationship and incorporating a real-world fantasy element), suggesting
an apt metaphor for the complex relationship between real-world and digital
versions of our social subjectivities.
Another pervasive thematic cluster concerns toxic social media effects and
social-political hacking threats, which together provide the focus for
numerous episodes, which we could also describe as staging film-
philosophical thought experiments. From Black Mirror’s first episode, ‘The
National Anthem’ [S1 E1], to one of the fifth season episodes, ‘Smithereens’
[S5 E2], the ubiquity of social media usage and its colonisation of personal
identity and shaping of subjectivity, distorting of communicative and social
relations, and potentially toxic cultural and political effects are recurring and
intersecting themes. ‘The National Anthem’, set in contemporary London,
melds political thriller with contemporary anxieties over terrorism,
cyberterrorism and the (social) media manipulation of politics and political
opinion, staging a scenario where an unknown ‘terrorist’ kidnaps ‘the people’s
Princess’ (a clear reference to Diana) and demands, by way of ransom, that
the Prime Minister perform a degrading sex act (with a pig) on live television.
Apart from the recognisable references to contemporary political figures
and plausibly realistic forms of (cyber) terrorist threat, the episode examines
the disturbing convergence of prurient entertainment, pornographic
degradation, the relevance of ‘shock’ art, manipulation of popular opinion
and toxic intertwining of media and politics today.10
The toxicity of social media driven ‘pile-on’ culture provides the premise
for ‘Shut Up and Dance’ [S3 E3], which elaborates the idea of unknown
hackers using toxic ransomware to target individuals using questionable
websites, and then forcing them to perform antisocial acts including theft
and, as it turns out, manslaughter. As with ‘The National Anthem’ and other
 Television as Philosophy 315

episodes, ‘Shut Up and Dance’ features a twist ending that plays on audience
sympathetic engagement with the tormented protagonist. In this episode we
observe an unassuming young man, Kenny [Alex Lawther], working as a
kitchenhand and mildly bullied by his co-workers, who inadvertently
downloads the malicious software while browsing privately at home. He is
then forced into a harrowingly stressful sequence of actions – robbing a
bank, for example – culminating in a videoed fight ‘to the death’ with another
victim, whose victim status is thrown into doubt by the revelation that he
was originally targeted by the hackers while browsing paedophilic websites.
It becomes clear, by episode’s end, that the other individuals targeted by
the malware ransom demands were all engaged in morally dubious uses of
the internet, whether for cheating, cyberbullying, trolling or harassment. The
‘twist’ ending in this and other episodes, playing on our initial assumptions
about the role of victim and perpetrator – assumptions about morally
permissible and impermissible forms of censure and punishment, and
credibility of online social media communication and activism – are all put
into question and re-framed by the episode’s disturbing concluding
revelation. The effect is an acute moral-cognitive dissonance: we are shocked
and sympathetic to the protagonists’ horrendous plight, but then have to
reconcile this sympathetic response with the revelation that, Kenny, for
example, was targeted for his paedophiliac desires. This raises pointed
questions concerning our assumptions regarding moral judgement, ethical
responsibility, social media ‘pile on’ culture, retributive practices of
punishment and the ways in which social media and internet culture have
dramatically altered all of these social and cultural phenomena.
‘Nosedive’ [S3 E1], directed by Joe Wright, takes the pervasive influence
of social media image curation, the competitive culture of accumulating
‘likes’ and boosting social media ‘rankings’, to its disturbing moral as well as
logical conclusion. It imagines a society in which individuals rate each other
(on a scale of 1 to 5) for all of their social interactions, and one’s social media
rating (out of 5) determines not only one’s social status but economic
opportunities, career prospects, choice of real estate, travel options, personal
flourishing, romantic relationships, even membership of the social
community. Like other Black Mirror episodes, it enacts a slight amplification
of contemporary technological possibilities and social practices, thereby
magnifying their social, cultural and ethical implications. It explores what
might happen if the ‘Instagrammatisation of everyday life’ were to be directly
linked to social status, professional mobility and economic success. It tells
the story of Lacey, who seeks to boost her social rating score (4.2) in order to
316 Cinematic Thinking

secure a new apartment. She consults professionals, curates her online image
and accepts an invitation from a highly rated ‘influencer’ friend to speak at
her wedding. After an altercation with airport staff, where Lacey becomes
agitated following the cancellation of her flight, she is confronted by a
security guard who penalises her a whole point. After further unfortunate
exchanges, Lacey’s social rating ‘nosedives’ as she struggles to make her way
to the wedding in the cheapest, most outmoded hire car available, which
breaks down and cannot be recharged (all because of her lowered social
rating). Her picaresque nightmarish journey, which includes hitching a ride
with a busload of sci-fi TV fans and a sobering encounter with a female
trucker who opted out of the rating system after her husband died of cancer,
Lacey finally makes it to wedding, albeit late, dishevelled and drunk. She
delivers an inchoate but accurate truth-telling rant to the bride and her
fashionable guests, a perfectly primed and curated gathering of manipulative
media influencers and ruthless success stories, and then is arrested for
assault. She is escorted to a prison cell, the only space left where she and a
fellow ‘inmate’ can now express their anger and other messy emotions freely
without fear of social punishment.
‘Nosedive’ offers a compelling critical reflection on social media image
curation and self-marketisation that not only threatens to undermine social
relationships, but also provides the technological and social means for an
oppressive and manipulative ‘social credit system’, designed to track, monitor,
influence and control citizens’ behaviour. Far from being science fiction,
such a system currently exists already in China (see Zhou and Xiao 2020). At
the same time, Black Mirror episodes such as ‘Nosedive’ mimic social media/
digital culture’s aesthetic style: ‘Nosedive’ uses a beguilingly appealing and
engaging aesthetic that mirrors or reflects its critical object, an
‘Instagrammatisable’ pastel-coloured world of arresting social media images,
designer technology, AR enhanced images of social reality and alluring
forms of digital media consumer pleasure (see di Summa 2019). The
technological devices that feature in different Black Mirror episodes faithfully
mimic technological devices that also embody appealing aesthetic design
(what we might call the Apple effect). The episodes deploy temporal
compression and narrative ellipsis, coupled with rapidly sketched,
deliberately ‘thin’ characterisation, thereby mimicking the kind of rapid
tempo of narrative presentation, or ‘gaming’ style, familiar from contemporary
digital media and their accompanying viewing (and playing) practices. In
this sense, the episodes’ aesthetic style adds performative counterpoint to
the more familiar moral and social-political critique of the alienating,
 Television as Philosophy 317

dehumanising or socially exploitative aspects of contemporary digital

culture technologies.11
This focus on toxic social media effects links up with another thematic
cluster, which we could call the dangers of surveillance/data harvesting
culture. The latter have become, as remarked above, a defining feature
of ‘surveillance capitalism’ (Zuboff 2019): the harvesting of data and
information concerning consumer choices, preferences, attention and
behaviour as a way of influencing and manipulating the population. In ‘Hated
in the Nation’ [S3 E6], one narrative line dealing with the introduction of
‘drone’ insect swarms to replace extinct bees intersects with another narrative
line dealing with the phenomenon of online trolling and social media
denunciation culture. The latter takes a deadly turn via the ‘Game of
Consequences’ centred on the viral spread of the #deathto hashtag, which
gathers data in order to identify the most popular media pariah of the day
(most hated in the nation), who is then targeted by anonymous hacktivists
and killed via the weaponised drone bees. The network of drone bees depends
on a vast informational surveillance network that the hacktivists take over
and exploit in order to demonstrate, in violent and brutal terms, the ‘real-
world’ consequences of the vicious manipulation of public opinion made
possible by the convergence of social media, news as infotainment and
political opinion management (which also features in ‘The National Anthem’).
A number of episodes explore the distortion of personal identity thanks to
the unbridled adoption of reality augmentation technologies. ‘The Entire
History of You’, as remarked, introduces an implanted consciousness
recording device (called a ‘grain’) that captures the wearer’s perceptions via
wearable lens technology and allows him or her to record and replay their
experiences as though from a vast digital video archive. ‘Be Right Back’ [S2
E1] explores a fascinating possibility: that of constructing a posthumous
digital avatar based on the deceased person’s digital footprint. Social media
addict Ash [Domhnall Gleeson] is tragically killed in a traffic accident,
leaving his pregnant girlfriend Martha [Hayley Atwell] in grief. She
reluctantly takes up the advice of a friend to try a new AI avatar technology,
which recreates a digital version of her deceased partner – based on data
harvesting his entire social media digital footprint – that is supposed to help
her cope with her loss but instead becomes a substitute for her grieving. The
episode takes this idea a step further by depicting the possibility of a synthetic
bioflesh version of the deceased partner being brought back to life. The
synthetic Ash, based on his recorded digital social media posts, lacks many
personality features of the real Ash; he shifts from being an uncanny
318 Cinematic Thinking

substitute for her dead partner – one that she cannot bring herself to
terminate or kill – to an awkwardly maintained prisoner locked away in
Martha’s attic, who is visited weekly by Martha’s and Ash’s young daughter.
Here the ethics of how we might have to treat VR/AI entities is staged with
pathos and plausibility, rendering the tragic circumstance of an imprisoned
digital/bioflesh copy of a deceased person in vivid and confronting terms.
Many episodes explore the possibilities of digitising consciousness,
examining the possible social uses and ethical implications of such
technological processing of consciousness. In addition to ‘The Entire History
of You’, ‘Crocodile’ or ‘Playtest’, which feature technological means of
digitising consciousness as part of augmented reality technology, there are
other episodes that focus on the pernicious uses to which such technologies
could be put. One is the idea of a virtual reality form of immortality involving
the uploading of a digitised form of artificial consciousness. ‘San Junipero’
[S3 E4], one of the rare optimistic episodes in Black Mirror, is a romance
centred on the idea of uploading consciousness into a virtual format such
that friends and relatives who remain behind in the real world could visit
deceased people in a virtual world, spanning different time-periods. In the
episode, introverted Yorkie [Mackenzie Davis] meets extroverted Kelly
[Gugu Mbatha-Raw] in a bar in the resort town of San Junipero in 1987 and
they have a brief fling. Later, Yorkie can no longer find Kelly and follows a
suggestion from a stranger that she look for her in a different time, trying
unsuccessfully in 1980, 1996, before finally locating her in 2002. In reality,
Yorkie is dying, having spent her life paralysed after a car accident following
a clash with her parents over her coming out as a teenager, and wishes now
to depart the real world and upload her consciousness into the virtual world
of San Junipero. Kelly marries her and authorises the uploading of Yorkie’s
artificial consciousness. Her own health failing, Kelly decides to do the same,
leaving the memories of her husband and child behind as she is reunited
with Yorkie in a virtual afterlife. Much like Be Right Back, this episode
considers the utopian desire for immortality and reunion with the dead that
might be made possible via the digitising of consciousness and construction
of artificial avatars of the dead in virtual reality.12
Taking more contextual perspective, as many episodes of Black Mirror do,
we can cite a number of episodes that deal with the idea of a control society /
surveillance capitalism. By this I mean the deployment of subtle mechanisms
of control (rather than overt forms of disciplinary power or mechanisms of
punishment), where such mechanisms (extending performance management
practices to all areas of life and imposing ‘social credit’ systems to shape
 Television as Philosophy 319

individual conduct) eliminate the need for more coercive forms of social
control by becoming internalised and self-regulating (Deleuze 1992). Such
mechanisms of control are harnessed by broader networks of social
surveillance and data harvesting techniques; together they can facilitate
control in the workplace, in schools and other social institutions, in the
marketplace and in the political domain, tracking consumer choices and
behaviours in order to influence, direct and control citizens’ attitudes and
behaviours (Zuboff 2019). Episodes such as ‘Hated in the Nation’, ‘Fifteen
Million Merits’, ‘Nosedive’, ‘Men Against Fire’, ‘White Bear’, ‘Crocodile’,
‘Arkangel’ and ‘Smithereens’ focus on different aspects of these mechanisms,
their capacity to penetrate and shape our subjectivity, and their potentially
oppressive social, cultural, economic and political uses.
This theme links up with the cluster concerning the militarisation of
everyday life / weaponising biotechnology / technoterrorism: a number of
episodes show how one of the manifestations of this system of informational-
societal control involves ‘militarising’ aspects of everyday life, harnessing the
power of information data harvesting via social media platforms and other
forms of ubiquitous online activity. ‘Men Against Fire’ [S3 E5], for example,
portrays a scenario where, under the guise of managing the risk of PTSD,
soldiers are equipped with wearable augmented reality technology that
screens out the human form of target agents, rendering them rather as
terrifying humanoid mutants, known as ‘roaches’, thus eliminating the
potentially traumatic character of being forced to shoot or kill human targets
as required in military or security operations.13 This AR technological
‘solution’ to the problem of how to train soldiers to kill with minimal risk of
psychological damage by manipulating perceptual and thus moral awareness
of other human beings is chillingly rendered from the first-person viewpoint
of the soldiers themselves. In computer game-like fashion, we inhabit the
first-person perspective of protagonists engaged in ‘sweeping’ operations
where they are charged with eliminating the ‘roaches’ hiding from authorities.
When one soldier, Stripe [Malachi Kirby], finds his AR device beginning to
malfunction, he subsequently learns the truth when he witnesses his fellow
soldiers killing people during their operations: namely, that his neural
implant device is designed to alter his perception of reality in order to make
it ‘easier’ to kill refugees hiding in the community. When he is shown footage
of himself and fellow soldiers engaged in what is described as a ‘genetic
cleansing’ operation, killing refugees in hiding without remorse, he is offered
the choice of resetting his neural implant AR device or being imprisoned.
The allegorical political resonances with the technologically manipulated
320 Cinematic Thinking

‘policing’ and border protection operations conducted against ‘illegal

aliens’ – which the soldiers perceive as swarms of inhuman ‘vermin’ thanks
to AR technology – clearly refers to the rising xenophobia towards refugees
manifested in Europe and elsewhere across the globe.
This exploration of the disturbing implications of manipulating our social
and moral perceptions via technology is linked with the social manifestations
of aggression, resentment, anger and voyeurism familiar from online trolling
and the desensitising effects of images of violence coexisting with banal
forms of streamed infotainment. As mentioned,‘Shut Up and Dance’ explores
this tendency within the context of hacking and manipulating online activity.
‘White Bear’ [S2 E2], by contrast, stages the spectacle of punishment in the
form of a televised survivor reality TV ‘game’ perpetrated on a woman
[Lenora Critchlow] who wakes up one morning in an unfamiliar room
without any memories of how she got there. Her television screen displays a
mysterious symbol or glyph (resembling an inverted Y, but also a symbol of
binary code, as reappears in ‘Bandersnatch’). She heads outside into the
deserted streets, and notices that she is being filmed by neighbours who
refuse to reply to her questions. She soon realises that she is in imminent
danger from masked and armed attackers (‘the hunters’) who suddenly
appear in a vehicle and chase her brandishing shotguns. She takes shelter in
a shop and meets a woman (Jem [Tuppence Middleton) who explains that
the passersby have been affected by the televised image of a glyph, which has
turned them into passive voyeurs. The women’s task is therefore to attack
and neutralise a local transmission station (‘White Bear’) in order to knock
out the toxic signal and find refuge from their enemies.
As they attempt to flee the hunters, the woman and Jem are then picked
up by a man (Baxter) in a van who is also unaffected by the signal, but turns
out to be a sadistic hunter, driving them to a forest, attempting to torture the
women, before being shot by Jem. The woman and Jem then escape, find the
White Bear transmitter site and attempt to destroy it before being confronted
by two other hunters. As the tense, gruelling fight for survival concludes
(with the hunters’ shotguns turning out to be fake), the walls fall away to
reveal a stage set and live audience: the woman has been participating,
unwittingly, in a staged ‘survival game’, with all participants played by actors.
More shockingly, it turns out that the woman, named Victoria Skillane,
undergoes this ordeal, repeated daily, as a punishment for her role (with her
partner) in the kidnapping and murder of a young girl (Jemima Sykes). As
spectators, we too are placed in the same disturbing position of confusion as
the terrified and tormented woman, who is not only fighting for survival
 Television as Philosophy 321

against unknown enemies, but trying to resolve the mystery of ‘White Bear’
and accomplish the difficult task that she is called upon to perform (recalling
the hacking/ransom scenario in ‘Get Up and Dance’). The revelation that
what we have been watching was actually a simulated or staged criminal
punishment for a woman who we initially assume to be an innocent victim
of inexplicable assailants is deeply disorienting and morally troubling. Like
the ending of ‘Get up and Dance’, we are confronted with a twist ending in
which an erstwhile victim is revealed as a ‘perpetrator’ requiring us to
reframe and reflect upon our emotional and moral responses (and generating
the kind of moral-cognitive dissonance discussed previously).14 The
convergence of gaming and surveillance culture, punishment staged as
social spectacle, harnessing current practices of consuming images of
violence and suffering online, offers a confronting commentary on the
convergence of punishment, media manipulation, social passivity and
suffering as entertainment in our highly mediatised ‘society of control’.15
Finally, it is worth noting that not all episodes of Black Mirror focus on
the ‘dark side’ of modern technology. Indeed, Black Mirror reveals precisely
the kind of ambivalent potentiality of modern technology that Heidegger
(1993) warned against: it both threatens a totalising technicist reduction of
human beings to a stock of manipulable resources, but also harbours the
promise of opening up a transformed way of inhabiting the technological
world in a more thoughtful, ethical manner.16 Where Black Mirror goes
further than Heidegger, I claim, is by enacting some of these ambivalent
potentials of modern technology – especially with respect to digital media
technology – in its own forms of audiovisual expression and narrative
presentation (precisely as film-philosophical thought experiments). Indeed,
some episodes explicitly examine the positive ethical possibilities of such
technologies in addition to exploring the negative ethical implications of the
manner in which digital and social media technologies have pervaded
everyday life. There are a number of episodes, for example, that focus on a
thematic cluster that we could call ‘the ethics of VR/AI entities’, extrapolating
from some of the most recent technological developments and possibilities
(‘White Christmas’, ‘Playtest’, ‘Back in a Minute’, ‘Black Museum’, ‘USS
Callister’, ‘Men Against Fire’, ‘Striking Vipers’, ‘Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too’).
What kind of ethical issues arise from the emergence of VR/AI entities that
may soon have levels of interactivity, self-directed decision-making,
functional autonomy, even artificial consciousness, to rival those of human
beings? What are the ethics of VR/AI entities should these acquire levels of
AI sufficient to warrant recognition as conscious entities in their own right?
322 Cinematic Thinking

The idea of AI entities developing consciousness (explored in films such as

A.I., Her and Ex Machina) is extended in Black Mirror to more domestic
forms of digital technologies (Alexa-style domestic ‘helpers’, VR gaming
avatars, synthetic digitised AI entities that offer simulacra of deceased
individuals and so on), typically presented, again, via the use of compelling
televisual thought experiments. The latter feature aesthetically seductive, or
else realistically confronting, stylised depictions of contemporary social,
media and military technologies that are but a subtle shift from what we
already encounter in our everyday worlds.
Black Museum [S4 E6] tells the story of Nish [Letitia Wright], who
seemingly wanders on a whim into a decrepit museum of curio technologies.
She talks with the owner Rolo [Douglas Hodge], who tells the stories behind
the various technological curiosities on display (some of which resonate or
refer to other Black Mirror episodes). The museum’s showcase exhibit is a
holographic image of the consciousness of convicted murderer Clayton
Leigh, experiencing extreme pain while being executed in the electric chair.
Popular with visitors, they are invited to enjoy the spectacle of inflicting the
fatal punishment – a ghastly scenario made even more shocking by the racist
overtones of white tourists ‘enjoying’ the power to deliver the fatal voltage to
a black prisoner. Nish reveals that she is the daughter of Leigh, who was
wrongly convicted and executed, and has come to take her revenge. After
poisoning Rolo, she transfers his consciousness into Clayton Leigh’s
holographic image, forcing Rolo to undergo the torture of Leigh’s last minutes
before death, an experience that destroys both Leigh and Rolo’s digital copies.
Nish leaves with a souvenir keyring depicting Rolo’s agony, burns down the
museum and leaves with her mother (whose consciousness also resides
within Nish), saying that her father would have been proud of her.
The ethics of capital punishment, institutionalised racism, the
commodification of suffering as consumable spectacle and the ethics of VR/
AI entities – whether taking the form of digital copies of living or dead
individuals, gaming avatars or transferable forms of digitised consciousness
– are probed, performed and questioned here in the guise of a novel revenge
thriller. Such themes are also explored, however, in episodes using disparate
genres, from satirical forms of sci-fi drama (‘USS Callister’ as a Star Trek
spoof) to domestic/teen drama (‘Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too’). ‘Black
Museum’, along with ‘San Junipero’, ‘Rachael, Jack and Ashley Too’ and
‘Smithereens’, all explore ambiguous forms of technological-ethical resistance,
which remain important, if fragile and uncertain, in the face of the seemingly
inexorable convergence of technological, digital and social-political forces
 Television as Philosophy 323

defining contemporary societies of control. As Heidegger observed back in

the 1950s (1993: 307), it is not a matter of demonising modern technology or
railing helplessly against it as ‘the work of the devil’, but rather of being open
towards it, thoughtfully engaging with its ambivalent potentials, in order to
arrive at a more ‘free relationship with technology’. This means both
acknowledging the threats that it poses to established human ways of existing
and the possibilities it affords for ethically transforming our ways of being-in-
the-world within technological modernity. In this ‘Heideggerian’ sprit of
engaging in a critical and thoughtful manner with modern technology – a
performative critique of digital technology using the very same means – Black
Mirror’s televisual film-philosophical thought experiments offer confronting
and compelling ways of experiencing, and thinking through, the ambivalent
potentials and implications of the technologically mediated world.

