Abstract
Here we introduce the three films we refer to in the book—The Seventh Continent (Haneke 1989), Dogtooth (Lanthimos 2009), and Le Fils (Dardenne and Dardenne 2003)—and set out why these particular (types of) films provide the focus for this book, and how they relate to our interest in upbringing. We then articulate the approach we take to the use of film, and what we mean by the term ‘educational force’ of film. Drawing on Stanley Cavell, and his The World Viewed in particular, we understand this in relation to film’s specific capacity to assert something in their mode of presentation, that is, through the use of particular devices. We lay the groundwork for our argument that these three films assert existential truths about aspects and dimensions that are an inevitable part of the human activity we call upbringing and that are left out of the picture in the predominant account of ‘parenting’. We introduce the specific devices that we argue make this possible in each film, and situate our approach in relation to other recent scholarship using film in educational philosophy.
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Notes
- 1.
At least, that is, the kind of film Cavell is interested in. Richard Eldridge points out that ‘Cavell’s thought is concerned principally with centrally photographically based movies, that is, movies wherein the exposure of film stock to light rays emanating from things and persons that are of our world is central to the significance and interest of the movie as an artistic achievement’ (2014, p. 4, http://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-philosophy/313/).
- 2.
The 1953 edition reads ‘familiarity’ as a translation of ‘Alltäglichkeit’. Klevan’s suggestion to translate this as ‘ordinariness, everydayness’, we agree, is much closer to the German original text.
- 3.
It seems that part of what Fredriksson, referred to earlier, argues about documentary film is more or less along the same lines. Fredriksson argues that such films make us attentive to aspects of reality that are actually there, but that we fail to perceive because of certain preconceived ideas or projections we carry with us. The kind of attention that is brought by documentary film , then, allows us to ‘break with our previous knowledge and our habitual ways of seeing’ (Fredriksson 2018, p. 61), to ‘interrupt our habitual ways of perceiving the world ’ (p. 62); it ‘connects us to what is there to be seen, even when something does not comply with our intentions and preconceptions’ (ibid.).
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Hodgson, N., Ramaekers, S. (2019). The Educational Force of Film: Presentations of Upbringing. In: Philosophical Presentations of Raising Children. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12540-0_2
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