Abstract
Although there has been an extensive debate about whether films can actually do philosophy, this chapter bypasses that debate in order to examine a number of different ways in which philosophy has been done by contemporary filmmakers. Using a variety of different films from different genres—including Anomalisa, an animated film; Amour, a narrative fiction film; and The Act of Killing, a documentary—the chapter explores some of the central ways that philosophy has been done on film—such as providing a counterexample to a philosophical thesis, providing evidence to support a philosophical claim, and presenting an argument in support of a philosophical view.
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- 1.
The issue of who exactly the makers of a film are is subject to debate among philosophers of films. See, for example, Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 98–151.
- 2.
There has been a rich discussion of the validity of this point of view. See, for example, the exchange between myself and Richard Nunan in Film and Philosophy: Nunan “Film as Philosophy in Memento: Reforming Wartenberg’s Imposition Objection,” Film and Philosophy 18 (2014): 1–18; Wartenberg “The Imposition Objection Reconsidered: A Response to Richard Nunan,” Film and Philosophy 19 (2015): 1–14; and Nunan, “Authorial Intent, Alien3, and Thomas Wartenberg’s Alleged Necessary Condition for Films to Do Philosophy,” Film and Philosophy 21 (2017): 52–73.
- 3.
Stephen Mulhall discusses Blade Runner as a form of philosophical filmmaking in Mulhall, On Film, second edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 29–40.
- 4.
Noël Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 78–93.
- 5.
References to the film are drawn from its transcript (Linklater, Waking Life). The transcript divides the film into 19 episodes and provides titles for them. Doug Man (http://publish.uwo.ca/~dmann/waking_essay.htm) divides the film into 34 episodes. The transcript gives an obscure name to the game. I use its more familiar one. Doug Man. Nd. “Buddhists, Existentialists, and Situationists: Waking Up in Waking Life,” http://publish.uwo.ca/~dmann/waking_essay.htm. Accessed 1/27/2017.
- 6.
Kaufmann, Anomalisa, 2.
- 7.
Zadie Smith, “Windows on the Will,” New York Review of Books, March 10, 2016: 48.
- 8.
Kaufman, Anomalisa, 49.
- 9.
Kaufman, Anomalisa, 1.
- 10.
Smith, “Windows,” 46.
- 11.
David Davies, “Blade Runner and the Cognitive Value of Cinema,” in Blade Runner, ed. Amy Coplan and David Davies (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 151.
- 12.
Kaufman, Being John Malkovich, 51.
- 13.
The film has two co-directors, Cynthia Cynn and an anonymous Indonesian, whose identity is kept secret to protect him.
- 14.
For a related account of the film as making a philosophical contribution, see Sinnerbrink, Cinematic Ethics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 165–184. I discuss the film’s contribution to our understanding of moral evil more fully in my “Providing evidence for a philosophical claim.” Wartenberg, “Providing evidence for a philosophical claim: The Act of Killing and the banality of evil,” NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies (2017). https://necsus-ejms.org/providing-evidence-philosophical-claim-act-killing-banality-evil/
- 15.
Moral evil, the result of the actions of human beings, is distinguished from natural evil, events that have purely natural causes and that result in great devastation, such as an earthquake.
- 16.
Ned Curthoys, “Selbstdenken, Remembrance, and the Future of Civil Courage in Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt (2012). On the Psychogenesis of the ‘Banality of Evil,” Screening the Past (41) 2016: xxiii–xxv. Accessed at www.screeningthepast.com/issue-41/ on December 22, 2016.
- 17.
Curthoys, “Selbstdenken,” xxiii–xxv.
- 18.
For an excellent summary of the morality of euthanasia, see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/euthanasia-voluntary/, accessed on 12/19/2016.
- 19.
I attempted a more comprehensive investigation of the forms of philosophical filmmaking in Thinking on Screen, though I did not recognize there some of the forms I discuss in this chapter.
Bibliography
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———. 2017. Authorial Intent, Alien3, and Thomas Wartenberg’s Alleged Necessary Condition for Films to Do Philosophy. Film and Philosophy 21: 52–73.
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———. 2015. The Imposition Objection Reconsidered: A Response to Richard Nunan. Film and Philosophy 19: 1–14.
———. 2017. Providing Evidence for a Philosophical Claim: The Act of Killing and the Banality of Evil. NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies. https://necsus-ejms.org/providing-evidence-philosophical-claim-act-killing-banality-evil/
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Wartenberg, T.E. (2019). Contemporary Philosophical Filmmaking. 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_21
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