Black Mirror and Film-Philosophical

Thought Experiments
As we have seen, defenders of the ‘film as philosophy’ thesis – the idea that
cinema not only has a pedagogical value but can make significant
contributions to philosophical understanding via cinematic means – have
often pointed to narrative ‘thought experiments’ as one way of demonstrating
the philosophical potential of cinema. Wartenberg (2008) argues that not
only do thought experiments play a significant role in philosophy (from
Plato’s ‘ring of Gyges’, Descartes’ ‘evil demon’, to Philippa Foot’s ‘trolley
problem’), but many films can be taken as staging complex thought
experiments dealing with recognised philosophical problems (knowledge of
reality versus appearances, personal identity, free will versus determinism or
competing accounts of moral judgment). Standard philosophical thought
experiments (TEs) are abbreviated, schematic and stylised in order to reduce
variables and to render particular features of a situation more salient. As
Brown and Fehige (2019) point out, they include different forms with various
functions such as Karl Popper’s well-known classification of heuristic (to
illustrate a theory), critical (offering a counterexample to a theory) and
apologetic TEs (supporting a theory). Brown and Fehige elaborate this
classification in terms of destructive and constructive TEs. Destructive TEs
can point out contradictions, show how a theory conflicts with other beliefs,
show when a central assumption of a TE itself is undermined or provide a
324 Cinematic Thinking

counter-TE to competing TEs. Constructive TEs, by contrast, can illustrate a

theory or idea, or demonstrate the implications, argument or consequences
of a theoretical claim (see Brown and Fehige 2019).
According to these classifications, Wartenberg’s examples of Modern Times
and The Matrix would be heuristic and constructive (illustrating Marx’s
theory of alienated labour and Plato’s Cave/Descartes’ Evil Demon hypothesis),
whereas The Third Man and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind would be
critical and destructive (counterexamples to Aristotle’s theory of friendship
and utilitarian accounts of happiness respectively). Wartenberg (2007: 117–
132) and Carrol (2006b) offer the striking examples of experimental
minimalist films Empire, The Flicker and Serene Velocity as cases in point,
where Empire and The Flicker ‘foreground the background’ normally obscured
in our perceptual engagement with film, whereas Serene Velocity conducts a
cinematic thought experiment examining the photographic character of the
medium. Such films are interesting in that they could be either critical and
destructive or apologetic and constructive TEs depending on whether they
are taken to be counterexamples or exemplifications of differing theoretical
claims concerning the cinematic medium.
These experimental films, moreover, clearly qualify as aesthetic thought
experiments. A number of philosophers have argued for specifically aesthetic
thought experiments – Jorge Luis Borges’ short story ‘Pierre Menard, Author of
the Quixote’, for example, concerning the line-for-line reproduction of Don
Quixote, written by Pierre Menard, that because of its historical distance is
‘infinitely richer’ than Cervantes’ original. Such aesthetic thought experiments,
as Livingston and Pettersson (2017) remark, are both practical and productive
concerning the possibilities and paradoxes of an artistic medium. One of the
best examples of a comparable cinematic thought experience that is practical
and productive (or performative) would have to be Von Trier’s/Leth’s The Five
Obstructions. In the case of Black Mirror, we have a range of film-philosophical
thought experiments that are both heuristic and critical, destructive and
constructive (both exploring the negative implications of contemporary
digital and social media technologies, while exemplifying the ambiguous
possibilities that such technologies might also afford).
Artistic works and literary fiction can also provide complex, nuanced and
realistic kinds of thought experiment (Elgin 2014; Johnson 2016; Kung 2016).
As Mark Johnson observes: ‘It is the narrative depth, complexity, existential
validity of literary fictions that situates moral perception appraisal in contexts
that are psychologically more valid than those we typically encounter in most
moral philosophy’ (Johnson 2016: 365). We might compare this with Peter
 Television as Philosophy 325

Kung’s recent critique of ethical ‘counterexample thought experiments’: the

latter, he argues, are implausible because they depend on ‘forced choices and
fixed outcomes’, which is hardly how we would describe the complexity and
singularity of most moral judgments and ethical situations. Fictional TEs, by
contrast, including cinematic cases like those in Black Mirror, acknowledge that
choices vary and have unpredictable outcomes (the possibility of moral risk
and/or moral luck is ineliminable in actual situations, not just the adventitious
result of faulty decision procedures). This point is relevant for the fantasy of
technological control as applied to the social curating and technological
‘managing’ of subjectivity, which is evident in a number of Black Mirror
televisual thought experiments concerning digital subjectivity (e.g. Nosedive,
The Waldo Moment, Be Right Back, Arkangel). It is also important in relation to
critical and destructive counterexamples concerning some of the more naïve or
utopian claims made concerning future applications of AI, VR and AR
technologies (Entire History of You, Playtest, Men Against Fire, Black Museum).
Cinematic TEs span many genres and can take different forms: romantic
drama/comedy (Eternal Sunshine, Being John Malkovich), science-fiction
(Arrival, Her, Ex Machina) to metacinematic fiction (Adaptation, Inland
Empire). They are one important way in which we can describe cinema – and
by extension, television – as a ‘medium of ethical experience’. In comparison
with standard philosophical TEs, cinematic TEs add the power of immersive/
emotional engagement in order to evoke complex moral-ethical experiences.
We both imagine and observe the cinematic TE unfolding before us; the
multimodal character of audiovisual narration enables perceptual, affective-
emotional and cognitive-imaginative responses to occur in tandem, creating
a complex experience that is immediate and reflective at once. Because of
their multimodal and immersive character, cinematic TEs, like other
aesthetic TEs, are practical and performative (rather than abstract and
hypothetical): they are audiovisual ‘experience machines’ or multimodal
simulations of projected possibilities eliciting situational involvement
comprising emotional, imaginative and reflective responses.

Conclusion: Black Mirror as

Televisual Philosophy
To summarise, I have argued that the anthology series Black Mirror can be
regarded as a contribution to the idea of ‘television as philosophy’ according
326 Cinematic Thinking

to these three aspects: as televisual film-philosophical thought experiment;

as performative exploration and critique of digital and social media
technologies; and as engaged in a reflexive critique of audiovisual media and
its own status as episodic television. We could call these critical, performative
and reflexive modes of ‘television as philosophy’. I have endeavoured to show
how these three aspects are articulated in Black Mirror and thereby justify its
status as contributing to philosophical reflection, socio-cultural critique and
ethical understanding of our digitally mediated world.
With its short-form narrative format, elliptical presentation of character,
well-defined articulation of situation and dramatic unfolding of a key idea
or concept, Black Mirror offers an ideal platform for the staging of televisual
thought experiments. Expressed differently, Black Mirror episodes stage
performative audiovisual critiques of the ethical implications of digital media
culture via televisual thought experiments that are both immersive and
reflexive, critical and satirical, experiential and speculative. It is clear that
Black Mirror episodes deal with the question of technology, probing and
examining our digital technological engagement with the world. They
explore the possibilities, both positive and negative, afforded by ‘implantable’
AR technology and the prospect of a ‘digitisation of experience’ (the pervasive
use of ‘consciousness tracking’ devices, the digitising of perception and
memory and so on). They also question and reflect upon the ethical and
ideological-political implications of these ways of transforming both
individual consciousness and social relationships more generally via digital
technology, social media and the conjunction of data/information harvesting
and internalised forms of social control.
At the same time, Black Mirror episodes self-critically reflect upon their
own status as products of the televisual medium and the inevitable complicity
of the viewers/producers of such critiques of audiovisual culture. This is
what we might call, extending the idea of film as philosophy (Mulhall),
‘television in the condition of philosophy’: reflecting upon their status as
audiovisual works, their capacity for critique, as well as their ambiguous
implication within the very systems of digital technological and social
control that are in question.
Finally, these works of televisual speculative fiction are seductive: they
enact an aesthetic mimicry of the sensuous allure of digital social media as
part of their performative critique of the pernicious social effects of such
media. They engage us via immersive narrative scenarios, emotionally charged
audiovisual thought experiments, aesthetically imitative and interactive
‘gaming’ forms of cinematic presentation and reflective engagements with
 Television as Philosophy 327

their own complicity, as commercial television products, with the very system
of digital/social media culture of which they are a part. Black Mirror thus
offers performative, critical and reflexive modes of critique via the same
medium that it exposes to scrutiny. Moving beyond a traditional critique of
modern technology, Black Mirror thus performs a televisual disclosure of our
technological mode of ‘being-in-the-world’ – a dark screen reflecting our
ambivalent engagement with technologically-mediated social reality.
328
 Conclusion:
A Dialogue on the Future
of Film-Philosophy

Chapter Outline
1) The Digital Revolution and the Future of ‘Film-Philosophy’ 330
2) Philosophy of Film and Cultural Politics 333
3) Cinematic Thinking: Philosophical Cherry-Picking or
Transformative Encounter? 336

In this book I have attempted to introduce contemporary approaches to the

philosophy of film and to explore the idea of film-philosophy, focusing on the
question of whether film can ‘do philosophy’, that is, contribute to our
philosophical understanding via cinematic means. I have also examined the
debate over ‘film as philosophy’, which I suggest has become a matter of
exploring how cinema can accompany philosophy, engage in a mutually
transformative encounter, guided by the idea of ‘cinematic thinking’. In
addition, I have explored the idea of cinematic thinking by focusing on
three documentary/cinematic/televisual case studies, which offer aesthetically
challenging instances of how we might approach cinema as a medium of
philosophical and ethical experience. There are, nonetheless, three significant
challenges for philosophy of film/film-philosophy arising from contemporary
developments, which I have noted throughout this book. 1) The ‘digital
revolution’ that has put the traditional conception of the medium (‘film’) into
question; 2) cultural-political developments putting ‘identity politics’ (including
329
330 Conclusion

critiques of Eurocentrism, colonialism and so on), back at the centre of film-

theoretical debate; 3) the challenge to extend the ‘film as philosophy’ debate
into other domains of cinema (like documentary, television, animation and
other digital media). In regard to 3), we would do better, I suggest, to recast the
‘film as philosophy’ debate in more pluralistic terms (concerning what counts
as ‘philosophy’ as well as ‘film’), certainly in more aesthetic terms, centred on
the potential for cinema to serve as a medium of philosophical-ethical
experience, which is what I am calling the idea of cinematic thinking.
I have attempted to deal with these issues in this book but recognise that
there are critics who might remain unconvinced by the ‘film as philosophy’
idea, by the film-philosophy approaches I have explored, or by the idea of
cinematic thinking.1 Instead of rehearsing in summary form the arguments
and debates I have examined throughout this book, I shall imagine a dialogue
on the ‘future of film-philosophy’ in which these questions can be explored,
albeit in an abbreviated manner, by a number of characters adopting diverse
critical points of view. These are represented by a digital utopian (DU), a
philosopher of film (PF), a film-philosopher (FP), an advocate of identity
politics (IP) and a sceptical cultural theorist (CT). As in any philosophical
dialogue, the aim is not necessarily to arrive at a definitive answer or ultimate
conclusion but to deepen our understanding, clarify problems, conceptualise
how to think through them and open up new perspectives to transform our
horizons of thought.

1) The Digital Revolution and the

Future of ‘Film-Philosophy’
DU You have given us an illuminating overview of the new philosophical
theories of film, including the ‘film as philosophy’ debate, but these theories
still treat ‘film’ as though it were a living medium. How can we talk of ‘film’ – a
concept that is both historically obsolete and technologically superseded –
when we are currently in the digital age, and the medium of ‘film’ has been
replaced by digital image-making practices? Cinema today is “filmed” using
digital cameras, composed using digital editing software, routinely incorporates
animation and CGI techniques and is subjected to a plethora of digital post-
production processes. How can we still talk of ‘film theory’ when this medium,
as Rodowick observes, has been deprived of its object? Much as I am intrigued
by the ‘new philosophies of film’, they appear to be in the parlous position of
 Conclusion 331

philosophising on an obsolete medium, and have barely begun to revise their

‘ontology of film’ in light of the shift to digital culture, let alone the emancipatory
potentials of digital utopianism. Cavell follows Bazin in theorising a realist
ontology of cinema, while Deleuze, who at least recognised the significance of
digital images, remains focused on traditional forms of movement- and time-
image cinema. Film-philosophers, from what I can see, remain sceptical or
resistant towards the liberating possibilities of digital technology. What should
philosophy of film should do in response to the digital revolution?

PF As a philosopher of film, someone trained in film theory but who

embraced the ‘new philosophies of film’ (as an alternative to ‘Grand Theory’),
I agree that we need to take the digital revolution seriously. It is true that the
majority of philosophers of film have paid scant attention to the challenges
raised by the digital revolution, and do not give enough attention to how we
should describe but also philosophise about ‘film’. This is why many
philosophers of film (like Carroll, Gaut, Plantinga and others) claim that we
should talk of ‘moving images’ or ‘screen stories’ in order to loosen the grip
of the old term ‘film’ on our thinking and shift to a more contemporary and
expansive conception of this audiovisual medium. Others argue that we can
continue to use the term ‘cinema’ in an expanded sense in order to encompass
digital images, despite these technological transformations. Linguistic usage,
moreover, is slow to change, and the historical origins or legacies of many
terms do not preclude their acquisition of new meanings. Film production
processes have changed dramatically, as has the circulation and consumption
of cinema today (via multiple digital platforms involving different viewing
practices from the old-fashioned shared yet solitary viewing experience in a
darkened cinema theatre to watching streamed television shows on your
mobile phone while commuting to work). Narrative cinema or screen stories
are certainly produced and consumed differently, yet they remain
aesthetically continuous with earlier forms of mainstream film (movies),
despite obvious features such as the incorporation of CGI technology. There
are new possibilities of the medium, thanks to the advent of digital images,
but as Stephen Prince suggests, there is also a deep continuity with the older
paradigm of ‘film’ narrative. Cinema remains an overwhelmingly narrative
medium that has not changed appreciably. Reports of the death of film
thanks to the digital image are greatly exaggerated.

FP I agree with PF about the need to rethink our assumptions in light of

the digital revolution, and that we should give more attention to the ontology
332 Conclusion

of digital images (and examine how they differ from analogue images). It is
also true that contemporary narrative cinema has expanded in its possibilities
(in technical and production senses) but not radically altered in aesthetic
terms (Plantinga’s term ‘screen stories’ is an apt way of describing how
narrative cinema has not changed dramatically despite the digital revolution).
As a film-philosopher, however, I want to say a few words defending the
relevance of Cavell’s and Deleuze’s philosophical work on cinema in the digital
age. Cavell, to be sure, does focus on what we might call the analogue phase of
film history, and he did not write much concerning the shift to digital images and
filmmaking practices. At the same time, his account of the medium refers to the
aesthetic affordances and artistic possibilities that a new medium leaves for us to
discover or invent, which is surely what we are seeing today in recent cinema
(and animation). In the wake of the generalised ‘image scepticism’ that pervades
contemporary culture, the problem of scepticism, whether epistemic or moral,
has become more relevant than ever; Cavell’s philosophical approach to cinema
(or moving images, of whatever form) via the problematique of scepticism has
taken on a new lease of life. The cultural scepticism towards truth, the claim of
reason, artistic achievement, ethical responsibility and the role of art (including
cinema) in response to these phenomena, makes it crucial for philosophy to
respond to the ethical challenges raised by contemporary audiovisual culture.
There are also aesthetic reasons to defend Cavell’s philosophical
engagement with cinema. Some of the most interesting filmmakers today
have explored the stylistic possibilities of digital images in dialogue with
various filmic traditions in ways that suggest we need to think of the ‘medium’
in terms of aesthetic affordances and artistic possibilities rather than any
virtual substrate, technological mediation or ‘essential’ defining properties.
Whatever philosophical dimensions there are to contemporary digital
cinema, we should also remain attentive to, and engaged with, the aesthetic
possibilities of new digital media, including explorations of VR and their
capacities to transform the medium (in Cavell’s sense).
We can say much the same for Deleuze. Along with Carroll, he was one of
the few philosophers to have recognised early the importance of the coming
digital revolution, not to mention the importance of ‘the brain’ and body to
philosophical engagement with film. His account of the ‘shock to thought’
that art can engender – how an affective, perceptual and bodily encounter
with images can force us to think – is highly relevant to the challenges raised
by digital media and related developments (VR technology, for example).
Deleuze’s insistence on the capacity of cinema to create images that solicit
new ways of experiencing time, affect and thought that break with given
 Conclusion 333

frames of representation and thereby provoke us to think (even philosophically)

remains profoundly important in the digital age (consider his interest in
experimental television, for example, in Beckett’s television plays).2 For these
reasons, many film-philosophers have been thinking with Cavell and Deleuze,
and against Cavell and Deleuze, to open up new forms of film-philosophical
thinking in response to contemporary audiovisual culture. There is no reason
why we should continue to rehearse Deleuze’s own concepts or analyses,
when it is more in the spirit of Deleuzian cine-philosophy to create new
concepts in response to mutations in the medium(s) and the ‘challenge of the
digital’ that is transforming the meaning and possibilities of cinema.
At the same time, I think we should be critical about the ambiguous
potentials of digital and social media, and the profound technological
transformation of social reality today. As Heidegger observed, the point is
not to denounce technology as an evil force, nor uncritically celebrate it
while remaining blind to its dangers, but rather to think through technology
in order to find a more ethically freeing manner of inhabiting the
technologically disclosed world. This is how philosophically oriented cinema
and television (like Black Mirror) and ethical film-philosophy can contribute
to a cultural politics. Such works offer not only shock to thought but also an
invitation to explore the possibilities of cinema as a ‘way of thinking’.

2) Philosophy of Film and

Cultural Politics
IP What strikes me about both philosophers of film and film-philosophers
is that they seem to predicate their philosophical engagement with cinema
by passing over or marginalising cultural politics. Whether via the analytic-
cognitivist critique of ‘Grand Theory’, Cavell’s focus on ‘scepticism’ or
Deleuze’s focus on developing a Bergsonian (and Peircian) metaphysical and
semiotic typology of movement- and time-images, philosophical engagement
with cinema seems to sideline the more radical political traditions informing
film or screen theory. As we know, the latter foregrounded the central role of
ideology and the ways in which film theory could contribute to demystifying
the medium, critiquing capitalism and exposing the mechanisms of power
that construct dominant and subordinate subject positions according to the
axes of class, gender and so on. Film theorists today are renewing these
debates in light of the return to ‘identity politics’ and hence refocusing their
334 Conclusion

attention on gender, ‘race’ and the critique of coloniality, Eurocentrism, white

supremacy, to name some key fronts in what, for better or worse, used to be
called the ‘culture wars’. Would you not say that philosophers of film/film-
philosophers should be focusing more on identity politics or at least the
ways in which ideology remains important in contemporary cinema? Does
doing ‘philosophy of film/film-philosophy’ have to preclude cultural politics?

