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Filmosophy/Film as Philosophy

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Abstract

This chapter offers a critical discussion of the idea of filmosophy or film as philosophy (otherwise called “film-philosophy” or simply “film and philosophy”). I explore the debate surrounding the idea of “film as philosophy”, distinguishing this approach from more traditional philosophy of film, and suggesting that it has a long history going back to key figures in early film theory. I then focus on the seminal work of Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze, often described as the inaugurators of film-philosophy. Finally, I examine recent proposals concerning the idea of “film as philosophy”, which argue for a more transformative relationship between philosophy and cinema, and offer some concluding reflections on how we might respond to some of the objections raised against this approach.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Enlarged Edition (Cambridge MA./London: Harvard University Press, 1979 [1971]) and Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, (1986 [1983]), and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galatea (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, (1989 [1985]).

  2. 2.

    See Richard Allen and Murray Smith, eds, Film Theory and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, eds, Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996); Havi Carel and Greg Tuck, eds, New Takes in Film-Philosophy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Felicity Colman, ed., Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers (Durham: Acumen Press, 2009); Cynthia Freeland and Thomas E. Wartenberg, eds, Philosophy and Film (London and New York: Routledge, 1995); Paisley Livingston, and Carl Plantinga, eds, The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (London: Routledge, 2009); Rupert Read and Jerry Goodenough, eds, Film as Philosophy: Essays on Cinema after Wittgenstein and Cavell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Thomas E. Wartenberg, “Philosophy of Film”, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/film/ (2011), and T. Wartenberg, “On the Possibility of Cinematic Philosophy”, in Havi Carel and Greg Tuck, eds, New Takes in Film-Philosophy (Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1–24.

  3. 3.

    Compare the different approaches in the volumes edited by Livingston and Plantinga, Read and Goodenough, and Carel and Tuck. For a discussion of film-philosophy, see Robert Sinnerbrink, “Film-Philosophy”, in Edward Branigan and Warren Buckland, eds, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 207–213.

  4. 4.

    Sinnerbrink, “Film-Philosophy”, 207.

  5. 5.

    Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses (New York: Routledge, 2010), 8–12, 187.

  6. 6.

    Francesco Casetti, “Philosophical Issues in Early Film Theory”. Keynote Presentation for the Film-Philosophy Conference, Kings College London (Sept 13, 2012), available online: http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2012/09/francesco-casetti-philosophical-issues-in-early-film-theory/. See also F. Casetti, Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

  7. 7.

    Casetti, “Philosophical Issues in Early Film Theory”.

  8. 8.

    See Robert Sinnerbrink, “Early Film-Philosophy: A Dialectical Fable” Screening the Past 38 (December 2013): http://www.screeningthepast.com/2013/12/early-film-philosophy-a-dialectical-fable/

  9. 9.

    Daniel Frampton, Filmosophy (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), 49.

  10. 10.

    See Jean Epstein, ed. Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul, Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2011).

  11. 11.

    Epstein, Essays and New Translations, 311–312.

  12. 12.

    Ibid., 244.

  13. 13.

    Ibid.

  14. 14.

    Ibid.

  15. 15.

    See Malcolm Turvey, Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008) for a critique of the ‘revelationist tradition’ of cinema practice and theory.

  16. 16.

    Epstein, New Essays and Translations, 311–312.

  17. 17.

    See Patricia Pisters, The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).

  18. 18.

    Paisley Livingston, “Theses on Cinema as Philosophy”, in Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy, ed. Murray Smith and Thomas E. Wartenberg (Malden, MA/Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 11–18.

  19. 19.

    Turvey, Doubting Vision, Chapter Two.

  20. 20.

    Robert Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images (London/New York: Continuum, 2011), 4 ff.

  21. 21.

    Stanley Cavell, “Foreword: On Eyal Peretz’s Becoming Visionary”, in Eyal Peretz, Becoming Visionary: Brian de Palma’s Cinematic Education of the Senses (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2007), xiv.

  22. 22.

    Ibid.

  23. 23.

    Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), xii.

  24. 24.

    Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Enlarged Edition (Cambridge MA./London: Harvard University Press, 1979), 16.

  25. 25.

    Ibid., 20.

  26. 26.

    Ibid., 23.

  27. 27.

    Ibid., 188.

  28. 28.

    Gilles Deleuze, “The Brain is the Screen. An Interview with Gilles Deleuze”, trans. Marie Therese Guirgis, in Gregory Flaxman, ed., The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 366.

  29. 29.

    Ibid., 367.

  30. 30.

    Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galatea (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989 [1985]), 156–188.

  31. 31.

    See Hunter Vaughan, “Mutants We All: Jean-Louise Schefer and our Cinematic Civilisation”, SubStance 41, no. 3, Issue 129 (2012): 147–165; and Patrick Ffrench, “Memories of the Unlived Body: Jean-Louis Schefer, Georges Bataille, and Gilles Deleuze”, Film-Philosophy 21, no. 2 (2017): 161–187.

  32. 32.

    Deleuze, Cinema 2, 164.

  33. 33.

    Ibid., 157.

  34. 34.

    Ibid., 158.

  35. 35.

    Ibid., 159.

  36. 36.

    Ibid., 161.

  37. 37.

    Ibid., 163.

  38. 38.

