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Film Art from the Analytic Perspective

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Abstract

This chapter examines the emergence of a distinctively analytic approach to film as art. I begin with an overview of Berys Gaut’s claim that the philosophy of film art is, roughly speaking, organized around three levels of analysis: the film medium; film narrative and aesthetics; and philosophical themes that emerge in films. Next I trace the emergence of an analytic philosophy of film as art in the work of Alexander Sesonske and Francis Sparshott. Sesonske and Sparshott each draw attention to the central features of film aesthetics—notably to the ways in which film treats time and space. I conclude by discussing contemporary developments such as “film as philosophy.”

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Francis Sparshott, former president of the American Society for Aesthetics, taught at the University of Toronto from 1950 to 1995. I was one of those graduate students in his seminar on the philosophy of the dance in 1989. He was trained at Oxford, of which he said, “At Oxford in my day aesthetics ranked with phrenology and metaphysics among outmoded follies” (http://www.philosophy.utoronto.ca/im-francis-sparshott/, accessed 23/05/2017). Francis told the story that Gilbert Ryle so despised art and aesthetics that he afterwards denied being taken to a local Toronto eatery called The Art Gallery during a visit to Toronto.

  2. 2.

    Noël Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

  3. 3.

    F.E. Sparshott, “Basic Film Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 5:2 (1971).

  4. 4.

    Ian Jarvie, Philosophy of the Film: Epistemology, Ontology, Aesthetics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987).

  5. 5.

    Gregory Currie, Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

  6. 6.

    Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

  7. 7.

    David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, eds, Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996).

  8. 8.

    Thomas Wartenberg, “Philosophy of Film,” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/film/, accessed 22/05/2017.

  9. 9.

    Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 1.

  10. 10.

    See, for instance, Wartenberg, “Philosophy of Film,” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/film/, accessed 22/05/2017.

  11. 11.

    Hugo Munsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, in Hugo Munsterberg on Film, ed. Allan Langdale (London: Routledge, 2002).

  12. 12.

    Rudolph Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkley: University of California Press, 1957). This is expanded volume of the original published in Germany in 1933.

  13. 13.

    André Bazin, What is Cinema? Vol. 1, trans. H. Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967) and What is Cinema? Vol. 2, trans. H. Grey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). The two-volume English-language edition is derived from four volumes originally published in France between 1958 and 1965.

  14. 14.

    Jean Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of Cinema, trans. Christopher King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). This was originally published in France in two volumes in 1965.

  15. 15.

    George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974).

  16. 16.

    R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938).

  17. 17.

    Berys Gaut, “Analytic Philosophy of Film: History, Issues, Prospects,” Analytic Philosophy 38:3, 1997: pp. 145–146. Gaut is one of the very few to draw attention to the works of Sparshott and, in particular, Sesonske.

  18. 18.

    Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, pp. 282–307.

  19. 19.

    For instance, see Noël Carroll, “Forget the Medium!” in his Engaging the Moving Image (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).

  20. 20.

    Currie, Image and Mind, pp. 34–41.

  21. 21.

    Arguments to this effect made by Gaut in A Philosophy of Cinematic Art and in “Cinematic Art and Technology” in Current Controversies in Philosophy of Film, ed. Katherine Thomson-Jones (New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 17–35. See also Katherine Thomson-Jones, “Movie Appreciation and the Digital Medium,” in Current Controversies, pp. 36–54.

  22. 22.

    Gaut, “Analytic Philosophy of Film,” p. 145.

  23. 23.

    Ibid.

  24. 24.

    See Currie, Image and Mind, in particular “The Interpretive Problem,” pp. 225–259.

  25. 25.

    Mary Litch, Philosophy Through Film, 2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 2010).

  26. 26.

    Thomas Wartenberg, Thinking On Screen:Film as Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2007).

  27. 27.

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

  28. 28.

    Thomas Wartenberg, “Moral Intelligence and the Limits of Loyalty,” in his Thinking On Screen, pp. 94–116.

  29. 29.

    Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film, p. 9.

  30. 30.

    V.F. Perkins, Film as Art: Understanding and Judging Movies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972).

  31. 31.

    See, for example, Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), and his The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).

  32. 32.

    Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (London: Routledge, 1990).

  33. 33.

    Cynthia Freeland, The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror (Boulder: Westview Press, 2001)

  34. 34.

    Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The HollywoodComedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984) and his Contesting Tears: The HollywoodMelodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

  35. 35.

    See, for instance, Stephen Mulhall, On Film, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2016), especially the chapters on the Alien franchise and Minority Report.

  36. 36.

    See in particular David Bordwell, “Contemporary Film Studies and the Vicissitudes of Grand Theory” and Noël Carroll, “Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment,” in Bordwell and Carroll, eds., Post-Theory, pp. 3–36 and pp. 37–68.

  37. 37.

    David Bordwell and Kristin Thomson, Film Art: An Introduction, 11th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2016).

  38. 38.

    Noël Carroll, Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

  39. 39.

    David Bordwell, “Contemporary Film Studies and the Vicissitudes of Grand Theory,” in Post-Theory, p. 3.

  40. 40.

    Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (London: Blackwell, 2008), p. 33.

  41. 41.

    Currie, Image and Mind, p. xiii.

  42. 42.

    Gaut, “Analytic Philosophy of Film,” p. 145.

  43. 43.

    Alexander Sesonske, “Aesthetics of Film, or a Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Movies,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 33:1 (1974): pp. 51–57, and “Time and Tense in Cinema,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 38:4 (1980), pp. 419–426.

  44. 44.

    Sparshott, “Basic Film Aesthetics” and “Vision and Dream in the Cinema,” Philosophic Exchange 2:1 (1971), pp. 111–122.

  45. 45.

    Sparshott, “Basic Film Aesthetics,” p. 11.

  46. 46.

    Sesonske, “Aesthetics of Film,” p. 51.

  47. 47.

    Some consider Alexander Sesonske to be a phenomenologist, which would seem to place him outside the bounds of analytic philosophy. I simply claim here that Sesonske’s approach to film is analytic even though his focus of interest is how films are understood and, in that sense, experienced. Gaut, for example, describes Sesonske as offering a “phenomenological argument,” in “Analytic Philosophy of Film,” p. 149.

  48. 48.

    Sesonske, “Aesthetics of Film,” p. 54.

  49. 49.

    Ibid.

  50. 50.

    Sesonske, “Time and Tense,” p. 420.

  51. 51.

    Sesonske, “Aesthetics of Film,” p. 55.

  52. 52.

    Sparshott, “Basic Film Aesthetics,” p. 15.

  53. 53.

    Ibid., p. 20.

  54. 54.

    Ibid., p. 21.

  55. 55.

    Ibid., p. 23.

  56. 56.

    Ibid., p. 25.

  57. 57.

    Sesonske, “Time and Tense,” p. 53.

  58. 58.

    Ibid., p. 56.

  59. 59.

    Sparshott, “Basic Film Aesthetics,” p. 13.

  60. 60.

    Ibid., p. 15.

  61. 61.

    Ibid., p. 19.

  62. 62.

    Ibid., p. 24.

  63. 63.

    Sesonske, “Time and Tense,” p. 53.

  64. 64.

    Ibid., p. 54.

  65. 65.

    Ibid., p. 57.

  66. 66.

    Jarvie, Philosophy of the Film, p. xiii.

  67. 67.

    Ibid., pp. 3–4.

  68. 68.

    Ibid., p. 33.

  69. 69.

    Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

  70. 70.

    Jarvie, Philosophy of the Film, p. 178.

  71. 71.

    Ibid., p. 177.

  72. 72.

    Gregory Currie, The Nature of Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

  73. 73.

    Currie, Image and Mind, p. 11.

  74. 74.

    Ibid., p. xxiii.

  75. 75.

    Ibid., p. 147.

  76. 76.

    Ibid.

  77. 77.

    Ibid., p. 149.

  78. 78.

    Ibid., p. 225.

  79. 79.

    See Paisley Livingston, Art and Intention: A Philosophical Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

  80. 80.

    Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1978), pp. 142–148, and Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 113–138.

  81. 81.

    Barthes, Image-Music-Text, pp. 155–164.

  82. 82.

    Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi, Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).

  83. 83.

    Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga, The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (New York: Routledge, 2009).

  84. 84.

    Thomson-Jones, Current Controversies in Philosophy of Film.

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  1. Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada

    Deborah Knight

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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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Knight, D. (2019). Film Art from the Analytic Perspective. 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_16

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