PF The critique of ‘Grand Theory’ did come about during a volatile period
in film studies, which at times did take on a ‘culture wars’ aspect, although the
polemics, from memory, seemed to go in both directions (think of the lively
exchanges between Heath and Carroll). Still, there is a misconception today
that analytic-cognitivst film theory is ‘apolitical’ or unconcerned with social
and political issues, or somehow blind to ideology. Much depends on what
one means by ‘politics’ here, which has many meanings in contemporary
debates (what film and cultural theorists mean by ‘politics’ in an expanded
sense may be quite different from what political philosophers, let alone
political theorists, mean by the term). Early volumes by analytic-cognitivist
theorists (like Allen and Smith 1997) included discussions of ideology,
subjectivity and politics (including critiques of the ‘Brechtian’ paradigm in
film theory). This has not remained a focus of analytic cognitivist approaches,
to be sure, but that is not to say we cannot gain anything from these approaches
for understanding film’s ideological dimensions. Contemporary cognitivists,
especially pluralists, have contributed to understanding affect and emotional
engagement with film (see Plantinga 2018). This seems to me a key component
in how ideology gets a grip on individual (and group) subjectivity (not for
nothing do we talk today of the ‘politics of fear’ in regard to the alt-right, the
insidious appeal of ‘fake news’ or the affective and cognitive influence of
conspiracy theories in politics). This means that we need to understand how
audiovisual media manage to capture attention, channel and direct affect and
emotion, and shift attitudes and beliefs in ways that are ethically and politically
significant. Audiovisual propaganda does not work by appealing to the
‘unforced force of the better argument’ (to use Habermas’ phrase) but by the
force of images, the power of affect, the links between emotion and cognition,
between perception, emotion and action. That is one way that philosophy of
cinema – including cognitivist film theory – can contribute to our
understanding of ethical, political and ideological concerns.

FP I agree that we do need to think through cinema in relation to its

ethical, political and ideological dimensions, and that this remains a
 Conclusion 335

challenge for contemporary film-philosophy. That is why I made the point a

moment ago about how philosophy can contribute to cultural politics in
relation to cinema. I think we need to be careful, though, not to set up a false
opposition between ‘philosophical’ engagement with cinema and ‘political’
forms of theory with an explicitly ‘activist’ orientation. I think you can see
this with Cavell and Deleuze, for example, whose work has always had a
strongly ethical orientation, and implicit political dimension, which both
remain closely integrated with their respective philosophical concerns.
Think of Cavell’s exploration of moral perfectionism and his focus on the
conditions of democratic life, or his reflections (in Cities of Words) on how
popular cinema can engage traditions of political philosophy in narrative
terms. It is true that his attention is directed towards American cinema (and
politics) and that there is much to be said here concerning gender, ‘race’ and
other aspects of identity politics. Cavell always argued that we need to
maintain an openness to conversation and dialogue with others as paramount
to any philosophical engagement with film (lest we revert to a bellicose and
moralising paradigm of discursive ‘warfare’ in which my interlocutor is an
evil Other to be denounced rather than a partner in dialogue from whom I
might learn).
Deleuze too has a strongly ethical focus in his Cinema books, from his
insistence that cinema has a creative capacity to express ‘thought’ relevant to
the contemporary world to his engagement with cinema as a response to
nihilism and means of providing ‘reasons to believe in this world’. There is
also Deleuze’s more explicitly political exploration of ‘minor cinema’, with its
political focus on marginalised, subjugated and/or colonised peoples, who
find in their ‘impossible’ conditions of subjugation the tools to create cinema
with the potential for creating new modes of existence while critically
resisting the ‘intolerable’ status quo imposed by different forms of social and
cultural domination. And then there are Deleuze’s remarks on the ‘society of
control’, which resonate powerfully today and have been taken up by
filmmakers and theorists concerned with the dangers posed by the rise of
what Zuboff calls ‘surveillance capitalism’ (think of Black Mirror, for
example).
I am not saying that these two thinkers have all the answers, but their
responses to some of the philosophical, ethical and political questions raised
by cinema are, to my mind, worth the time (of your life) to reflect upon and
understand. Many contemporary film-philosophers are exploring, in a
critical and creative manner, how to move beyond Deleuze’s own thinking,
drawing on the conceptual tools we might find in his work in order to
336 Conclusion

respond to the cultural-political challenges we face in our globalised world.

Again, we can take our cue from filmmakers – in a world of global cinemas,
as Martin-Jones puts it – whose aesthetically complex and politically
committed works provoke (and express) thought in ways that are both
philosophically productive and ethico-politically resistant. When it comes to
‘politicising’ film-philosophy, we should let ‘a thousand flowers bloom’, to use
an old slogan. We should welcome a plurality of philosophical perspectives
that take up whatever concepts or philosophical approaches might help us
engage with contemporary cultural politics but in ways that remain open
and constructive, creative and critical, rather than being dogmatic, sectarian
or doctrinaire.
That said, I would add that we should also avoid falling into the trap of
reductively ‘instrumentalising’ cinema as no more than a vehicle for ideology.
This is the case whether we are critiquing the ethical, cultural, ‘racial’ or
political biases of a particular work, or promoting the moral-pedagogical –
or ‘consciousness-raising’, to use an old-fashioned term – benefits of particular
marginalised, radical or overtly cultural-political works. The interplay, which
includes both confluences and clashes, between aesthetic and ethico-political
dimensions of cinema and television remains an irreducible feature of their
aesthetic complexity and expression of meaning – a point that contemporary
film-philosophers would be wise to acknowledge.

3) Cinematic Thinking: Philosophical

Cherry-Picking or Transformative
Encounter?
CT These are fine words from you both, and I applaud the sentiment behind
them; but many philosophers still have doubts about the ‘bold’ or strong
versions of the ‘film as philosophy’ thesis. It is difficult but not impossible to
show how cinematic works can contribute in an original manner to
philosophical or ethical understanding (or even to political change) but I do
not see how we can make such bold claims without erasing the distinction
between philosophy and film – or indeed philosophy and art – in ways that
are implausible or questionable. Films do not, in a philosophical sense, offer
arguments, or give reasons, or make theoretical generalisations, although I do
grant that they can be regarded as ‘thought experiments’ or complex examples
for further philosophical reflection. But this is to admit only the ‘moderate’
 Conclusion 337

version of the ‘film as philosophy’ thesis, which still leaves the ‘bold’ version in
abeyance.
I do not wish to rehearse those arguments again here but would like to
raise a related issue, which chimes with DU’s question: why do philosophers
of film/film-philosophy tend to focus on narrative film (whether popular,
‘world’ or ‘arthouse’) rather than other forms of cinema (like documentary)
or, for that matter, television? The author has made some initial forays in
these directions, but the question remains: have philosophers of film/film-
philosophers focused on particular kinds of narrative film in order to ‘cherry
pick’ examples that would fit or confirm the ‘film as philosophy’ thesis? Is this
not a question-begging form of argument (what Wartenberg called the
‘imposition objection’), recalling the very flaw for which ‘Grand Theorists’
were ruthlessly criticised? Do we really need philosophy in order to engage
with cinema? What can philosophy add to our cultural understanding of
film and other audiovisual media?

PF These are important questions getting to the heart of what philosophers

think they are doing when they engage with cinema. As you note, the
‘moderate’ version of the ‘film as philosophy’ thesis is now widely accepted,
even among erstwhile critics of this approach. The ‘bold’ version, of course, is
still controversial, with debate continuing as to its coherence and plausibility.
One way we can defend the idea of film contributing to philosophical
understanding is via the cinematic experience we can have that may be
conducive to imaginative reordering of beliefs, questioning of assumptions,
or shifting of perspectives. Cinema does not generally introduce radically
new ideas or profoundly re-educate (or, for that matter, manipulate) viewers.
But it can remind us of what we (think we) know, it can clarify but also probe
or query our intuitions and beliefs, and it can enable us to reorder and refine
our thinking (particularly concerning moral beliefs and attitudes) in ways
that are philosophically significant and cognitively productive (this is what
contemporary philosophers call aesthetic cognitivism). These forms of
affective and cognitive experience – essential, for example, in engaging with
cinematic thought experiments – may be one way of explaining how films
can be philosophical in ways specific to the medium (and thus offer support
for the ‘bold’ version of the ‘film as philosophy’ thesis).

FP These criticisms of philosophical approaches to cinema are

understandable but also misplaced. I can only agree with PF’s responses
regarding the potential for cinema to enhance, refine and extend our
338 Conclusion

philosophical and ethical understanding. We can have philosophical and

ethical experiences with cinema. If film-philosophers are responding to the
aesthetic, moral and philosophical experiences that certain films can elicit,
then it is not surprising that they appear to ‘cherry pick’ films – as the author
has done in this book – that are conducive to both eliciting and expressing this
kind of philosophical and ethical engagement. From this point of view, film-
philosophers are not engaging in a questionable ‘imposition’ of their views or
frameworks on film; rather, they are responding, in a conceptual manner, to
the varieties of philosophical and ethical experience that cinema can make
possible. My suggestion, then, is that perhaps we should shift the ground and
terms of the debate, focusing more on cinema as a philosophical and ethical
experience.3 This is one way of recasting what cinema can do: both express and
elicit what we might call experiences of cinematic thinking, which depend
upon the ways in which aesthetic, imaginative and emotional engagement
with cinematic works can open up new paths for thinking, perhaps even new
ways of being.
For these reasons I think we need to recall that audiovisual works of art
(like all art) not only offer experiences that are pleasurable and fascinating,
wondrous and absorbing, disturbing and arousing. They can also both
provoke and express thought in ways that force us to think and feel outside
our habitual routines and stereotypical regimes. Cinema can reveal and
express the world anew, offering ways of thinking and feeling that are urgently
required in our troubled and troubling world. It may even offer us experiences
with ethically transformative power. If that sounds like a speculative
promissory note, which it doubtless is, all I can say is that it recalls one of the
most admirable ways of thinking about art and beauty – I mean the idea that
cinema, like beauty, offers us ‘only the promise of happiness’.
 Notes

Introduction
1. These are contested terms. Nonetheless, film theory that opposes itself to the
‘old’ paradigm (psychoanalytic, semiotic, ‘Continental’), has a set of shared
problems, arguments and debates, and involves authors who explicitly
discuss each other’s work, can be called a ‘movement’ with shared views of
what comprises ‘philosophy of film’. The term ‘analytic-cognitivist’ (or
‘cognitive-analytic’) approach has also been used by other film theorists,
including Plantinga (2002, 2009), who defined the cognitivist approach
more generally as ‘committed to the study of human psychology using the
methods of contemporary psychology and analytic philosophy’ (2002: 21),
and remarked that ‘much of what has been called “cognitivist” film studies is
only cognitivist in a broad sense, and could just as well be called “analytic”’
(2002: 15). See also Elsaesser’s discussion of the ‘film as philosophy’ debate,
which explicitly discusses the analytic-cognitivist approach (2019: 23–24).
2. I use the terms ‘film’, ‘cinema’ and ‘moving images’ interchangeably
throughout this book, mindful of the terminological subtleties attending
these different terms, and the need to acknowledge the important shift
introduced by the advent of digital images (see Carroll 2008; Gaut 2012;
McGregor 2013).
3. The earliest volumes published using this now ubiquitous title were those
by Mulhall (2002, 2008), Read and Goodenough (2005), Smith and
Wartenberg (2006) and Wartenberg (2007). The analytic-cognitivist turn
was announced even earlier with volumes by Bordwell and Carroll (1996)
and Allen and Smith (1997). See also the important book by Daniel
Frampton, Filmosophy (2006) and Carel and Tuck’s influential volume,
New Takes on Film-Philosophy (2011). For authoritative topical overviews
of philosophical work on cinema, see Livingston and Plantinga (2009); for
more author-based philosophical approaches, see Colman (2009) and the
monumental recent volume edited by Carroll, di Summa and Loht (2019).
Other recent volumes on film as philosophy with a more ‘Continental’
slant include Herzogenrath (2017), Rawls, Neiva and Gouveia (2019) and
Elsaesser (2019), who added a new twist on the theme with his study on
‘film as thought experiment’.

339
340 Notes

4. See Wartenberg (2015 [2004]), for a fine overview and analysis of recent
work in this field. See also Falzon (2013) for a helpful critical discussion of
debates concerning ‘philosophy through film’ that I address in Chapter 8.
5. A sample of key works would include Bordwell (1989), Cavell (1979
[1971], 1981, 1996), Carroll (1988a, 1988b), Currie (1995), M. Smith
(1995), Bordwell and Carroll (1996), Allen and Smith (1997), Plantinga
and G. M. Smith (1999).
6. See Sinnerbrink (2019a, 2019b) for longer discussions of ‘film as
philosophy’ and ‘post-structuralism and film’ respectively.
7. I address Rodowick’s contribution to film-philosophy at greater length in
Chapter 8.
8. See Gaut (2010: 2–6) and Smith (2010) for useful summaries of this
analytic-cognitivist turn.
9. Ian Jarvie (1987) was one of the pioneers of the new philosophy of film,
publishing articles on Bergman’s films in 1959 and the early 1960s and
various articles on film and philosophy throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
In addition to Cavell’s The World Viewed (1971, first edition), important
articles appeared in the 1970s by Alexander Sesonke (1973, 1974) and
Francis Sparshott (1975, 1985). Bruce Kawin’s Mindscreen (1978) should
also be mentioned as an early contribution to the field.
10. See Rafe McGregor’s excellent discussion (2017) of Murray Smith’s Film,
Art, and the Third Culture and the idea of a romantic film-philosophy or
‘cinematic romanticism’ that would bring together these two approaches.
11. The two texts that catalysed this uptake, in my opinion, are Rodowick’s
Gilles Deleuze’s Time-Machine (1997) and Gregory Flaxman’s edited
volume, The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema
(2000).
12. My thanks to Fiona Jenkins and Greg Tuck for their helpful comments on
an earlier draft of this chapter.

Chapter 1
1. Carroll defines ‘Theory’ as ‘a classy continental number, centrally
composed of elements of Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, and Roland
Barthes, often with optional features derived, often incongruously, from
Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Pierre Bourdieu, Gilles Deleuze, and
(maybe sometimes) Jacques Derrida, along with contributions from
French cinéphiles like Christian Metz, Raymond Bellour, and Jean-Louis
Baudry, although generally filtered, albeit with a difference, through
exegetes like Stephen Heath, Kaja Silverman, and Teresa de Lauretis’
(1996: 37).
 Notes 341

2. See also Carroll’s companion book to this one (1988b).

3. It is intriguing that Carroll here cites Cavell as a ‘classical film theorist’
whereas I would classify him as a philosopher of film and, more precisely,
as a film-philosopher.
4. V. F. Perkins had already made this criticism in 1972: ‘[Film theory]
emerged radically deformed and incapable of useful growth. It could
develop only as a sterile orthodoxy, a body of rules and prescriptions
whose common features include internal contradiction and irrelevance to
critical discussion of actual movies’ (1972: 11). Perkins’ words are echoed
in more recent criticisms of the sterile orthodoxy that film theory has
become (see Frampton 2006: 169–182).
5. Allen and Smith, for example, assert that ‘Continental’ philosophers such
as Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault have all
attempted to demonstrate ‘the impossibility of knowledge’, and have
apparently ‘embraced this contradiction as the defining feature of
philosophy and the only legitimate path that philosophy can take in
response to modernity’ (Allen and Smith 1997: 10). Little argumentative or
textual evidence is provided, however, to support such hyperbolic claims,
which are sometimes uncritically repeated in some critiques of ‘Grand
Theory’ (see, for example, M. Smith 2010).
6. See Slugan (2019) for an excellent detailed study of Carroll’s philosophy of
film.
7. See Sobchack (2011) for a fascinating discussion of Derek Jarman’s Blue
from a phenomenological perspective.
8. This is the basis of Carroll’s critique of Currie’s account of the filmic
medium, which is unable to deal with avant-gardist and experimental
cinema.
9. A striking example would be Torben Grodal’s bioculturalist analyses of
action film, pornography or romance genres as ‘illustrating’ the
biologically grounded propensity, derived from our evolutionary history,
for men to prefer sex and violence and women to prefer romance and
child-nurturing narratives (2009: 56–78). Grodal assumes that culture
reflects biological foundations, much like ‘vulgar’ Marxists assumed that it
reflected the ‘economic base’.
10. For a critique of the ‘naturalistic’ turn in film theory and defence of a
‘philosophy of the humanities’ see Rodowick (2007a, 2007b, 2014, 2015).
I discuss in Chapter 8 Rodowick’s contribution to contemporary film-
philosophy, a neo-Deleuzian/neo-Cavellian aesthetic-ethical ‘philosophy
of the humanities’.
11. An exception here is Joseph D. Anderson’s work (1996), which emphasised
‘ecological’ cognitive theory and the importance of our cognitive-practical
engagement with the ‘affordances’ of our environment.
342 Notes

Chapter 2
1. See David Lynch’s remarks on the ‘end of film’ (2006: 149–150).
2. Necessary conditions are those which something must have in order to
count as a case of X; sufficient conditions are those which, if possessed
jointly, ensure that something is X. Being male is a necessary condition of
being a bachelor but not a sufficient one (there are married men); whereas
being male and unmarried is a sufficient condition of being a bachelor.
3. This of course is a different sense of ‘intentionality’ than that used in
phenomenology and philosophy of mind, according to which
‘intentionality’ refers to the directedness of consciousness.
4. It is true that I cannot orient myself on the basis of the image, but then
that is also true of a microscopic or telescopic image. Imagine attending a
screening of Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002) within St Petersburg’s famous
Hermitage museum; here I would have phenomenological access to the
profilmic space but not to the historical-cinematic ‘Russian’ world of the
film. Although we obviously cannot orient ourselves towards the fictional
world of the film, Carroll’s insistence on the impossibility, ‘save in freak
circumstances’ of orienting ourselves towards any profilmic space we view
on screen seems overstated.
5. Brian de Palma’s Body Double (1984), Kieslowski’s A Short Film About Love
(1988) and Jacques Audiard’s Read My Lips [Sur mes lèvres] (2001) are
excellent examples of this kind of cinematic use of space, which depends
upon our ability to orient ourselves within the diegetic world inhabited by
the characters.
6. I owe this example to Jean-Philippe Deranty.
7. The flicker fusion threshold is the frequency at which all flicker from an
intermittent light source is perceived to disappear (for us, approximately
16 Hertz); cinema projectors typically operate at 24 Hertz (24 frames per
second), television monitors at 50 or 60 Hertz and so on.
8. An account that, charitably interpreted, is not far off the ‘flicker effect’.
9. As Carroll notes, even animals appear to perceive movement in moving
images in the same way that human beings do (2008: 88–89).
10. Or when a film interrupts our ordinary perception (or expectation) of
movement and raises explicitly the question of movement and its
relationship with the (moving) image, as is the case with Marker’s La jetée.
11. See Sinnerbrink (2009) for a criticism of Carroll’s (1988c) reading of
Münsterberg, and his related critique of the film/mind analogy, which is
best understood as an aesthetic analogy rather than an epistemic claim.
12. Carroll criticises the film/mind analogy (1988c), arguing that comparing
film to the mind is unhelpful because we know more about film than the
mind, so the logic of analogy fails to be illuminating in the right way. On
 Notes 343

the other hand, comparing the mind to film – as Henri Bergson, Edmund
Husserl and Bernard Stiegler have done – can be illuminating, offering
new ways of thinking about the mind.
13. See also discussions of film as art by Haig Khatchadourian (1975), Jesse
Prinz (2010) and Murray Smith (2006).
14. Cf. ‘The electronic image, that is, the tele and video image, the numerical
[digital – R. S.] image coming into being, either had to transform cinema
or to replace it, to mark its death’ (Deleuze 1989: 265).
15. Cf. ‘The brain is unity. The brain is the screen. I don’t believe that
linguistics and psychoanalysis offer a great deal to the cinema. On the
contrary, the biology of the brain – molecular biology – does. Thought is
molecular. Molecular speeds make up the slow beings that we are. . . The
circuits and linkages of the brain don’t pre-exist the stimuli, corpuscles,
and particles that trace them. . . Cinema, precisely because it puts the
image in motion, or rather endows the image with self-motion, never stops
tracing the circuits of the brain’ (Deleuze 2000: 366).
16. We should note here the rise of new media theory and philosophy of new
media that has provided a rich field on engagement with digital media
technologies. See Cubitt (2014), Hansen (2004), Manovich (2001).
17. Timothy H. O’Sullivan, ‘Death on a Misty Morning’ [Photograph],
Available online: www.alamy.com/stock-photo-american-civil-war-death-
on-a-misty-morning-photographed-on-the-field-57287908.html (accessed
1 June 2021).
18. My thanks go to Havi Carel for her helpful comments on an earlier draft
of this chapter.

