The Only Star in a Nihilist Heaven: A Reflection on the Problematic Identity of History, Art and Cinema

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to furnish a more comprehensive appraisal of nihilism as the bedrock of the identity mentioned in the title. In the first section, we dwell on the question of how the culture of the last century tried to recover the unity with a mythic or mystic origin (both epithets are valid), which was perceptible alike in phenomena as different as the totalitarianism, the individual liberation of the middle of the century and the development of a philosophical criticism that tried to remind us of the oblivion of being. What we intend to show through the analysis of these phenomena is that all of them stem from the belief in a transcendent origin and the effort to revert to it, which begets a sui generis nostalgia that has had very questionable upshots on the treble plane of society, individual life and thought. In the second part of the paper, we show that this nostalgia is not, however, the sole way to bring to light the want of a common ground of culture and history, and that art furnishes other model for coming by that beyond the metaphysical assertion of the origin. In accordance with our approach, cinema stands for the historical and technical fulfilment of this optional model insofar as it makes literally visible the human presence beyond or rather before whatever symbolic value, which coincides with the nihilist devaluation of existence and with all the critic possibilities that that caters despite the negative part that it plays face the final development of the philosophical conception of man and art.

To my duckbill.