    Ibid., 167.

  39. 39.

    Ibid., 168.

  40. 40.

    Ibid., 168.

  41. 41.

    Ibid., 169.

  42. 42.

    Ibid., 170.

  43. 43.

    Ibid., 170.

  44. 44.

    Ibid., 171.

  45. 45.

    Ibid., 172.

  46. 46.

    See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994 [1968]).

  47. 47.

    See Robert Sinnerbrink, Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience through Film (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 64–69.

  48. 48.

    Ibid., 72–76.

  49. 49.

    Daniel Frampton, Filmosophy (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), 6.

  50. 50.

    Ibid., 6.

  51. 51.

    Ibid., 7.

  52. 52.

    Ibid., 7.

  53. 53.

    Noël Carroll (1998). ‘Film/mind analogies: The Case of Hugo Munsterberg’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 46, no. 4 (1998): 489–499.

  54. 54.

    Frampton, Filmosophy, 3.

  55. 55.

    Ibid., 15.

  56. 56.

    Ibid., 16.

  57. 57.

    Ibid., 16.

  58. 58.

    Ibid., 5.

  59. 59.

    Ibid., 7–8.

  60. 60.

    Ibid., 7.

  61. 61.

    Ibid., 7.

  62. 62.

    Ibid., 7.

  63. 63.

    Ibid., 11.

  64. 64.

    See Cavell, The World Viewed, and Deleuze, Cinema 1 and Cinema 2.

  65. 65.

    Stephen Mulhall, On Film (London: Routledge, 2002); Robert Sinnerbrink, “Re-enfranchising Film: Towards a Romantic Film-Philosophy”, in In New Takes in Film-Philosophy, ed. Havi Carel and Greg Tuck (Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 25–47; Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film; Aaron Smuts, “Film as Philosophy: In Defence of a Bold Thesis”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 67, no. 4, (2009): 409–420; Thomas E. Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy (London/New York: Routledge, 2007).

  66. 66.

    Stephen Mulhall, On Film, Second Edition (London: Routledge, 2008), 3–11; and Thomas E. Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy (London/New York: Routledge, 2007), 15–31.

  67. 67.

    See Paisley Livingston, “Theses on Cinema as Philosophy”, in Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy, ed. Murray Smith and Thomas E. Wartenberg (Malden, MA/Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 11–18; Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Bruce Russell, (2006). “The Philosophical Limits of Film”, in Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology, ed. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi (Malden MA./Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 387–390; Murray Smith (2006). “Film, Art, and Ambiguity”, in Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy, ed. Murray Smith and Thomas E. Wartenberg (Malden, MA/Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 33–42; Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film.

  68. 68.

    See Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film, 120–135.

  69. 69.

    Mulhall, On Film, 1–11.

  70. 70.

    Ibid., 2.

  71. 71.

    Ibid.

  72. 72.

    See Julian Baggini, “Alien Ways of Thinking: Mulhall’s On Film”. Film-Philosophy 7, no. 3 (2003): http://www.film-philosophy.com/index.php/f-p/article/view/745/657 Smith, “Film, Art, and Ambiguity”.

  73. 73.

    Mulhall, On Film, Second Edition, 130–134.

  74. 74.

    Mulhall, On Film, 2.

  75. 75.

    Ibid., 3.

  76. 76.

    Ibid., 3–4.

  77. 77.

    Ibid., 2.

  78. 78.

    Ibid., 4.

  79. 79.

    Ibid., 3–4.

  80. 80.

    Ibid., 6.

  81. 81.

    Ibid., 6.

  82. 82.

    Ibid., 6.

  83. 83.

    In response to critics of his book On Film (2002), Mulhall remarks that his aim, in the Second Edition of On Film (2008), is ‘to identify and put in question a range of assumptions about what film and philosophy must be whose apparent prevalence has helped to occlude the kinds of possibilities my book always aspired to realize’. Mulhall, On Film, Second Edition, 155.

  84. 84.

    Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen, 16.

  85. 85.

    Ibid.

  86. 86.

    Ibid., 16–31.

  87. 87.

    Ibid., 16.

  88. 88.

    Bruce Russell, ‘The Philosophical Limits of Film’, quoted in Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen, 19.

  89. 89.

    Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen, 19–20.

  90. 90.

    Ibid., 21.

  91. 91.

    Ibid., 22–24.

  92. 92.

    Ibid., 24–25; Chapter Four.

  93. 93.

    Ibid., 26.

  94. 94.

    Ibid. See also Paisley Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

  95. 95.

    Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen, 26.

  96. 96.

    Ibid., 28.

  97. 97.

    Ibid., 30.

  98. 98.

    Ibid., 37.

  99. 99.

    See Frampton. Filmosophy, and Sinnerbrink, “Re-enfranchising Film” and New Philosophies of Film.

  100. 100.

    See Livingston ‘Theses on Cinema as Philosophy’, and Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film.

  101. 101.

    See Sinnerbrink, Cinematic Ethics.

  102. 102.

    Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film, 139.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Robert Sinnerbrink

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

    Noël Carroll

  2. William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ, USA

    Laura T. Di Summa

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

    Shawn Loht

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Sinnerbrink, R. (2019). Filmosophy/Film as Philosophy. In: Carroll, N., Di Summa, L.T., Loht, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_22

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