Chapter 3
1. See, for example, Oliver Sacks’ (1986), ‘The Lost Mariner’, which features a
character by the name of Jimmie G., who lost the ability to form short-
term memories, hence still believes that it is 1945.
2. I owe this point to Jane Stadler.
3. In discussing Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (1975), for example,
Gaut comments on the film’s (Akerman’s) use of a static camera as
commenting on the trapped existence of the heroine: ‘For Akerman,
employing a stationary camera was a matter of choice, whereas for the
Lumiére brothers it was not’ (2010: 40). Gaut’s comment certainly reads
like the ascription of authorial intention and artistic responsibility to
Akerman as solo author (not to mention the Lumiére brothers).
4. One also has to acknowledge the role of the film industry in this regard,
for which the author/director has become another means of marketing a
344 Notes

certain ‘brand’; the advent of DVD extras, moreover, has added to the
prestige of the auteur, offering interviews and other authorial insights that
promise to reveal the inner meaning of the film. My thanks to Jane Stadler
for this point.
5. One could argue that the authorship for The Fog of War is jointly shared
with former Secretary of State Robert McNamara, whose remarkable
autobiographical reflections on his life and on American politics provide
the film’s fascinating subject-matter.
6. As Frampton points out (2006: 170–174), the fact that it is easy to conflate
critical-technical discourse with narrative description continues to bedevil
theoretical discussions of film.
7. The Sixth Sense, which features Shyamalan as writer/director, is a
straightforward case. Films with different screenwriters and directors,
however, could presumably also have a single implied author imputed to
them, even if this implied authorship is divided between different actual
authors who collaborated in the making of the film.
8. I restrict myself here to digital interactive media, with some reflections on
VR, rather than focusing on computer gaming, which is a specialised field
of inquiry in its own right (see Aarseth 2007; Bogost 2011; Crogan 2011;
Gaut 2009; Grodal 2003, 2009; Kania 2018; McIver Lopes 2010; Robson
and Tavinor 2018; Tavinor 2009; Thompson-Jones 2015).
9. See Smuts (2009a) for a detailed analysis of different senses of
‘interactivity’, a proposed definition of interactivity (as ‘interacting with’),
and critiques of prevailing theories of interactivity.
10. See Daniel 2018 for a discussion of the idea of VR as a medium of ethical
experience, focusing on immersive VR documentary dealing with
indigenous experience in Australia. See also Ordóñez Angulo (2017) for a
discussion of the aesthetic and ethical affordances of Gonzalez Iñárittu’s
interactive VR installation work Carne y Arena [Flesh and Sand] (2017) as
a ‘transformative’ VR work that solicits both cognitive and affective-
perceptual empathy with a profound potential for transforming our
moral horizons.

Chapter 4
1. This is Bordwell’s main complaint against what he derisively calls
‘Interpretation Inc’ (1989b: 21–29), and the motivation for proposing his
alternative model of film analysis, namely ‘historical poetics’.
2. The famous shots of Kane speechifying in front of the campaign poster of
his grotesquely exaggerated face cannot help but recall (given the wartime
context) a certain proximity to fascist aesthetics.
 Notes 345

3. As Bordwell and other critics point out, Ozu recast the materials of
post-war Japanese Meiji culture, ‘mediated by such cinematic factors as
Hollywood norms, Japanese cinema’s “decorative classicism”, and the
practices of a commercial film industry’ (Bordwell 1988b: 30). The point is
that one should not immediately assume that Ozu’s famous use of low-
angle shots has an obviously ‘traditional’ cultural meaning.
4. Carroll uses the nauseating example of Dario Argento’s Phenomena
(Creepers) (1985): ‘As the heroine thrashes about in the pool – full of
decomposing bodies, sewerage, and insect larvae – and quaffs down
viscous gobs of liquidy, brownish stuff, one’s feeling of nausea is surely not
quasi-nausea nor pretend disgust; it is indiscernible from real disgust’
(1990: 78).
5. Contra Plantinga, however, consider the new French ‘cinema of extremity’,
which includes films such as Catherine Breillat’s Romance (1999), Claire
Denis’ Trouble Every Day (2001), Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible (2002), Breillat’s
Anatomy of Hell (2004) and so on. See Quandt (2004) and Palmer (2006)
for contrasting discussions of this trend, which began to subside once we
entered the 2010s (most likely due to ideological shifts in prevailing moral
and cultural-political sensibilities applied to cinematic representations of
sex and violence).
6. A keen gamer, however, might find Inception’s lack of ‘character
engagement’ paradoxically engaging precisely because it simulates a
computer game, thus allowing the viewer to identify with ‘Cobb’ in a
manner similar to his or her own gaming avatar. I owe this point to Tarja
Laine.
7. Interestingly, this Mexican song, written by Tomas Mendez, and
introduced by Lola Betran in a film of the same name, also appears in
Robert Aldrich’s Western The Last Sunset (1961) and in Wong Kar-wai’s
queer love story, Happy Together/Buenos Aires Affair (1997).
8. My thanks go to Tarja Laine and Jane Stadler for their helpful comments
on an earlier draft of this chapter.

Chapter 5
1. Peritore (1977) was among the first to introduce descriptive
phenomenology as a method for film studies, although his plea for an
application of the Husserlian epoche and method of eidetic reduction to
the descriptive analysis of film experience fell on deaf ears (or blind eyes).
2. Although published in 1990, Tomasulo notes that it had been in
preparation for five years, so from the mid-1980s. He mentions the
forthcoming books by Casebier and Sobchack, and outlines many of the
346 Notes

themes to which phenomenology can contribute that still concern us

today (subjectivity, spectatorship, gender, aesthetic experience and the
ontological challenge of television and new media).
3. As Tomasulo urged over 30 years ago: ‘Attention needs to be directed away
from the strain of affective, intuitive, and psychological phenomenology
that has become the sine qua non in film circles (Bazin, Metz, Cavell,
Linden, Andrew) and redirected toward the pure phenomenology of
consciousness originally posited by Husserl’ (1988: 20, quoted in Ferencz-
Flatz and Hanich 2016: 2). Although Casebier took up this challenge, it
was Merleau-Ponty who became the philosophical source par excellence
for contemporary film-phenomenology (thanks to the work of Vivian
Sobchack).
4. As Yacavone (2016) argues, much contemporary film-phenomenology
adapts Merleau-Pontian phenomenology of embodied perception but
ignores the tradition of phenomenological aesthetics and its exploration of
the phenomenology of cinematic (aesthetic) experience.
5. Don Idhe’s phenomenological work is another important source and
influence, as is evident in the extensive citations of his work in Sobchack’s
discussion of the ‘film’s body’ in Chapter 3. So too is the contribution of
Sobchack’s supervisor Richard L. Lanigan. Heidegger and Mikel Dufrenne
are other important philosophical/phenomenological reference points, as
is Iris Marion Young’s phenomenological version of ‘corporeal feminism’.
6. This opposition recalls that between realism and idealism in philosophy:
either we have direct perceptual access to reality (realism), or our experience
is always already mediated by representations, concepts etc. (idealism).
7. See Koivunen (2015) for an overview of the turn to affect in feminist film
theory.
8. Cf. ‘In The Address of the Eye I was focused on our vision as embodied and
entailing all our senses. For me, the big realisation was that a film also sees
(and hears) and that seeing (and hearing) are always situated somewhere.
Thus, I had to deal with the material substrate of that offscreen presence.
To just call it “the camera” seemed to me too easily reducible to much less
than it was. And it was also other than the filmmaker. The film’s seeing and
hearing is consciously moving and connecting things together onscreen
for a purpose while inhabiting space and time. The apparatus called “the
camera” does not “inhabit” anything. Borrowing upon Richard Zaner’s
work, the term “body” is thus meant not only to assert a film’s material
status but also its basic functions. Moreover, bodies are not necessarily
anthropomorphic. These are the reasons why the film’s body is not a
metaphor’ (Sobchack quoted in Hanich 2017).
9. A point already made by Hugo Münsterberg in his pioneering work, The
Photoplay (1916).
 Notes 347

10. We cannot ordinarily perceive many things that a camera can capture and
a film can depict (with respect to point of view, magnification, scale,
context, timeframe, motion speed etc.); we do not experience the world as
having cuts, see objects in close-up, cut between spatial and temporal
frames, have literal flashbacks etc. As Sobchack remarks of The Lady in the
Lake, ‘the film is narrated almost exclusively through the subjective
perception of its protagonist Philip Marlowe, but the film does not see
exactly as a human sees and it was necessary to point out the differences’
(Sobchack quoted in Hanich 2017).
11. In response to Julian Hanich putting this criticism to Sobchack, namely
that the ‘film body’ is a conceptual imposition, rather than a
phenomenological derivation from experience, Sobchack claims that she
does not impose the concept but arrives at it in the course of a
phenomenological investigation of the cinematic experience (2017). Her
defence, however, supports my claim that there is an irreducibly ‘subjective’
(anthropocentric) horizon presupposed by all phenomenological analyses,
including her analysis of the film body. Indeed, given that cinema is a
human artefact, and that films are intentional works directed at human
recipients embedded within cultural lifeworlds, what other ‘horizon of
meaning’ could there possibly be?
12. Although the flaws of Lady in the Lake are well known, there are more
recent examples of cinematic experiments in direct embodied point of
view that are far more successful (e.g., Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the
Butterfly (2007) and Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void (2009)). These more
recent examples clearly signal the transition to an embodied character
point of view and at the same time make use of ‘free indirect’ camera/
narrative point of view in contrast to insisting on a monologically
‘embodied’ point of view attributable to one particular character.
13. As with Sobchack, the very idea of a ‘filmind’ with an animating
intentionality is eo ipso modelled on the (phenomenological) model of
intentional (human) consciousness, hence Frampton cannot simply
dismiss charges of ‘anthropocentrism’ since it is hard to imagine any
other model of ‘mindedness’ that could serve as a paradigm for
thinking.
14. Without any specific examination of what a film (like Haneke’s The Piano
Teacher, for example, see 2006: 143) enables us to think (concerning, say,
the relationship between art and desire, violence and subjectivity, cinema
spectatorship and moral complicity), we are left with only a sensuous
description and minimalist hermeneutic concerning the formal
composition of various image sequences.
15. See Frampton’s (2008) replies to these and other criticisms of his
book, Filmosophy.
348 Notes

16. As Hanich remarks (2015: 116), although there are brilliant analyses of
texts like Barthes’ Camera Lucida and Freud’s ‘Inhibition, Symptom,
Anxiety’, Brinkema’s book devotes remarkably little attention to detailed
and extended film analyses that would provide the appropriate
hermeneutic evidence to fulfil her aim of ‘reclaiming form for film studies’.
17. See De Roo (2019) and B. Martin (2019) for two fine examples of how
these approaches can be combined in ways that relate aesthetic and ethical
dimensions of cinema.

Chapter 6
1. Although both Deleuze and Cavell can be understood as film-
philosophers, in what follows I refer to Deleuze’s approach as cine-
philosophy to signal its difference from traditional ‘philosophy of film’
approaches, but more specifically to distinguish it from Cavell’s ‘film and
philosophy’ (or film-philosophy) approach (which I discuss next chapter).
2. See Deamer (2016) for comprehensive introductions to Deleuze’s film-
philosophy from philosophical, semiotic and cinematic perspectives.
3. I cite these as authored by Bergson/Deleuze since Deleuze deploys an
idiosyncratic and contestable interpretation of Bergson. See Mullarkey for
a critique (2009: 97–100).
4. In the case of digital images, as Mullarkey points out, Bergson’s critique
would refer to screen refresh rates rather than frame projection rates, with
‘the apparent movement of the cinema images being parasitic upon real
physical movement existing elsewhere (ultimately, of whatever generates
the power for an electrical device . . .)’ (2009: 236).
5. See McGregor (2018) for a comprehensive defence of ‘anti-illusionism’ as a
persuasive version of cinematic realism.
6. I discuss the first two versions of the crisis of the action-image in what
follows, and return to the third version in a later subsection (‘Deleuze’s
Existential Imperative: Belief in the World’).
7. Cf. ‘But the essence of cinema – which is not the majority of films – has
thought as its higher purpose, nothing but thought and its functioning’
(Deleuze 1989: 168).
8. Rodowick defines aberrant movements in terms of irrational movements
(with reference to irrational cuts) using the definition of rational versus
irrational planes as an analogy (see Rodowick 1997: 18–27).
9. As Rodowick notes (1997), Deleuze’s rather traditional account of the
history of cinema is hampered by his assumptions concerning the
primitive character of early cinema, a point that has been discussed
critically by Viegas (2016).
 Notes 349

10. I take this to refer not only to the post-revolutionary disappointments

experienced after WWII but to the disappointed expectations of radical
social transformation following the social and cultural upheavals of the
1960s and 1970s.
11. Kovács (2000) claims that Deleuze’s Cinema books, with their historical
break between movement-image and time-image cinema, should be read
as a cinematic version of the history of thought.
12. Rancière makes the same point about Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du
cinéma (2006: 5).
13. A number of Deleuzian film theorists have also questioned Deleuze’s
historical and aesthetic assumptions about cinema, and have taken
Deleuzian film-philosophy into new theoretical territory (see Brown
2013a; Del Rio 2012; Flaxman 2012; Marks 2000, 2002; Martin-Jones 2006,
2011, 2019; Pisters 2003, 2012; Rodowick 2010; Vaughan 2013).

Chapter 7
1. See LaRocca’s (2020) excellent collection of philosophical essays on Cavell
and cinema.
2. See Mulhall (1999) for a fine discussion of Cavell, scepticism and film. See
Klevan (2011) for an exemplary engagement with Cavell and philosophical
film criticism.
3. Deleuze makes a very similar point concerning the ‘frame’ in his
discussion of the movement-image (1986: 12–18).
4. This is why cinematic remakes are usually disappointing. It is impossible
to substitute one actor for another when we are dealing with an iconic
actor/character combination (like Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates in Gus
Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of Psycho (1998)).
5. See Klevan (2005) for an original Cavellian-inspired engagement with
screen performance.
6. See Trahair (2007) for a fine film-philosophical discussion of Keaton’s
cinematic philosophy of comedy.
7. Irving Singer (2008) has elaborated, in elegant Cavellian fashion, this
important aspect of film as a practice of cinematic mythmaking.
8. Haynes asked Blanchett and Mara to read Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s
Discourse in order to prepare for their roles as Carol and Therese. See
White (2015) for a discussion of the significance of Barthes’ text for the
ways in which the love relationship is explored in the film.
9. Therese’s own ambivalence about how her relationship with Carol may or
may not fit within the subcultural New York lesbian community is
signaled in the record store scene where two older lesbians, in mannish
350 Notes

dress, stare pointedly at Therese, who also seems unsure how to respond to
their gaze. That she and Carol do not fit into this subcultural world, let
alone the ‘straight’ world, only adds to the tragic pressure to which their
perfectionist romance is subjected.
10. The film’s circular structure – commencing with a restaurant scene in
which their relationship hangs in the balance, recounting the story of their
relationship and how they reached that point, and reprising the same
scene having traversed the story and realised the pathos and gravity of
their exchange – recalls Brief Encounter in structure, mood and style.
Carol, however, also departs from the film in leaving open the possibility
of Carol and Therese renewing their romance on a more equal and
hopeful basis.
11. Cf. ‘It requires belief, relation to one’s past, conviction that one’s words and
conduct express oneself, that they say what one means, and that what one
means is enough to say’ (Cavell 1979: 62).
12. Mullarkey criticises Deleuze for using film examples ‘as stand-ins for
concepts’ (2009: 108).

Chapter 8
1. In the third edition of On Film, Mulhall (2016) extends his reflections on
contemporary cinematic franchises with additional chapters on the Jason
Bourne films, the fourth Mission: Impossible movie, J. J. Abrams’ Star Trek
and Star Trek: Into Darkness, and Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (which returns
us to the Alien universe he introduced in 1979). These philosophical
reflections expand on central problems discussed in the earlier editions of
On Film, including the question of genre (science fiction and thriller),
reflections on the impact of digital technology on cinema as a medium
(and its relation to television), and the significance of sequeldom in the
context of mainstream contemporary cinema.
2. As Joshua Shaw points out (2009), this is Julian Baggini’s (2003) main
criticism of Mulhall’s On Film: not that films cannot philosophise (Baggini
mentions that philosophers’ favourite, Kurosawa’s Rashomon) but that the
Alien films do not.
3. See, for example, the Philosophy Now recording of ‘Interview with Slavoj
Žižek’ (2017) www.youtube.com/watch?v=ka8S0vN73u4. Strictly speaking,
the philosophy in this case would be occurring in the context of the
interview situation, rather than anything cinematic, which raises the
question to what extent media interviews, whether written or filmed, can
serve as media of philosophical expression. I thank Tom Wartenberg for
alerting me to this point.
 Notes 351

4. In Chapter 10 I shall discuss precisely such an attempt in the case of two

documentaries focused on the life and thought of controversial French
philosopher Jacques Derrida.
5. See Austin’s discussion in Sense and Sensibilia of ‘trouser words’, which
refer to the dominant partner in conceptually paired terms (where the
subordinate term is presumably a ‘skirt word’). The obvious sexism of the
metaphor carries over, I suggest, in many discussions of the relationship
between film and philosophy.
6. Bergman writes in a 1957 Preface to the English translation of the
screenplay of Wild Strawberries (1957): ‘Philosophically, there is a book
which was a tremendous experience for me: Eino Kaila’s Psychology of the
Personality. His thesis that man lives strictly according to his needs –
negative and positive – was shattering to me, but terribly true. And I built
on this ground’ (quoted in Livingston 2009b: 562).
7. Smuts overlooks the possibility that The Matrix does offer this kind of
demonstration within the narrative itself; the viewer undergoes the kind of
sceptical experience of radical uncertainty precisely by watching and
engaging with the film’s fictional simulation of worlds (within the film).
From this point of view, the philosopher is providing a commentary on
something that the film does cinematically, rather than an interpretation
that supplies a demonstrative element absent from the film.
8. Shaw also discusses this sequence along similar lines (2008: 9–10).
9. In his most recent response, Livingston (2019) queries Smuts’ claim to
have found a counterexample (the ‘God and Country’ sequence from
October) that would satisfy the conditions required for a cinematic work
to fulfil the ‘bold’ version of the film as philosophy thesis. Livingston
rejects this claim, arguing that Smuts weakens the ‘bold’ claim by not
requiring the film to communicate a philosophical argument by
exclusively cinematic means, that is, by using features that are ‘unique’ to
cinema (2019: 85). In short, Livingston rejects any of the recent attempts
to rebut his arguments or refine the definitions of the bold thesis or what
would count as philosophy, despite most critics arguing that Livingston
‘sets the bar too high’ in articulating what the ‘bold’ version of the film as
philosophy thesis would entail. Unsurprisingly, Livingston remarks that it
is unlikely any film example would fulfil the stringent conditions required
for the bold thesis, but acknowledges that many could satisfy a more
moderate version of the film as philosophy thesis (2019: 88–89).
10. In The Well-Wrought Urn, Cleanth Brooks famously criticised the ‘heresy
of paraphrase’, arguing that poetry should not be ‘paraphrased’ into its
propositional content, for this would destroy the literary and aesthetic
qualities of the work. For philosophers like Livingston, by contrast,
paraphrase is the properly philosophical response to a work of art, whose
352 Notes

aesthetic qualities should be translated into the idiom of philosophical

discourse in order to extract their philosophical content for the purposes
of engaging in argument. Such approaches, however, ignore the question
of whether something significant – like aesthetic meaning – is ‘lost in
translation’, which is precisely what is at stake in the debate over the idea
of film as philosophy: are there ways of thinking that cinema can express,
but which philosophy fails to address or to communicate?
11. This is the real merit of Livingston’s Bergman study (2009a): the
philosophically original readings of Bergman’s films, which make the case
that Bergman is a cinematic philosopher more successfully than
Livingston’s attempt to anchor his films in Kaila’s theories (important
though this is for understanding Bergman’s work).
12. It is implausible to describe ‘analytic’ philosophy as a monolithic paradigm,
lacking diversity or plurality, even though the idea of analytic philosophy
as a methodological approach to theory construction remains important
(in aesthetics, for example). See, for example, Rajchman and West’s volume,
Post-Analytic Philosophy (1985), which articulated a movement (inspired
by Rorty, Putnam and pragmatism) breaking with the overly linguistic and
scientistic ‘analytical’ orthodoxy.
13. Cf. ‘Here we need no external examination beyond the critical
investigation of our own practices as they evolve historically’ (Rodowick
2007b: 100).
14. Wittusen (2016) has argued that my own efforts at developing a ‘romantic
film-philosophy’ incorporating philosophical film criticism, despite
attending to the aesthetic dimension of cinema, risks falling into the
‘philosophical disenfranchisement of film’ that I have criticised in others,
principally due to my attempt to ‘translate’ aesthetic meaning into
philosophical discourse. He rightly notes that ‘it is important to be aware
that philosophical film criticism and traditional film criticism can have
very different aims’ (Wittusen 2016: 209), and that philosophical film
criticism, in approaching cinematic works from the perspective of how
they may contribute to philosophical understanding, remains bound to
the idea of film experience being subordinated to philosophical
comprehension. I agree that this remains a hermeneutic risk in any critical
engagement with film, whether philosophical or not, but do not think that
this means that an aesthetically responsive and self-reflexive form of
philosophical film criticism necessarily distorts or dismisses what is
aesthetically specific to cinema. We can regard and defend this approach,
rather, as a philosophical response to the varieties of philosophically and
ethically significant aesthetic experience that a film may make possible.
My conception of philosophical film criticism as a ‘translation’ between the
mediums of film and philosophy is an attempt to articulate the expression
 Notes 353

of thought via moving images into a philosophically resonant,

conceptually appropriate idiom. The idea of cinematic thinking, moreover,
is an attempt to address Wittusen’s concerns by proposing a more open,
pluralistic and expansive way of thinking (than the more narrow ‘film as
philosophy debate’) about how our aesthetic experience of film can have
philosophical as well as ethical significance without being reducible to
these particular aspects. Indeed, in challenging our conventional
philosophical ways of thinking, cinematic experience, in its aesthetic
dimensions, can be regarded as expressing a distinctively cinematic way of
thinking.
15. My thanks to Tom Wartenberg for his helpful comments on an earlier
draft of this chapter.

Chapter 9
1. A related strand concerns the Levinasian ethics of responsibility towards
the ‘alterity’ of the Other as applied to our experience of cinema (see
Cooper 2007; Girgus 2010; Raviv 2020).
2. Apart from references to other Latin American domestic ‘maid dramas’
(see below), it is also hard not to think of Rossellini’s 1945 neorealist
classic, Rome, Open City [Roma città aperta] (1945).
3. A fact that is marked in the use of italicised English subtitles in the film.
4. De la Mora notes that Roma received universal acclaim within Mexico,
whereas the sharpest criticisms of the film came from (white) American
critics (2019: 46), a point also noted by other scholars of transnational/
global cinemas (see Marcantonio 2019). See Lagunas (2018) for an
account of the ‘almost unanimous praise for Roma in Mexico’.
5. See Ramirez’s quotation (2019) of Cuáron responding to questions
concerning the depiction of indigenous domestic workers in the film:
https://twitter.com/MonicaRamirezOH/status/1094416001028911104
(accessed 1 April 2021).

Part III
1. See Mullarkey (2009: 4 ff., 2011) for versions of this line of criticism
applied to advocates of the ‘film as philosophy’ thesis.
2. The fact that the philosophical ‘canon’ remains overwhelmingly masculinist
and Anglo/Eurocentric is a case in point. Here one can only gesture to the
possibility of expanding and pluralising the kinds of films, traditions and
354 Notes

auteurs who are at the forefront of philosophical filmmaking (Apichatpong

Weerasethakul, Bong Joon-ho, Catherine Breillat, Jane Campion, Claire
Denis, Lav Diaz, Ashgar Farhadi, Alejandro González Iñárittu, Kelly
Reichardt, Céline Sciamma, Warwick Thornton, Agnès Varda, Denis
Villeneuve, Wong Kar-wai, Jia Zhangke, to name a few).

Chapter 10
1. Wartenberg (2007: 18) mentions Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001) as
a possible candidate for film doing philosophy.
2. Goodenough discusses ‘films about philosophy’ (focusing on Rohmer’s Ma
nuit chez Maud), praising Dick and Kofman’s Derrida as ‘rather more than
a mere documentary’ because it ‘both depicts Derrida’s public activities as
a philosopher, his speeches and meetings, yet at the same time
deconstructs them’ (2005: 6). Strathausen (2009) also comments on
Derrida in relation to Derrida’s account of teletechnologies (see Derrida
and Stiegler 2002). As he remarks of the film’s pointed inclusion of the
filmmaking apparatus within various sequences, ‘these multilevel scenes of
mediation put into play the constitutive impossibility of getting to the
source or the essence of the subject “Derrida” ’ (Strathausen 2009: 140).
Trine Riel (2015) examines the manner in which philosophers in cameo
are depicted on screen, focusing on Brice Parain in Godard’s Vivre sa vie
(1963) and Jacques Derrida in Ken McMullen’s Ghost Dance (1983).
3. One recent exception is Riel (2015).
4. See Bowie (2015) for a discussion of how cultural meaning-making
practices – such as art – can be understood as philosophically significant
performances that disclose and enhance our sense of meaning in the world.
See also Cull Ó Maoilearca and Lagaay (2014) on Performance Philosophy.
5. The film was accompanied by a book (Dick and Kofman 2005) comprising
the screenplay, transcript of a Q&A with the filmmakers and Derrida, and
additional essays by Geoffrey Hartmann and Nicholas Royle, plus
photographs from the film.
6. Riel (2015: 93 ff.) discusses four ways in which philosophers appear in
fictional and non-fictional films, including ‘a known philosopher playing
himself ’, as in the ‘Derrida’ documentaries. Grindon (2007) discusses the
poetics of the documentary interview format, an approach that has its
roots in televisual culture.
7. An early anticipation of this style of screening philosophy can be found in
one of the 12 chapters composing Godard’s Vivre sa vie (‘The Unwitting
Philosopher’), which I discuss in the Preface to this book. See also Riel
(2015).
 Notes 355

8. Consider Amy Ziering Kofman’s text in Dick and Kofman (2005): ‘Making
“Derrida” – An impression; or: How to make a film about someone who
doesn’t want a film made about them and whose work “to put it mildly” at
first glance would appear to resist any and all cinematic treatment’. Kirby
Dick (2005) further explains the challenges of making a ‘deconstructive
documentary’ about Derrida, in a manner that reflects his manner of
thinking, which also means deconstructing the cinematic presentation of
Derrida as a biographical subject: ‘there was an underlying demand that
the film be made in the style of the subject’s work. . . that our film (indeed
any film) about Derrida be “Derridean”. Or. . . “do Derrida to Derrida” ’
(Dick 2005: 44).
9. Thomassen notes the difficulties the film encounters in trying to maintain
both an ironic distance from, and a pedagogical relationship towards, its
biographical subject: ‘The film keeps an ironic distance to Derrida, a
self-irony that also characterises Derrida himself. And yet the film is also
uncritical and, in this respect, it follows Derrida too closely (or, one might
argue, by following Derrida too closely and uncritically it precisely does
not follow him or deconstruction). At times the film falls into a kind of
student/professor relationship vis-à-vis its subject, and this is my main
objection to the film’ (Thomassen 2006).
10. Some critics, however, do take this approach, crediting biographical
experiences as shaping a philosopher’s thinking in profound ways. It is
hard to ignore the importance of Nietzsche’s break with Wagner as shaping
the direction of his thought, or the complexities of Heidegger’s influence
on Arendt’s political philosophy, or even Foucault’s experimentation with
drugs and the gay subcultural scene in California as shaping his later
thought. See, for example, Ettinger (1997) and Dean and Zamora (2021).
11. Think, for example, of texts such as Ray Monk’s Wittgenstein, the trilogy of
Foucault biographies by Didier Eribon, David Macey and David Miller,
Rüdiger Safranski’s Heidegger: Ein Meister aus Deutschland (a reference to
Paul Celan’s poem, ‘Todesfuge’ [‘Death Fugue’]), or Julian Young’s
monumental philosophical biography, Nietzsche.
12. This sequence, which begins with Pascale Ogier asking Derrida whether
he believes in ghosts, can be viewed online: www.youtube.com/
watch?v=0nmu3uwqzbI (accessed 9 February 2021).
Derrida has collaborated with Safaa Fathy on another film, Nom à la mer
(Safaa Fathy 2004), which features Derrida reciting one of her poems. She
also made an earlier one on Derrida, De tout coeur [With All My Heart,
1999], a montage of three of Derrida’s last public appearances. See Cavitch
(2021) for a detailed deconstructive commentary on Nom à la mer.
13. There is some debate about how the title of this film should be translated.
As Marguerite La Caze notes (2019: 156), ‘d’ailleurs’ can also mean
356 Notes

‘moreover’, ‘besides’, ‘in another way’, ‘otherwise’ or ‘in other respects’, as

well as ‘elsewhere’, suggesting that ‘From Elsewhere, Derrida’ is a more apt
translation. David Wills, by contrast, suggests, ‘Moreover Derrida’ as the
primary meaning of the title without explaining why that would be
superior to ‘Derrida’s Elsewhere’, which is surprising given the clear
emphasis on the theme of ‘elsewhere’ from the beginning and throughout
the film.
14. Fathy’s film can be viewed on YouTube with English subtitles: www.
youtube.com/watch?v=JMQDUrQ6ctM (accessed 9 February 2021).
15. For an illuminating discussion of the film, emphasising both its
philosophical and cinematic dimensions, see Peggy Kamuf ’s excellent
(2010) introduction to a 2005 memorial screening of D’ailleurs, Derrida.
See also Olson’s (2001) review.
16. La Caze argues that the film enables us to understand and question
Derrida’s thought, pointing out that Fathy questions Derrida’s notion of
hospitality in their co-authored work (2019: 154). Moreover, the film often
offers a visual counterpoint to what Derrida is saying on screen (La Caze
2019: 157), using the displacement of place and refusal to situate shots of
Derrida within identifiable locales or provide written context for these
visual sequences in order to evoke ‘Derrida’s elsewhere’ audiovisually
(which, ironically, would seem to confirm rather than question what
Derrida is saying in the film).
17. One could argue that D’ailleurs, Derrida (the film) needs to be understood
in conjunction with Tourner les mots (the co-authored text by Fathy and
Derrida on the making of D’ailleurs, Derrida), which is where the conflict
between ‘the Author’ and ‘the Actor’ becomes much more explicit and
thematic. Nonetheless, Derrida’s impatience with the filmmaker and
filmmaking process is evident in some scenes in D’ailleur, Derrida (such as
in the fish in the fishbowl scene which he takes as an allegory of himself in
relation to the film) but the film as a whole remains deferential towards
Derrida’s discourse and presence. Moreover, as Derrida also notes, in an
interview, the book and the film are both connected and ‘radically
independent’ (De Baecque 2015: 35).
18. Bruzzi criticises Nichols, however, for conflating performance with the
deconstructive notion of performativity, referring to Judith Butler’s work,
claiming that this is what Nichols should have used to describe the
‘performative’ mode of documentary presentation (2000, 154).
19. Butler draws on Derrida’s deconstructive critique (1988) of Searle’s
account of J. L. Austin’s pragmatic theory of performative speech acts,
arguing that the fluidity of context and necessity of iterability (citational
repeatability) make Searle’s attempts to formalise definable rules governing
the performance of speech acts fundamentally untenable.
 Notes 357

Chapter 11
1. Freeland (1999) has discussed the elements of the aesthetic experience of
the sublime in cinema.
2. This section title echoes Derrida (1984).
3. ‘Last man’ narratives have proven popular in film; Richard Matheson’s
novel I Am Legend has inspired adaptations like The Last Man on Earth
(1964), The Night of the Living Dead (1968), Omega Man (1971) and the
more recent I Am Legend (2007).
4. At the end of H. G. Wells’ Time Machine (1895), the expansion of the sun
causes the death of all life on Earth.
5. The film is The World, The Flesh, and the Devil (Ranald MacDougall 1959).
6. Apocalyptic movies (e.g. Before the Fall, 4:44 Last Day on Earth or
Melancholia) are centred on characters’ responses and actions to the
catastrophic destruction of civilisation or even the Earth itself, whether
due to nuclear war, biological catastrophe or planetary collision. Post-
apocalyptic movies (e.g. Hour of the Wolf, 28 Days Later or The Road),
focus on the aftermath of the apocalyptic event, how survivors struggle to
keep alive in a devastated and anarchic environment. Some films (2012, for
example) attempt to straddle both apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic
scenarios.
7. Given the global pandemic sweeping the world at the time of writing this
revised edition of my book, it is pertinent to mention the swathe of ‘viral
pandemic’ apocalyptic films that have emerged in recent years. These
include 28 Days Later (Boyle 2002), Contagion (Soderberg 2011), World
War Z (Foster 2013), Pandemic (Suits 2016) and Train to Busan (Yeon
Sang-ho 2016).
8. Schelling (1978 [1789]: 225) writes: ‘The work of art reflects to us the
identity of the conscious and unconscious activities’.
9. Like many recent movies, the rest of Melancholia was shot on high
definition digital video using an Arri Alexa camera.
10. The golf course at which the wedding reception is to be held has 18 holes
(as we are reminded twice in the film).
11. As Manohla Darghis (2011) remarks, the image could be a reference to
Isaiah 51:8: ‘For the moth shall eat them up like a garment, and the worm
shall eat them like wool: but my righteousness shall be for ever, and my
salvation from generation to generation’.
12. The arresting of movement via striking but static imagery coupled with
the use of evocative, expressive music in von Trier’s Prelude, as Grodal
remarks (2012: 48), has the effect of both arresting and stimulating
affective and emotional responsiveness: it ‘presses the accelerator and
touches the brake at the same time’.
358 Notes

13. See the essays in Hjort (2008) for discussions of von Trier’s game-playing
as an exemplary case of cinematic ‘creativity under constraint’. Elsaesser
(2015) also discussed Melancholia as a case of the philosophical-aesthetic
‘mind-game’ film.
14. Cf. ‘the danger in Melancholia – from a strange and difficult to detect
planet that may possibly destroy the Earth – fits perfectly into such a
system of obsessive-compulsive anxiety. The anxiety is linked to severe
panic by fundamental threats to bonding that will be clear in the rest of
the film (as OCD may reflect an insecure bonding in the past or in the
present)’ (Grodal 2012: 51).
15. Compare the very different depiction of the ‘end-of-the-world’ in McKay’s
Don’t Look Up (2021), which literally (and unironically) enacts the
‘pleasant family dinner with a few glasses of wine’ scenario that Justine so
mocks and despises.
16. The slogan ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of
capitalism’ is attributed to both Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Žižek (see
Fisher 2009). The argument as applied to film seems to be that it is easier
to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, ergo films
depicting the end of the world are really allegories of the end of capitalism.
A suggestive parallel, however, is different from a relationship of
implication.
17. Žižek (2012b: 273 ff.) discusses the fantasy situation of being in a position
to contemplate our own death or absence from the Earth.
18. My thanks to Magdalena Zolkos for her generous and helpful comments
on an earlier draft of this chapter.
19. Cf. von Trier’s remark: ‘If you ask me, she is longing for shipwrecks and
sudden death, as Tom Kristensen wrote. And she gets it, too. In a way, she
succeeds in pulling this planet from behind the sun and she surrenders to
it’. Melancholia Pressbook, p. 5. For such a critique, see Richard Brody
(2011); for a countering view, see Steve Williams (2011).

Chapter 12
1. Two recent forays into extending the ‘film as philosophy’ discussion to
documentary (focusing on The Act of Killing [Jagal] (Oppenheimer and
Anonymous, 2012) include Sinnerbrink (2016a: 165–184) and Wartenberg
(2017). See also Abbott 2019 and Chaudhuri 2014
2. Consider Deleuze’s prescient remark from the late 1980s: ‘The electronic
image, that is, the tele and video image, the numerical [i.e. digital – R. S.]
image coming into being, either had to transform cinema or to replace it,
to mark its death’ (1989: 265).
 Notes 359

3. As Carroll notes (2021), television serials typically come in three different

forms: the sequential narrative, a continuous story with a large cast of
characters unfolding over time with intersecting plot lines (The Crown,
Mad Men); the episodic narrative, featuring a small cast of central
characters who appear in different scenarios, often disconnected, each
episode (Jeeves and Wooster or Steptoe and Sons); the anthology series
comprising discrete standalone episodes with a different cast each episode
(Black Mirror, The Twilight Zone).
4. In what follows, I will often refer simply to ‘Black Mirror’ as a collective
title covering the various episodes included in the five series comprising it.
5. Elsaesser (2019) positions his intervention in the contemporary ‘film as
philosophy’ debate as both setting out to understand ‘the symptomatic
nature of the philosophical turn in film studies’ (2019: 21), and to explore
the idea of film as ‘thought experiment’ in a more ethico-politically
oriented sense than Anglo-American philosophers of film (like
Wartenberg). Indeed the European films on which Elsaesser focuses (by
Clare Denis, Aki Kaurismäki, Fatih Akin, Lars von Trier and Christian
Petzold) elaborate distinctive kinds of thought experiment that feature
both cinematic self-reflective and ethico-political dimensions.
6. Daily Mail Island is a satirical documentary-style account of a fake reality
TV show featuring middle-class progressives on a remote Welsh island.
Their only source of news and information is the British tabloid the Daily
Mail, and as a result they are soon comically transformed into
conservative bigots.
7. See Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s recent remarks comparing the secret use
of face-recognition technology to a real-life ‘Black Mirror’ situation: ‘This
is some real-life “Black Mirror” stuff that we’re seeing here’, she said. ‘And I
think it’s really important that everyone really understand what’s
happening because. . . this is happening secretly, as well’ (quoted in Houser
2020).
8. Di Summa (2019) makes the important point that Black Mirror does not
simply ‘mirror’ contemporary fears concerning the consequences of
technology or illustrate philosophical theories (whether from the
Frankfurt School or post-structuralist thinkers) that are critical of the
ideological uses of modern technology. Rather, she claims, the series
reflects upon the manner in which individual users are transformed by
their engagement with technology, and the manner in which the seductive
aesthetic, cognitive problem-solving and pleasurable uses of technology
are part of how it exercises its subjective and social effects. She argues that
it thereby offers a genuine case of ‘film as philosophy’ and points to the
forms of ‘pragmatic disillusionment’ that the series enacts; but she also
argues that it shows, in a ‘novel and aesthetically captivating’ manner, the
360 Notes

ambiguous character of modern technology – a point that chimes with my

‘Heideggerian’ claim that Black Mirror explores both the ‘dangers’ and the
‘saving power’ of modern (communicational, social, AI and VR)
technologies.
9. Jeff Minter (aka ‘Yak’), who plays author Jerome F. Davies, is a real-life
game designer and programmer who founded the company Llamasoft and
designed several important games during the 1980s.
10. See Ungureanu (2015) for an interesting discussion of ‘The National
Anthem’ focusing on the ‘artist’s violence’ and act of self-sacrifice analysed
from the perspective of Jean Baudrillard’s remarks on ‘spectacular terror’
and Walter Benjamin’s reflections on violence and technology.
11. See cf. Terri Murray’s (2013) discussion, for example, for a Frankfurt
School-style reading of ‘Fifteen Million Merits’, which overlooks this
‘performative’ aesthetic dimension of the episode. See di Summa (2019)
for a critique of Murray’s account. Nonetheless, it is difficult not to see the
episode as a whole as a critique of the co-opting of social and political
dissent into popular media entertainment.
12. This idea has recently been taken up in reality, as featured in a recent
Korean television documentary on the recreation of a virtual reality avatar
of a mother’s deceased daughter. See Hayden (2020).
13. The title ‘Men Against Fire’ refers to combat historian S. L. A. Marshall’s
non-fictional book of the same name and to Dave Grossman’s On Killing,
both of which were important sources for Brooker in writing the
screenplay for the episode.
14. See Livingston and Ponech (2016) for an excellent discussion of ‘twist
endings’ focusing on the case of Robert Enrico’s short film, La rivière du
hibou (1961), which is based on the Ambrose Bierce short story, ‘An
Occurrence at Owl Creek’.
15. See Sola and Martinez-Lucen (2016) for an illuminating analysis of ‘White
Bear’ focusing on the way in which it presents different aspects of the ‘social
imaginary’ of crime and punishment in contemporary Western societies.
16. See Sinnerbrink (2014a) for an exploration of the relationship between
Heidegger and cinema.

Conclusion
1. See, for example, Falzon 2013; Livingston 2019; McClelland 2011;
Wittusen 2016.
2. See Bogue (2002) and Gardner (2012) for discussions of Deleuze on
Beckett and television.
3. An idea that Davies (2019) has discussed recently.
 Filmography

4:44 Last Day on Earth (2011), [Film] Dir. Abel Ferrara, USA , Switzerland,
France: Fabula, Funny Balloons, Wild Bunch.
8 ½ (1963), [Film] Dir. Frederico Fellini, Italy and France: Cineriz, Fracinex.
28 Days Later (2002), [Film] Dir. Danny Boyle, UK : DNA Films, UK Film
Council.
300 (2007), [Film] Dir. Zack Snyder: USA : Legendary Pictures, Virtual Studios,
Atmosphere Entertainment.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), [Film] Dir. Stanley Kubrick, USA : Stanley
Kubrick Productions.
2012 (2009), [Film] Dir. Roland Emmerich, USA : Columbia Pictures,
Centropolis Entertainment.
Adam’s Rib (1944), [Film] Dir. George Cukor, USA : Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Adaptation (2002), [Film] Dir. Spike Jonze/Charlie Kaufman, USA : Sony
Pictures.
Alice in the Cities (1974), [Film] Dir. Wim Wenders, Germany : Axion Films.
Alien (1979), [Film] Dir. Ridley Scott, USA : Brandywine Productions.
Alien3 (1992), [Film] Dir. David Fincher, USA : Brandywine Productions.
Alien Resurrection (1997), [Film] Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet, USA : Twentieth
Century Fox, Brandywine Productions.
Aliens (1986), [Film] Dir. James Cameron, USA : Brandywine Productions.
All About Eve (1950), [Film], Dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, USA : 20th Century
Fox.
All About My Mother [Todo sobre mi madre] (1999), Dir. Pedro Almodóvar,
Spain: El Deseo, Renn Productions, France 2 Cinema.
Amélie (2001), [Film] Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet, France: UGC Productions,
UGC-Fox Distribution.
American Beauty (1999), [Film] Dir. Sam Mendes, USA : DreamWorks Pictures.
Anatomy of Hell [Anatomie de l’enfer] (2004), [Film] Dir. Catherine Breillat,
France: Canal+, CB Films, CNC .
Antichrist (2009), [Film] Dir. Lars von Trier, Denmark, France, Germany :
Zentropa Entertainments, arte France Cinéma, Canal+, Danmarks Radio.
Au hasard Balthazar (1966), [Film] Dir. Robert Bresson, France: Cinema Ventures.
The Awful Truth (1937), [Film] Dir. Leo McCarey, USA : Columbia Pictures.
Badiou (2018), [Film] Dir. Gorav Kalyan and Rohan Kalyan, USA and France:
Nonetheless Productions.
361
362 Filmography

Badlands (1973), [Film] Dir. Terrence Malick, USA : Warner Brothers.

Band of Ninja (1967), [Film/Animation] Dir. Nagisa Oshima, Japan: ATG .
Bande à part (1964), [Film] Dir. Jean-Luc Godard, France: Anouchka Films,
Orsay Films.
Beau travail (1999), [Film] Dir. Claire Denis, France: Pyramide Distribution.
Before the Fall (2008), [Film] Dir. F. Javier Gutierrez, Spain: Canal Sur
Television, Green Moon Productions, Maestranza Films.
Being-in-the-World (2010), [Film] Dir. Tao Ruspoli, USA : Mangusta Productions.
Bicycle Thieves [Ladri de biciclette] (1948), [Film] Dir. Vittorio de Sica, Italy :
Produzioni De Sica.
The Big Sleep (1946), [Film] Dir. Howard Hawks, USA : Warner Bros.
Black Mirror (2011–2019), [TV programme], Creator Charlie Brooker,
Channel 4 and Netflix, UK and USA : Zeppotron, House of Tomorrow.
Blade Runner (1982), [Film] Dir. Ridley Scott, USA : The Ladd Company, Slade
Brothers, Blade Runner Partnership.
Blue (1993), [Film] Dir. Derek Jarman, UK : Basilisk Communications Ltd.
Body Double (1984), [Film] Dir. Brian de Palma, USA : Delphi II Productions.
Breaking Bad (2008–2013), [TV programme] Creator Vince Gilligan, USA :
High Bridge Entertainment, Gran Via Productions, Sony Pictures Television.
Breaking the Waves (1996), [Film] Dir. Lars von Trier, Denmark, Sweden,
France, Netherlands: ARTE, Argus Films Produktie, Canal+.
Breathless [À bout de souffle] (1960), [Film] Dir. Jean-Luc Godard, France:
SNC .
Bringing Up Baby (1938), [Film] Dir. Howard Hawks, USA : RKO Radio
Pictures.
Caché [Hidden] (2006), [Film] Dir. Michael Haneke, France, Austria, Germany,
Italy: Les Films du Losange, Wega Films, Bavaria Films.
The Canterbury Tales [I raconti di Canterbury] (1972), [Film] Dir. Pier Paolo
Pasolini, Italy: Les Productions Artistes.
Carne y arena [Flesh and Sand] (2017), [VR Installation], Dir. Alejandro
González Iñárritu, USA : Legendary Pictures.
Carol (2015), [Film], Dir. Todd Haynes, USA : The Weinstein Company, Film 4,
Number 9 Films.
Carrie (1976), [Film], Dir. Brian de Palma, USA : Metro Goldwyn Mayer,
United Artists, Redbank Films.
Casablanca (1942), [Film] Dir. Michael Curtiz, USA : Warner Bros. Pictures.
Citizen Kane (1941), [Film], Dir. Orson Welles, USA : Mercury Productions.
City Lights (1931), [Film] Dir. Charlie Chaplin, USA : United Artists.
Contagion (2011), [Film] Dir. Stephen Soderbergh, USA : Participant Media,
Imagenation Abu Dhabi, Double Feature Films.
D’ailleur, Derrida [Derrida’s Elsewhere] (1999), [Film], Dir. Safaa Fathy, France:
Gloria Films.
 Filmography 363

Days of Heaven (1978), [Film] Dir. Terrence Malick, USA : Paramount Pictures.
Derrida (2002), [Film], Dir. Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, USA : Jane
Doe Films.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), [Film] Dir. Julian Schnabel, France,
USA : Canal+, Kennedy/Marshall Company, France 3 Cinéma.
Dogville (2003), [Film] Dir. Lars von Trier, Denmark, Netherlands, Sweden,
Germany: Zentropa Entertainments, Isabella Films B. V., Something
Else B. V.
Double Indemnity (1944), [Film] Dir. Billy Wilder, USA : Paramount Pictures.
Dr Strangelove (1964), [Film] Dir. Stanley Kubrick, USA : Columbia Pictures.
Duck Soup (1933), [Film] Dir. Leo McCarey, USA : Paramount Pictures.
Easy Rider (1969), [Film] Dir. Dennis Hopper, USA : Pando Company INC,
Raybert Productions.
Empire (1964), [Film] Dir. Andy Warhol, USA : Warhol Films.
Enter the Void (2009), [Film] Dir. Gaspar Noé, France, Germany, Italy : Fidélité
Films, Wild Bunch, Les Cinémas de la Zone.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) [Film] Dir. Michel Gondry, USA :
Anonymous Content/This Is That.
Europa ‘51 (1952), [Film] Dir. Roberto Rossellini, Italy : I.F.E. Releasing
Corporation.
Examined Life (2008), [Film] Dir. Astra Taylor, Canada: Sphinx Productions.
Fight Club (1999), [Film] Dir. David Fincher, USA : 20th Century Fox.
Finding Nemo (2003), [Animation] Dir. Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich,
USA : Pixar Walt Disney Films/Animation Studios.
Fitzcarraldo (1982), [Film] Dir. Werner Herzog, Werner Herzog
Filmproduktion, Filmverlag der Autoren.
The Five Obstructions (2003), [Film] Dir. Lars von Trier and Jorgen Leth,
Denmark: Zentropa Real ApS, Wajnbrosse Productions, Koch-Lorber
Films.
The Flicker (1965), [Film] Dir. Tony Conrad, USA : Tony Conrad.
The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003),
[Film] Dir. Errol Morris, USA : Sony Pictures Classics.
Freud: The Secret Passion (1962), [Film] Dir. John Huston, USA : Universal-
International.
Funny Games (1997), [Film] Dir. Michael Haneke, Austria: Österreicher
Rundfunk.
Funny Games (2007), [Film] Dir. Michael Haneke, USA, France, UK, Germany,
Italy: Celluloid Dreams, Tartan Films, Film4 Productions, Halcyon
Company.
Gaslight (1944), [Film] Dir. George Cukor, USA : Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Germany Year Zero (1948), [Film] Dir. Roberto Rossellini, Italy : Produzione
Salvo D’Angelo and Tevere Film.
364 Filmography

Ghost Dance (1983), [Film] Dir. Ken McMullen, West Germany, UK : Channel
Four Films, Channel Four Television, Looseyard Films.
The Great Dictator (1940), [Film] Dir. Charlie Chaplin, USA : United Artists.
Hannah Arendt (2012), [Film] Dir. Margarethe von Trotta, Germany,
Luxembourg, France, Israel: Heimatfilm, Amour Fou Luxembourg, MACT
Productions.
Happy Together/Buenos Aires Affair (1997), [Film] Dir. Wong Kar-wai, Hong
Kong: Kino International.
House of Cards (2013–2018), [TV programme] Creator Beau Willimon, USA :
Netflix.
The Hurt Locker (2008), [Film] Dir. Kathryn Bigelow, USA : Voltage Pictures,
Voltage Park Media, Film Capital Europe Funds.
In the Mood for Love (2000), [Film] Dir. Wong-Kar-wai, Hong Kong/China:
Jet Tone Productions, Paradis Films.
Inception (2010), [Film], Dir, Christopher Nolan, USA/UK : Legendary
Pictures, Syncopy.
Independence Day (1996), [Film] Dir. Roland Emmerich, USA : Centropolis
Entertainment.
Inland Empire (2006), [Film] Dir. David Lynch, France, Poland, USA : Absurda,
Studio Canal.
Irréversible (2002), [Film] Dir. Gaspar Noé, France: Le Cinémas de la Zone,
StudioCanal.
Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? (2014), [Film] Dir. Michael Gondry, France:
Partizan Films.
The Ister (2004), [Film] Dir. David Barison and Daniel Ross, Australia: Black
Box Sound and Image.
It Happened One Night (1934), [Film] Dir. Frank Capra, USA : Columbia
Pictures.
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975), [Film], Dir. Chantal
Akerman, Belgium/France: Paradise Films.
Journey to Italy [Viaggio in Italia] (1954), [Film] Dir. Roberto Rossellini, Italy :
Titanus Distribuzione.
Kiss Me Deadly (1955), [Film] Dir. Robert Aldrich, USA : Parklane Pictures.
La guerre est finie (1966), [Film] Dir. Alain Resnais, France: Europa Film,
Sofracima.
La jetée (1962), [Film] Dir. Chris Marker, France: Argos Films.
The Lady Eve (1941) Dir. Preston Sturges, USA : Paul Jones, Buddy G DeSylva/
Paramount Pictures.
The Lady in the Lake (1946), [Film] Dir. Robert Montgomery, USA : Metro-
Goldwyn-Mayer.
The Last Man on Earth (1964), [Film] Dir. Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow,
USA, Italy: Associated Producers Inc. Produzioni La Regina.
 Filmography 365

Last Night (1998), [Film] Dir. Don McKellar, Canada: Alliance Atlantis, Odeon
Films.
The Last Sunset (1961), [Film] Dir. Robert Aldrich, USA : Brynapod.
Last Year at Marienbad (1966), [Film] Dir. Alain Resnais, France, Italy : Cocinor.
Le Quattro Volte (2010), [Film] Dir. Michelangelo Frammartino, Italy, Germany,
Switzerland: Invisible Film, Ventura Film, Vivo Film.
Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), [Film] Dir. Max Ophüls, USA :
Rampart Productions.
Letter to Jane (1972), [Film] Dir. Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin,
France.
Love Actually (2003), [Film], Dir. Richard Curtis, UK : StudioCanal, Working
Title Films, DNA Films.
Magnolia (1999), [Film] Dir. P. T. Anderson, USA : Ghoulardi Film Company,
JoAnne Sellar Productions.
The Maltese Falcon (1941), [Film] Dir. John Huston, USA : Warner Bros.
Meek’s Cutoff (2010), [Film] Dir. Kelly Reichardt, USA : Evenstar Films,
Oscilloscope Laboratories.
Melancholia (2011), [Film] Dir. Lars von Trier, Denmark, Sweden, France,
Germany: Zentropa Entertainments, Memfis Films, Slot Machine, Liberator
Productions.
Memento (2000), [Film] Dir. Christopher Nolan, USA : Summit Entertainment
Team Tod.
Memoria (2021), [Film] Dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Columbia, Thailand,
Germany, France, Mexico: 165 Films, Anna Sanders Films, Beijing
Contemporary Art Foundation.
Minority Report (2002), [Film] Dir. Steven Spielberg, USA : Twentieth-Century
Fox, DreamWorks Pictures, Amblin Entertainment.
Miracle Mile (1988), [Film] Dir. Steve de Jarnatt, USA : Miracle Mile
Productions.
Mirror [Zerkalo] (1979), [Film] Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, Russia: Mosfilm.
Mission: Impossible (1996), [Film] Dir. Brian de Palma, USA : Cruise/Wagner
Productions.
Modern Times (1936), [Film] Dir. Charlie Chaplin, USA : United Artists.
Mouchette (1967), [Film] Dir. Robert Bresson, France: Anatole Dauman.
Mulholland Drive (2001), [Film] Dir. David Lynch, USA/France: Les Films
Alain Sarde, Asymmetrical Productions, Babbo Inc, Canal+, The Picture
Factory.
My Own Private Idaho (1991), [Film] Dir. Gus van Sant, USA : Laurie Parker,
Fine Line Pictures.
The Night of the Living Dead (1968), [Film] Dir. George A. Romero, USA :
Image Ten.
Nightwatching (2007), [Film] Dir. Peter Greenaway, UK : Kees Kasander.
366 Filmography

North by Northwest (1959), [Film] Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, USA : Metro-

Goldwyn-Mayer.
Notorious (1946), [Film] Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, USA : RKO Radio
Pictures.
Now, Voyager (1942), [Film] Dir. Irving Rapper, USA : Warner Bros.
Nymphomaniac (2014), [Film] Dir. Lars von Trier, Denmark, Germany, France,
Belgium: Zentropa Entertainments, Slot Machine, Caviar Films, Zenbelgie,
arte France Cinéma.
October: Ten Days that Shook the World (1928), [Film] Dir. Sergei Eisenstein,
USSR : Sovkino (USSR), Amkino Corporation (US).
Omega Man (1971), [Film] Dir. Boris Sagal, USA : Walter Seltzer Productions.
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), [Film] Dir. Sergio Leone, Italy : Euro
International Films (Italy), Paramount Pictures (USA).
One Second in Montreal (1969), [Film] Dir. Michael Snow, USA .
Paisan [Paisà] (1946), [Film], Dir. Roberto Rossellini, Italy : Arthur Mayer and
Joseph Burstyn, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Pandemic (2016), [Film] Dir. John Suits, USA : New Arts Alliance.
Parasite (2019), [Film] Dir. Bong Joon-ho, South Korea: Barunson E&A,
CJ Entertainment.
The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), [Film] Dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer, France:
Société Générale des Films.
Persona (1966), [Film] Dir. Ingmar Bergman, Sweden: AB Svensk Film
Industry.
The Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema (2006), [Film] Dir. Sophie Fiennes, UK,
Austria, Netherlands: Amoeba Films, Kasander Film Company, Lone Star
Productions.
The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012), [Film] Dir. Sophie Fiennes, UK, Ireland:
Blinder Films, British Film Institute (BFI), Filmfour.
The Philadelphia Story (1940), [Film] Dir. George Cukor, USA : Metro-
Goldwyn-Mayer.
The Piano Teacher (2001), [Film] Dir. Michael Haneke, France, Austria,
Germany: arte France Cinéma, Bavaria Film International, Bayerischer
Rundfunk.
Pickpocket (1959), [Film] Dir. Robert Bresson, France: Agnès Delahaie.
Poetic Justice (1972), [Film] Dir. Hollis Frampton, USA .
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), [Film] Dir. Céline Sciamma, France: Lilies
Films, Arte, Hold Up Films.
Psycho (1960), [Film] Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, USA : Paramount Pictures.
Psycho (1998), [Film] Dir. Gus van Sant, USA : Universal Pictures.
The Quiet Earth (1985), [Film] Dir. Geoff Murphy, New Zealand: Sam Pillsbury,
Don Reynolds.
Rashomon (1950), [Film] Dir. Akira Kurosawa, Japan: Daiei Film.
 Filmography 367

Read My Lips [Sur mes lèvres] (2001), [Film] Dir. Jacques Audiard, France:
SEDIF, Cine B, Pathe Image.
Rear Window (1954), [Film] Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, USA : Patron Inc.
Reservoir Dogs (1992), [Film] Dir. Quentin Tarantino, USA : Miramax Films.
The Road (2009), [Film] Dir. John Hillcoat, USA : Dimension Films.
Roma (2018), [Film], Dir. Alfonso Cuáron, Mexico: Espectáculos Fílmicos El,
Coyúl, Netflix.
Romance (1999), [Film] Dir. Catherine Breillat, France: Rezo Pictures, Trimark
Films.
Rome Open City [Roma città aperta] (1945), Dir. Roberto Rossellini, Italy :
Minerva Italy, Joseph Burstyn and Alfred Mayer.
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), [Film] Dir. Wes Anderson, USA : Touchstone
Pictures, American Empirical Pictures.
Rules of the Game (1939), [Film] Dir. Jean Renoir, France: Nouvelle Édition
Française.
Russian Ark (2002), [Film] Dir. Alexandre Sokurov, Russia: Seville Pictures.
Shirin (2008) [Film] Dir. Abbas Kiarostami: Iran: Abbas Kiarostami
Productions.
A Short Film About Love (1988), [Film] Dir. Krzysztof Kieślowski, Poland:
Zespol Filmowy ‘Tor’.
The Silence of the Lambs, (1991), [Film] Dir. Jonathan Demme, USA : Strong
Heart Productions.
The Sixth Sense (1999), [Film] Dir. M. Night Shyamalan, USA : Hollywood
Pictures, Spyglass Entertainment.
Solaris (1972), [Film] Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union: Mosfilm.
The Sopranos (1999–2007), [TV programme] Creator David Chase, USA :
Chase Films, Brad Grey Television, HBO Entertainments.
Stage Fright (1950), [Film] Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, USA : Transatlantic Pictures.
Stella Dallas (1937), [Film] Dir. King Vidor, USA : Samuel Goldwyn
Productions.
Stromboli (1950), [Film] Dir. Roberto Rossellini, Italy and USA : Berit Films,
RKO Radio Pictures.
Sullivan’s Travels (1941), [Film] Dir. Preston Sturges, USA : Paramount
Pictures.
Summer with Monika [Sommaren med Monika] (1953), [Film] Dir. Ingmar
Bergman, Sweden: Allan Ekelund.
Sunset Boulevard (1950), [Film] Dir. Billy Wilder, USA : Paramount Pictures.
Take Shelter (2011), [Film] Dir. Jeff Nichols, USA : Hydraulx Entertainment, Rei
Capital, Grove Hill Productions.
That Obscure Object of Desire [Cet obscur objet du désir] (1977) [Film], Dir.
Luis Buñuel, Spain/France: Greenwich Film Productions, Les Films Galaxie,
InCine.
368 Filmography

The Thin Blue Line (1988), [Film] Dir. Errol Morris, USA : Miramax Films.
The Thin Red Line (1998), [Film] Dir. Terrence Malick, USA : Fox 2000,
Phoenix Pictures.
Three Crowns of the Sailor [Les trois couronnes du matelot] (1988), [Film] Dir.
Raul Ruiz, France: Paolo Branco.
Time of the Wolf (2003), [Film] Dir. Michael Haneke, France, Germany, Austria:
arte France Cinema, Bavarian Film, Canal+.
Tokyo Story (1953), [Film] Dir. Yasujiro Ozu, Japan: Shochiku.
Train to Busan (2016), [Film] Dir. Yeon Sang-ho, South Korea: Next
Entertainment World, RedPeter Film.
Transformers: The Last Knight (2017), [Film] Dir. Michael Bay, USA : Hasbro
Films, Di Bonaventura Pictures, Paramount Pictures.
Trouble Every Day (2001), [Film], Dir. Claire Denis, France: arte France
Cinema, Canal+.
The Turin Horse (2011), [Film] Dir. Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitsky, Hungary :
T. T. Filmműhely.
Umberto D. (1952), [Film] Dir. Vittorio de Sica, Italy : Dear Film.
Un Chien Andalou (1928), [Film] Dir. Luis Buñuel, France.
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), [Film] Dir. Apichatpong
Weerasethakul, Thailand, UK, France: Kick the Machine, Illumination
Films, Anna Sanders Films.
The Unknown (1927), [Film] Dir. Tod Browning, USA : Metro-Goldwyn-
Mayer.
The Usual Suspects (1995), [Film] Dir. Bryan Singer, USA : PolyGram Filmed
Entertainment, Bad Hat Harry Films.
Vertigo (1958) [Film] Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, USA : Paramount Pictures.
Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux (1962), [Film] Dir. Jean-Luc Godard,
France: Pierre Braunberger.
Waking Life (2001), [Film] Dir. Richard Linklater, USA : Fox Searchlight
Pictures, Independent Film Channel (IFC), Thousand Words.
When Worlds Collide (1951), [Film] Dir. Rudolf Maté, USA : Paramount
Pictures.
Winter Light [Nattvardsgästerna] (1963), [Film] Dir. Ingmar Bergman, Sweden:
Allan Ekelund.
The Wire (2002–2008), [TV programme], Creator David Simon, USA : Blown
Deadline Productions, HBO Entertainments.
Wittgenstein (1993), [Film] Dir. Derek Jarman, UK, Japan: CBFI, Channel 4,
Bandung Productions.
The Wizard of Oz (1939) [Film] Dir. Victor Fleming, USA : Metro-Goldwyn-
Mayer.
The World, The Flesh, and the Devil (1959), [Film] Dir. Ranald MacDougall,
USA : Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
 Filmography 369

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 Index

Abbott, Mathew 230 Akerman, Chantal 343 n.2

Abell, Catherine 53, 54 Alice in the Cities 158
acting 99, 180, 256 Alien 13, 77, 202, 203, 206, 350 n.1,
screen versus theatrical 179–180 350 n.2
action-image (Deleuze) 147–152, 153–55, Alien Resurrection 202
166, 167, 348 n.2 Alien3 202
crisis of 148–9, 153–5 Aliens 202
Adam’s Rib 185 All About Eve 82, 179
Adaptation 83, 325 All About My Mother 98, 103, 106
Adorno, Theodor and Horkheimer, Max Allen, Richard 12, 19
311 Allen, Richard and Smith, Murray 225,
aesthetics 9–10, 12, 13, 16, 18, 30, 38, 40, 334, 339 n.3, 341 n.5
113, 114, 168, 199, 201, 203, Almodóvar, Pedro 98, 101, 103, 111
232, 301 Altman, Robert 151
analytic 66, 120, 122, 223 Amelie 79
digital 41 American Beauty 79, 147
eco- 299 American Dream 149, 151
film 55, 56, 92 role in crisis of action-image 151
Hegel’s 300 Anatomy of Hell 345 n.5
of mood 279, 280, 294 Anderson, J. D. 12
naturalised 223 Anderson, P. T. 79, 80
of touch 121 Andrew, J. D. 118, 346 n.3
affect 6, 15, 16, 71, 74, 103–5, 115, 147, animation 32, 40, 46, 49, 52, 58, 59, 60,
149, 159, 160, 162, 165, 193, 288 118, 146
affect theory 119–121 compared with film 40
Brinkema 135–6 Antichrist 228, 284, 288, 289, 290
Carol 193 Antonioni, Michelangelo 117, 250
cognitivism 90, 334 Aristotle 56, 70, 204, 324
Deleuze 134–5, 147, 159, 160, 162, Arnheim, Rudolf 6, 9, 22, 41, 49, 51, 52,
165, 288, 297 54 ff.
feminist film theory 346 n.7 Artaud, Antonin 131, 159, 161, 162
Grodal 288, 289 Au hasard Balthazar 166
phenomenology 126, 132, 134, 135, Audiard, Jacques 342 n.5
137, 230 Authorship 3, 15, 27, 66, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78,
affection-image (Deleuze) 147, 166 83, 89, 93, 344 n.5, 344 n.7
Agamben, Giorgio 21, 283, 299 cinematic 74–78

401
402 Index

The Awful Truth 185 Bolton, Lucy 226, 230

Bordwell, David 4, 12, 15, 19, 22, 25, 33,
Backman Rogers, Anna and Mulvey, 38, 66, 67, 71, 72, , 73, 80, 84,
Laura 229 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 113, 129, 141,
Badiou, Alain 8, 21, 256 216, 217, 218, 220, 221, 225,
Badiou 256 230, 339 n.4, 340 n.3, 340 n.4,
Badlands 158 345 n.3
Band of Ninja 47 Botz-Bornstein, Thorsten 10
Barker, Jennifer 120, 126, 230 Bradshaw, Peter 238
Barthes, Roland 35, 256, 264, 277, brain 57, 131, 134, 138, 160, 332, 343 n.15
340 n.1, 348 n.16, 349 n.8 Branigan, Edward 66, 78, 129
Baudry, Jean-Louis 30, 93, 225, 340 n.1 Breillat, Catherine 354
Bazin, André 3, 6, 9, 22, 42, 54 ff., 153, Bowie, Andrew 354 n.4
174, 176, 178, 180, 182, 331, Brinkema, Eugenie 120, 135–6
346 n.3 Breaking Bad 251, 304
Beau Travail 37 Breaking the Waves 285
Being John Malkovich 250 Breathless [Á bout de soufflé] 37, 158
belief 16, 68, 71, 100, 101–3, 267, 296, 348, Bresson, Robert 166
350 n.10, 351, Bringing Up Baby 185
in the world 162–4, 168, 169, 172, 173, Brown, William 5, 7, 8, 13, 229, 230,
282, 348 n.6 349 n.13
Deleuze on 142, 150, 154, 158, 162–4, Browning, Tod 166
168, 169, 172, 173, 282, 348 n.6 Bruzzi, Stella 275, 356 n.18
Cavell on 194, 195, 350 Buckland, Warren 8, 66, 68, 73
Benjamin, Walter 10, 164, 301 Buñuel, Luis 74, 108
Bergman, Ingmar 76, 77, 208–9, 210, 213, Butler, Judith 275, 356 n. 18, 356 n. 19
214, 250, 351 n.6, 352 n.11
Bergson, Henri 1, 49, 131, 134, 142, 143, Caché [Hidden] 71
144, 145, 146, 147, 156, 157, Cameron, James 202
343 n.12, 348 n.3 The Canterbury Tales 83
Deleuze on 142–147, 156, 157 Carel, Havi 339 n.3, 343 n.18
Bernstein, J. M. 170 Carne y Arena [Flesh and Sand] 344 n.10
Bersani, Leo and Dutoit, Ulysse 5 Carol 172, 188–194
Bicycle Thieves 158, 241 Carrie 101
The Big Sleep 180 Carroll, Noël 4, 7, 12, 15, 19, 22–33, 34,
Black Mirror 17, 66, 250, 252, 253, 305 35, 36, 38, 40–45, 47, 49, 50, 53,
ff., 333, 335, 359 n.3, 359 n. 4, 55, 57, 59, 66, 68, 69, 70–72, ,
359 n.7, 359 n.8, 360 n.8 78, 86–7, 91, 93, 99, 100, 102,
as televisual philosophy 325–7 105, 107, 109, 112–13, 141,
Blade Runner 13, 42, 250 146, 177, 179, 216–8, 220–2,
Blue 47, 48, 51, 341 n. 7 225, 230, 288, 303, 331–2, 334,
Body Double 70, 80, 342 n.5 334, 339 n.2, 339 n.3, 340 n.1,
Bogue, Ronald 360 n.2 342 n.9, 342 n.12, 345 n.4,
Boljkovac, Nadine 13, 135, 229 359 n.3
 Index 403

critique of ‘Grand Theory’ 22, 23–29 Bordwell’s 95 ff.

erotetic model of narrative 70–72 contemporary 112 ff.
medium essentialism 30 ff. critiques of ‘Grand Theory’ 23 ff.
ontology of the moving image 40–50 critique of ‘identification’ 93 ff.
philosophical turn in film theory 7 dialectical (Carroll) 19, 29–34
post-theory 12 Melancholia (Grodal) 287–91
Casablanca 44, 180 moderate 102
Casebier, Allan 2, 118, 119, 345 n.2, phenomenology and 137 ff.
346 n.3 pluralist 57 ff.
Cavell, Stanley 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 13, 16, reductionism 115–6
22, 32, 56, 90, 11, 130, 141, 142, Colman, Felicity 6, 13, 339 n.3
159, 163, 165, 168, 171 ff., 188– Comolli, Jean-Louis 225
194, 199, 201, 202, 203, 216, Comolli, Jean-Louis and Narbone, Jean
219, 220, 222, 228, 230, 231, 225
249, 250, 251, 331, 332, 333, Constable, Catherine 210, 255
335, 340 n.5, 341 n.3, 348 n.1, Contagion 357 n.7
349 n.1, 349 n.2, , 350 n.11 Cooper, Sarah 226, 230m 258, 353 n.1
Carol 184 ff. Coplan, Amy 104, 110, 115
end of film 194–197 Crawford, Joan 179
moral perfectionism 182–4 Creepers [Phenomena] 345 n.4
ontology of film 174–8 Critchley, Simon 19, 210, 284
remarriage comedy 185–8 Cubitt, Sean 228, 343 n.16
scepticism 173–4 Cull Ó Maoilearca, Laura and Lagaay,
Chamarette, Jenny 120, 121, 230 Alice 254 n.4
Chaplin, Charlie 76, 181 Cukor, George 186
character engagement 15, 66, 89, 92, 104, Cunliffe, Zoe 229
109, 345 n.6 Currie, Gregory 12, 35, 36, 38, 49, 50, 61,
structures of sympathy (Smith) 108–9 81, 91, 93, 94, 95, 100, 146
Chatman, Seymour 66, 75, 79
Choi, Jinhee and Frey, Matthias 226, 228, D’ailleur, Derrida [Derrida’s Elsewhere]
229 16, 250, 252, 256–8, 260, 270 ff.,
Cholodenko, Alan 40, 59 272, 356 n.17
cinematic thinking 249–253, 258, 266, D’Aloia, Adriano and Eugeni, Ruggero
270, 273, 276, 277, 304, 329, 113
330, 336–8, 353 n.14 Daniel, Adam 84, 85, 344 n.10
Citizen Kane 76, 86, 95, 96, 97, 158 Danto, Arthur C. 6, 9, 41, 44, 47
City Lights 76 Davies, David 201, 210, 215, 304, 360
Clewis, Robert 210 Davis, Bette 82, 179–180
Coëgnarts, Maarten and Kravanja, Peter Days of Heaven 74, 81
38, 92, 112, 116 De Palma, Brian 70, 80, 101, 203, 342 n.5
Coëgnarts, Maarten 116 De Roo, Ludo 348 n.17
cognitive closure 73, 252 De Sousa, Ronald 105
cognitivism 5, 8, 15, 90 ff., 280, 287 ff. Deamer, David 142, 229, 248 n.2
aesthetic 337 Debord, Guy 305
404 Index

Del Rio, Elena 13, 112, 135, 229, 349 n.13 Double Indemnity 35, 79
Deleuze, Gilles 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, Dr Strangelove 195
14, 16, 21, 35, 49, , 56, 57, Dreyer, Carl Theodor 74, 166
74, 90, 130, 132, 141 ff., 172, Duck Soup 1 78
194–97, 199, 201, 216, 217, 219, Dulac, Germaine 131
220, 222, 230, 231, 249, 282, Dutoit, Ulysse 5
288, 319, 331, 332, 333, 335,
340 n.11, 340 n.1, , 343 n.14. Easy Rider 158
343–49, 349 n.3, 350 n.12, 8 ½ 37, 80
358 n.2 Eisenstein, Sergei 6, 130, 159, 160, 161
belief in the world 162–65 Elsaesser, Thomas 3, 4, 5, 21, 38, 66, 172,
Bergson 143–46 173, 199, 225, 231, 290, 304,
Cavell 194–97 339 n.3, 358 n.13, 359 n.5
cine-philosophy 142 ff. Emerson, Ralph Waldo 181, 182, 184,
crisis of action-image 148–52 185, 187
critiques of 168–170 Emersonian perfectionism 184
movement-image 155–59 Empire 204, 324
neo-realism 152–55 Enter the Void 347 n.12
time-image 159–62 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
thought 159–62 76,204, 250, 324, 325
Demme, Jonathan 45 ethics 3, 8, 10, 14, 16, 90, 113, 141, 163,
Denis, Claire 37, 345 n.5, 354, 359 n.5 164, 172, 220, 225 ff., 231 ff.,
Derrida, Jacques 16, 255 ff., 262, 263 249, 253, 258, 308, 312, 318,
Derrida (documentary) 16, 250 252, 260, 231, 332, 353n.1
261, 263 ff., 289 ff. Melancholia 294 ff.
Derrida’s Elsewhere [D’ailleurs, Derrida] Roma 233 ff.
(documentary) 16, 250, 252, Europa ’51 152 155
260, 270 ff. Examined Life 260
desire, unconscious 22, 24, 30, 34, 92, 122
Di Summa, Laura 308, 316, 339 n.3, Falzon, Chris 340 n.4, 360 n.1
359 n.8, 360 n.11 feeling 104–5, 107, 136, 147, 192, 252, 338
Dick, Kirby and Kofman, Amy Ziering Fellini, Frederico 37, 80, 237
258, 260, 262, 264, 270, 273, feminist theory 7, 24, 26
275, 276, 354 n.2, 354 n.4, Ferencz-Flatz, Christian and Hanich,
355 n.8, Julian 117, 118, 120, 121, 346 n.3
digital images 40, 41, 57 ff., 58–63, 331, fiction, paradox of 98 ff., 102–3
332, 339 n.2, 348 n.4 Fight Club 79, 80
definition of 58–60 film as philosophy 3, 4, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16,
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly 347 n.12 56, 90, 199, 20, 201 ff, 211, 255
Do the Right Thing 77 ff. 258, 259, 303, 304, 323 326,
Dogville 285 329, 330, 336, 337, 339 n.1,
Don’t Look Up 282, 358 n.15 339 n.6, 351 n.9, 352 n.10,
Downing, Lisa and Saxton, Libby 226, 352 n.14. 353 n.1, 359 n.5.
228 359 n.8
 Index 405

Bergman 208–9 Flory, Dan 226

Black Mirror 323 ff. The Fog of War 76, 342 n.5
bold thesis 204 ff., 215 formalism 23–4, 28 ff., 125
moderate thesis 208 ff. 4:44 Last Day of Earth 281, 357 n.6
cinematic thinking 215 Frampton, Daniel 5, 7, 72, 130–33, 135,
defences of 211 ff. 137, 200, 201, 339 n.3, 341 n.4.
Derrida documentaries 255–58 344 n.6, 347 n.13
Elsaesser 359 n.5 filmind 130–33
idea of 201–4 Freeland, Cynthia 357 n.1
Livingston’s critique of 205–8 Freud, Sigmund 12, 100, 116, 182, 210,
Rodowick 216 ff., 223–24, 250 292, 345 n.16
Smuts 211–12, 213, 214 melancholia 292
Terrence Malick 210 Freud 1 18
film/mind analogy 52, 122, 128, 342 n.11, Funny Games [1997/2007] 83
342 n.12 Furstenau, Marc and MacAvoy, Leslie 210
filmind 130 ff. 135, 347 n.13
Filmosophy 10, 132, 339 n.3, 347 n. 15 Gadamer. Hans-Georg 34
film-philosophy 141, 170, 172, 196, Gallagher, Shaun and Zahavi, Dan 116
197, 200, 201, 204, 210, 212, Gaslight 186
214, 222, 224, 226, 229, 230, Gaut, Berys 22, 27, 32, 40, 41, 53, 57,
231, 249, 250, 252, 257, 261, 59–60, 63, 66, 71, 75, 76–7,
279, 274, 276, 277, 329, 334, 79, 80, 96–8, 105, 107, 146,
337, 339 n.3, 340 n7, 348 n.1, 331, 339 n.2, 340 n.8, 343 n.3,
349 n.13 344 n.8
cultural politics 334–36 authorship 76–7
Derrida documentaries 255 ff. critique of Bordwell 96–8
future of 330–33 digital images 59–60
Rodowick 216 ff. identification 107
romantic 340 n.10 genre 3, 4, 13, 15, 16, 28, 33, 34, 40, 55, 56,
critique of (Wittusen) 352 n.14 60, 67, 68, 75, 76, , 92, 103, , 104,
film criticism 16, 26–27, 34, 54, 56 109, 114, 148, 149, 152, 172,
philosophical 16, 54, 56, 197, 211, 249, 180ff., 202, 203, 241, 250, 251,
349 n.2, 349 n.14 252, 253, 260, 265, 292, 293,
criticism of 349 n.14 303, 304, 306 341 n.9, 350 n.1
film, ontology of 3, 16, 26, 41, 42, 1, 55, Cavell on 180 ff., 184, 185, 187, 188,
89, 331 189, 194, 195, 196
Fincher, David 79, 80, 202 Germany Year Zero 152, 155
Finding Nemo 76 Ghost Dance 260 ff., 263, 265
Fisher, Mark 358 n.16 Derrida, Jacques 265, 273, 354 n.2
Fitzcarraldo 228 film and philosophy 274
The Five Obstructions 213, 324 Godard, Jean-Luc 178, 210, 250, 349 n.12,
Flaxman, Gregg 12 236, 340 n.1 354 n.2, 354 n.7
The Flicker 204, 324 Gondry, Michel 76, 204, 259, 260
flicker fusion threshold 42, 342 n.7 Goodenough, Jerry 264, 354 n.2
406 Index

Goodenough, Jerry and Read, Rupert Hume 70

230, 255, 339 n.3 The Hurt Locker 229
Grand Theory 4, 12, 14, 15, 19, 20, 22, 39,
89, 92, 97, 114, 122, 211 ff., 216, identification 15, 35, 65, 66, 92, 196, 108,
229, 331, 333 155, 225, 226
critique of 7, 23–5, 211, 334, 341 n.5 identification, critique of 93–4
Carroll’s criticisms of 25 ff. Gaut’s critique of Carroll 107
The Great Dictator 76 Ideology 9, 22, 23, 24, 26, 33, 37, 96, 113,
Greenaway, Peter 53 114, 164, 228, 229, 256, 333,
grief 68, 99, 101, 102, 136, 296, 317 334, 336
Grodal, Torben 14, 84, 104, 110, 113, 114, In the Mood for Love 37, 111
145, 280, 341 n.9, 344 n.8 Inarittu, Alejandro Gonzalez 344 n.10,
Melancholia 287–291, 357 n.12, 354
358 n.14 Ince, Kate 120, 226, 228, 230
Grønstad, Asbjørn 226 Inception 106
Independence Day 282
Hadot, Pierre 183 Inland Empire 80, 108, 325
Hanich, Julian 104, 117, 118, 120, 121, Irréversible 345 n.5
136, 138, 346 n.3, 346 n.8, Is the Man Who is Tall Happy? 260
347 n.10, 347 n.11, 348 n.16 The Ister 260
Brinkema 136, 138 It Happened One Night 185
Hannah Arendt 256
Hansen, Mark B. 84, 343 n.16 Jameson, Frederic 151, 243, 358 n.16
Happy Together/Buenos Aires Affair Jarman, Derek 31, 47, 207, 256, 260,
345 n.7 341 n.7
Heath, Stephen 225, 334, 340 n.1 Jarvie, Ian 340 n.9
Hegel, G.W.F. 176, 266, 300 Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du commerce,
Heidegger, Martin 1, 10, 13, 118, 119, 120, 1080 Bruxelles 343 n.3
121, 129, 134, 161, 176, 177, Jeunet, Jean-Pierre 79, 202
210, 346 n.5, 355 n.11, 360 n.16 Jonze, Spike 83
hermeneutics 20, 22, 25, 26, 33 Journey to Italy [Viaggio in Italia] 152,
hermeneutic approaches 67, 76, 82, 96, 155
97, 101, 113, 120, 121, 126,
128, 129, 132, 214, 217, 219, Kamuf, Peggy 356 n.15
347 n.14, 348 n.16, 352 n.14 Kania, Andrew 68, 344 n.8
versus explanatory approaches 33–4 Karina, Anna ix
Herzogenrath, Bernd 6, 339 n.6 Kar-Wai, Wong 37, 111, 345 n.7, 354
historical poetics 68, 78, 98, 344 n.1 Kaufman, Charlie 36, 83
Hitchcock, Alfred 76, 78, 79, 81, 148, 154 Kawin, Bruce 131
Hjort, Mette 213, 290, 358 n.13 Keane, Marian 142
Horeck, Tanya and Kendall, Tina 228 Kiarostami, Abbas 37
House of Cards 178, 304 Kieslowski, Krzysztof 342 n.5
horror 44, 99, 101, 108, 120, 202, 251, 253, Kiss Me Deadly 195
295, 304, 305, 307, 312 Klevan, Andrew 349 n.2, 349 n.5
 Index 407

Kovács, András Bálint 213, 349 n.11 The Maltese Falcon 180
Kristeva, Julia 340 n.11 Mankiewicz, Joseph L. 82
Kubrick, Stanley 80, 195 Manovich, Lev 40, 59, 343 n.16
Kung, Peter 324 Marker, Chris 47, 48, 342 n.10
Kurosawa, Akira 1, 97, 350 n.2 Marks, Laura U. 120, 126, 135, 230,
349 n.13
La Caze, Marguerite 270, 271, 355 n.13, Marrati, Paola 167, 168
356 n.16 Marriage 185, 186, 187, 189, 190, 194
La guerre est finie 72 film and philosophy 200, 208, 224,
La Jeteé 47–48, 342 n.10 264, 287
Lacan, Jacques 12, 23, 34, 37, 93 ff., 96, Martin, Adrian 21, 307
116, 122, 231 Martin, Brigid 348 n.17
critiques of 93ff. Martin-Jones, David 5, 13, 159, 230, 232,
mirror stage 37 336, 349 n.13
unconscious 116 McClelland, Tom 201, 360 n.1
The Lady Eve 42, 185 McGregor, Rafe 40, 41, 57–63, 339 n.2,
The Lady in the Lake 128, 129, 130, 348 n.5
347 n.10, 347 n.12 McIver Lopes, Dominic 53, 54, 344 n.8
Laine, Tarja 8, 104, 110, 120, 121, 126, medium of film 9, 26, 32, 33, 39, 52, 55,
230, 345 n.6 174, 179, 180, 181, 195, 206,
LaRocca, David 5, 230 207, 262
Lash, Dominic 136 Melancholia 16, 250, 279 ff., 357–8
The Last Man on Earth 357 n.3 cinematic ethics 294–302
Last Night 251 Grodal 287–291
The Last Sunset 345 n.7 Freudian 292–3
Last Year at Marienbad 72, 285 Read 298–9
Latour, Bruno 2 80, 302 Shaviro 299–300
Le Quattro Volte 114 Memento 68, 71, 250
Letter from an Unknown Woman 186 Memoria 92, 114
Letter to Jane 4 7 Mendes, Sam 147
Livingston, Paisley 10, 19, 76200, 202, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 1, 2, 8, 51, 118,
203, 205–9, 210, 212, 213, 214, 119, 120, 212, 122, 123, 124,
255, 261, 324, 339 n.3, 351 n.6, 346 n.3
351 n.9, 351 n.10, 360 n.14 Metaphysics 10, 206
critique of ‘bold’ film as philosophy Bergsonian 142, 143, 145
thesis 205–9 Metz, Christian 22, 30, 34, 67, 80, 93, 100,
objections to 209–10 216, 340 n.1, 346 n.3
Loht, Shawn 201, 339 n.3 mind-game film 304, 358 n.13
Love Actually 114 Minority Report 13, 202
Lübecker, Nikolaj 229 Miracle Mile 281
Lynch, David 41, 45 Mirror [Zerkalo] 74
misogyny 239, 290
Magnolia 79, 80 Mission: Impossible 13, 203, 250, 350 n.1
Malick, Terrence 210, 250 Mitchell, W.J.T 58, 60
408 Index

Modern Times 76, 204, 228, 324 Nancy, Jean-Luc and Lacoue-Labarthe,
mood 72, 101, 104, 109–112, 115, 116, Philippe 284
136, 181, 193, 280, 284, 285, Nannicelli, Ted and Taberham, Paul 3,
286, 290, 291, 293, 350 n.10 5, 37, 38, 41, 42, 112, 113, 221,
human versus art 136 222, 230, 303
Melancholia 294–300 narrative 3, 10, 15, 16, 24, 27, 30, 33, 36,
Morin, Edgar 6, 74 37, 28, 40, 45, 47, 52, 55, 56, 60,
Morris, Errol 76, 228 63, 66ff., 89, 90, 92, 95, 96, 101,
Mouchette 74 103, 104, 115, 124, 127, 131,
movement 1, 5, 16, 31, 40, 46, 47, 48, 49, 132, 137, 138, 143, 147, 166–8,
50, 51, 52, 55 72, 74, 126, 143, 194, 196, 200, 202, 209, 213,
145, 154, 156, 157, 158, 161, 174, 224, 227, 209, 213, 224, 227,
178, 237, 286, 289, 294, 342 n.9, 228, 229, 231, 252, 255, 258,
342 n.10, 348 n.4, 357 n.12 266, 274, 332, 335, 337, 344 n.6,
aberrant 156–57 347 n.12, 351 n.7, 359 n.3
Bergson 143–54 aesthetic experience 72, 73
illusory 50, 146 affect and emotion 104–8
movement-image 142, 146–48, 150, 152, apocalyptic 280
153, 155, 160, 161, 165, 166, authorship 74–8
167, 169, 196, 230, 236, 331, canonical or popular 60, 63, 74, 113,
333, 349 n.11, 349 n.3 114
phenomenological 50–51, 123, 125, 128 Deleuze on 143–155
Mulhall, Stephen 3, 5, 13, 200, 201–5, 212, digital cinema 84–7
226, 252, 255, 261, 266 305, 326, erotetic model (Carroll) 70–2
339 n.3, 349 n.2, 350 n.1 ethics 232, 232
Mulholland Drive 37, 73, 92, 112 ethical experience 296–8
Mullarkey, John 348 n.3, 348 n.6, genres 180–81
350 n.12, 353 n.1 media 282
Mulvey, Laura 93, 226, 229 mood 109–112
Münsterberg, Hugo 6, 9, 41, 49, 51, 52, 54, moral perfectionism 183–4, 219
131, 225, 342 n.11, 346 n.9 narrators 78–83
music 41, 55, 84, 109, 111, 112, 188, 228, parametric 114
233, 234, 235, 241, 267, 277, pleasure 35, 225
288, 289, 357 n.12 plot and story 66–8
My Own Private Idaho 158 puzzle 73
myth 35, 78, 164, 181, 195,196, 268, 282, remarriage comedy 185–6
285 Roma 233–45
Echo and Narcissus 269 sensory-motor 166
mythmaking 182 ff., 195 structure of sympathy (Smith) 108–9,
progress 292, 293, 302 274, 332, 335, 337
of total cinema 182, 194 technique 68–70
television 251, 253, 300, 304, 308, 309,
Nagib, Lucia 232 313, 316, 317, 321, 331
Nancy, Jean-Luc 10 thought experiment 323, 324, 326
 Index 409

time-image 158, 165 Parasite 37

naturalism 5, 10, 114, 219, 223 Parain, Brice ix, 354 n.2
nature 135, 160, 161, 162, 168, 181, 202, Pasolini, Pier Paolo 83
221, 222, 231, 282, 286, 287, The Passion of Joan of Arc 74, 166
295, 300, 302 Peretz, Eyal 5, 250
human 24 Perkins, Victor F. 22, 31, 341 n.4
Neill, Andrew 104 persona 75, 203, 259, 262–3, 273
Neiva, Diana 6, 21, 201, 305, 339 n.3 von Trier’s 292
Nichols, Bill 258, 274–5, 356 n.18 Persona 211
Nietzsche, Friedrich 143, 176, 183, 185, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema 256, 260
208, 266, 355 n.11 The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology 256
The Night of the Living Dead 357 n.3 phenomenology 1, 2, 8, 9, 10, 15, 16,
Nightwatching 53 90, 101, 103, 115, 116, 117ff.,
nihilism 16, 141, 142, 150, 152, 162, 217, 342 n.3, 345 n.1, 346 n.2,
163–5, 168–9, 172–3, 176, 183, 346 n.3, 346 n.4
194, 280, 293, 300, 301, 335 cognitivism 137 ff.
Cavell and Deleuze 96 ff., 335 conventional and technical senses 120
Melancholia 280, 293, 300, 301 criticisms of 133 ff.
Noé, Gaspar 75, 345 n.7, 347 n.12 film experience 123–26
Nolan, Christopher 68 projection and distribution 134
North by Northwest 43 Sobchack 119 ff., 123 ff.
Nosferatu 100 subjectivism 134 ff.
Notorious 71 The Philadelphia Story 185
Now, Voyager 186–7 philosophical paraphrase 63, 205–7, 211,
Nymphomaniac 228 212–15, 351 n.10,
problem of (Livingston) 205–7
October: Ten Days that Shook the World philosophy
212, 351 n.9 analytic 2, 4, 5, 7, 30, 92, 219, 220, 223,
Omega Man 357 n.3 339 n.1, 352 n.12
Once Upon a Time in the West 147 post-analytic 220, 223
One Second in Montreal 47 continental 3, 10, 19, 23, 217, 229
Ontology film-philosophy x, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8–11,
digital image 56, 57–60 13–15, 16–17, 90, 116, 130, 141,
Cavell 42 170, 172, 196, 197, 199, 200,
of film 3, 6, 9, 10, 15, 16, 26, 31, 40–2, 201, 204, 210, 212, 214, 222,
51, 55, 56, 61, 65, 89 ff., 146, 224, 226, 229, 230, 231, 249,
167, 168, 173, 174, 217–9, 331 250, 252, 257
of moving image 46–48 and philosophy of film 8–10
Ordóñez Angulo, Emmanuel 344 n.10 documentary 249 f., 255 ff.
Ozu, Yasujiro 76, 155, 345 n.3 romantic 352 n.14
photography 1, 40, 41, 42, 46, 51–5, 59,
Paisan [Paisà] 152 60–2, 118, 174–78, 188, 191
Pandemic 357 n.7 digital 41, 59–60
Panofsky, Erwin 9, 174, 178 Cavell 174–78
410 Index

Carol 188, 191 Raviv, Orna 353 n.1

Heidegger on 118 Rawls, Cristina, Neiva, Diana, and Gouveia,
McGregor 61–2 Steven S. 6, 21, 201, 339 n.3
Scruton 53–4 Read, Rupert 13, 14
The Piano Teacher 347 n.14 Melancholia 298–99
Pickpocket 72, 166 Read, Rupert and Goodenough, Jerry
Pippin, Robert B. 5, 201 230, 255, 339 n.3
Pisters, Patricia 5, 8, 13, 120, 230, 349 n.13 Read my Lips [Sur mes lèvres] 342 n.5
Plantinga, Carl 5, 12, 19, 28, 37, 38, 72, 93, realism 3, 6, 30, 31, 63, 75, 85, 125, 148,
98, 102, 112, 113, 115, 145, 221, 222, 346 n.6, 348 n.5
226, 230, 258, 294, 295, 296, Bazin/Panofsky 174–6
297, 331, 334, 339 n.13, 339 n.3, neo- (Italian) 151–2, 153, 154, 155,
340 n.5, 345 n.5 157, 247 299
emotional engagement 102 photographic 59–61
emotion 104–5, 105–6 Rear Window 45, 148, 166
mood 109–110, 294–5, 297 Reason 92, 93, 113, 137, 142, 200, 207,
Plato 56, 176, 207 211, 212, 233, 293, 332, 336
Plato’s cave 264, 324 Renoir, Jean 37
plot 66 ff., 67–8, 70, 71, 74, 84, 194, 195, Renov, Michael 258
251, 313, 359 n.3 Reservoir Dogs 147
Deleuze 151 The Road 357 n.6
Memento 68 Roberts, Robert C. 105–6
versus story 67–8 Robinson, Jenefer 101, 102, 105
Poetic Justice 47 Rodley, Chris 46
political correctness 23, 27–8 Rodowick, D.N. 3, 4, 13, 38, 41, 142, 172,
Portrait of a Lady on Fire 37 173, 200, 201, 220, 221, 223,
Powell, Anna 13 230, 231, 330 340 n.7, 340 n.11,
Prince, Stephen 41, 57, 63, 94, 331 341 n.10, 348 n.8, 349 n.13,
Prinz, Jesse 104, 105, 343 n.13 352 n.13
Psycho (Hitchcock) 79, 81, 110, 256 critique of post-Theory 218–19
Psycho (van Sant) 359 n.4 critique of 2 22–23
psychoanalytic theory 4, 9, 15, 12, 21, 22, film philosophy of the humanities
23, 24, 93, 94, 95, 343 n.15 216 ff.
puzzle films 73 Turvey 221–22
Roma 233 ff.
Quandt, James 345 n.5 Romance 345 n.5
The Quiet Earth 281 romance 185, 187, 194, 251, 307, 318,
341 n.9, 350 n.9, 350 n.10
Radford, Colin 98 Carol 188–193
Rancière, Jacques 6, 10, 21, 56, 181, 196, romanticism 176, 279, 280, 284 ff., 292,
284, 349 n.12 301, 340 n.10
critique of Deleuze 165–7 cinematic 340 n.10
regimes of art 56, 168 Rome Open City [Roma città aperta] 152,
Rashomon 1, 68, 97, 98, 250, 350 n.2 353 n.2
 Index 411

Rossellini, Roberto 152, 247, 353 n.2 The Silence of the Lambs 45, 108, 229
Rothman, William and Keane, Marian Silverman, Kaja 340 n.1
142 Singer, Irving 208, 349 n.7
The Royal Tenenbaums 79 Sinnerbrink, Robert 3, 5, 9, 10, 19, 112,
Rugo, Daniele 230 113, 115, 116, 118, 139, 169,
Rules of the Game 37, 158 170, 179, 187, 191, 201, 208,
Rushton, Richard 5, 13, 189, 230 210, 221, 223, 226, 227, 230,
Russell, Bruce 200, 202 231, 235, 255, 261, 280, 284,
Russian Ark 342 n.4 287, 295, 296, 297, 298, 304,
Rutherford, Anna 120, 121 340 n.6, 342 n.11, 358 n.1,
360 n.16
Sacks, Oliver 68, 343 n.1 The Sixth Sense 73
Saxton, Libby 226, 228, 258 Slugan, Mario 341 n.6
Scenes from a Marriage 209, 224, 264 Smith, Greg M. 104, 230
scepticism 2, 16, 60–61, 63, 141, 142, 145, Smith, Murray 5, 8, 12, 19, 26, 37, 38, 45,
165, 168, 169, 170, 172, 173, 66, 104, 108–9, 113, 114, 200,
174, 176, 177, 182, 183, 183, 221, 222, 223, 225, 230, 334,
194, 195, 196, 197, 230, 301, 339 n.3, 340 n.5, 341 n.5
332, 333, 349 n. 2 structure of sympathy 108–9
Cavell on 141, 170, 173, 174, 176, 177 Smuts, Aaron 211–12, 214, 261, 305,
182, 183, 194, 195, 196, 197, 349 n.9, 351 n.7, 351 n.9
230, 333 ‘bold’ thesis (film as philosophy) 211–12
Image (iconscepticism) 332–3 Sobchack, Vivian 2, 8, 47, 119, 122, 123–
The Matrix 204, 211, 228 25, 345 n.2, 346 n.3, 347 n.10,
science 282, 283 347 n.11, 347 n.13
Schelling, F.W.J. 357 n.8 film body 126–27 ff.
science fiction 13, 17, 202, 251, 253, 280, Frampton 132, 133
304, 306, 307, 311, 325, 350 n.1 Lady in the Lake 128 ff.
Scott, Ridley 77, 202, 350 n.1 phenomenology of viewing 123–5
Scruton, Roger 41, 42, 53–4 Sokurov, Alexander 342 n.4
critique of film as art 53–4 Solaris 285
Sesonske, Alexander 340 n.9 The Sopranos 304
sensory-motor action schema 74, 77, Sparshott, Frances E. 44, 340 n.9
143–162, 163, 166, 168, 282, Spielberg, Stephen 202
288 Stadler, Jane 8, 37, 104, 115, 120, 221, 226,
sexuality 24, 193, 292, 256, 313 228, 229, 230, 343 n.2, 344 n.4,
Shaviro, Steven 120, 135, 230, 280, 283, 345 n.8
296 Stage Fright 81
Shaw, Daniel 226, 228, 230, 245, 351 n.8 Stanwyck, Barbara 35, 42
Shirin 37 Stella Dallas 187, 189, 228
Shimamura, Arthur P. 37, 113, 114, 230 Stephens, Elizabeth 120
Shohat, Ella and Stam, Robert 25 Stewart, James 148, 166
A Short Film About Love 342 n.5 story 36, 38, 45, 47, 66 ff., 69, 71–2, 79, 80,
Shyalaman, M. Night 73, 344 n.7 81m 82m 111, 190, 239, 241,
412 Index

247, 264, 265, 280, 304, 313, theory, resistance to 252

315, 322, 324, 345 n.7, 350 n.10, thought experiment 83, 204, 205, 211,
359 n.3, 360 n.14 224, 228, 251, 252, 304, 324,
versus plot 67–8 326, 339 n.3, 359 n.5
Stromboli 152, 155 Three Crowns of the Sailor [Les trois
Sturges, Preston 37 couronnes du matelot] 37
subjectivity 14, 16, 24, 26, 63, 108, 119, 300 115
122, 131, 134, 137, 142, 160, Time of the Wolf 283
169, 176, 177, 241, 253, 258, Tokyo Story 37, 74, 76, 158
308, 313, 314, 319, 325, 334, Tomasulo, F.P. 118, 119, 345 n.2, 346 n.3
346 n.2, 347 n.14 Tragedy 70, 187, 300
Sullivan’s Travels 37 Train to Busan 357 n.3
Summer with Monica 178 Trahair, Lisa 196, 349 n.6
Sunset Boulevard 37, 79 Transformers: The Last Knight 114
sympathy, structure of (Smith) 108–9 transparency thesis 42, 61, 175
trauma 68, 155
Take Shelter 283, 284 Trouble Every Day 345 n.5
Talk to Her 111 Tuck, Greg 120, 339 n.3, 340 n.12
Tan, Edward S. 66, 104, 115, 230 The Turin Horse 114
Tarantino, Quentin 147 Turvey, Malcolm 14, 221–2
Tarkovsky, Andrei 213, 250, 287, 291 critique of Rodowick 221–2
That Obscure Object of Desire 108 28 Days Later 357 n.6, 357 n.7
The Big Sleep 180 2012 282, 357 n.6
The Canterbury Tales 83 2001: A Space Odyssey 80
The Five Obstructions 213, 324
The Flicker 204, 324 Umberto D. 153, 155, 247
flicker films 32 Un Chien Andalou 74
flicker fusion threshold 46, 342 n.7 Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past
The Fog of War 76 344 n.5 Lives 74
The Great Dictator 76 The Unknown 166
The Lady Eve 42, 185 The Usual Suspects 81
The Maltese Falcon 182
The Matrix 68, 204, 206, 210, 211, 228, Van Sant, Gus 349 n.4
256, 324, 351 n.7 Vaughan, Hunter 159, 349 n.13
The Passion of Joan of Arc 74, 166 Vertigo 166
The Perfect Human 213 violence 83, 162, 225, 227, 228, 239, 282,
The Rules of the Game 37, 158 283, 301, 320, 321, 341 n.9,
Thompson-Jones, Katherine 344 n.8 345 n.9, 345 n.5, 347 n.14,
The Seventh Seal 209 360 n.10
The Silence of the Lambs 45, 108, 229 Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux ix,
The Sixth Sense 73 72, 178, 354 n.2, 354 n.7
The Thin Blue Line 228 Von Trier, Lars 23, 213, 284–5, 287–93,
The Thin Red Line 79, 250 301–2, 359 n.5
 Index 413

Waking Life 260, 354 n.1 Winter Light 76

Walton, Kendall, L. 42, 61, 99, 121, 179 The Wire 251, 304
Warhol, Andy 204 Wittgenstein 207, 256, 260
Wartenberg, Thomas E. 3, 6, 9, 200, 201, Wittgenstein, Ludwig (philosopher) 2,
204, 205, 206, 211, 212, 226, 13, 176, 177, 183, 220, 256, 298,
255, 261, 304, 305, 323, 324, 355 n.11
337, 339 n.3, 340 n.4, 350 n.3, Wittusen, Cato 352–3 n.14, 360 n.1
353 n.15, 354 n.1, 358 n.1, The Wizard of Oz 45
359 n.5 The World, the Flesh, and the Devil
Weerasethakul, Apichatpong 74, 92, 354 357 n.5
Welles, Orson 76, 77, 78, 95, 96, 97, 98 World War Z 357 n.7
Wheatley, Catherine 142, 226, 228, 29,
230 Yacavone, Daniel 34, 240, 346 n.4
When Worlds Collide 281
Wild Strawberries 53, 351 n.6 Zero Dark Thirty 229
Wilder, Billy 35, 37, 79 Žižek! 260
Williams, Linda 188, 251 Žižek, Slavoj 21, 206, 242, 243, 256, 260,
Wilson, George M. 66, 79, 80, 131 281, 300, 301, 350 n.3, 358 n.16,
Winston, Brian 258 358 n.17
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