Abstract
The previous chapter summarizes existentialist positions from a purely philosophical approach. While existentialism is most commonly thought of as a philosophical enterprise, there are certainly other means of conveying existentialist insights. For example, philosophers like Sartre, Camus, and Marcel wrote plays and novels with existentialist themes. Non-philosophers have also written works of fiction that have been described as existentialist; Dostoevsky, Hesse, Kafka, and Beckett are obvious examples. And films provide another medium where one can find existentialist content, as this book will extensively demonstrate. But literature, film, and other artistic media are not the same as philosophy, and there is considerable debate on how these artistic activities can impact the practice of philosophy. I contend that film indeed can be used as a tool in developing our philosophical positions, because it has a unique potential to describe the essential elements of the human condition. But what exactly does this mean? Can film do philosophy in some way? Or does it simply show us certain things about ourselves that philosophers can reflect on? To what extent can it contribute novel insights that are not easily attainable in the context of a philosophical essay? In this chapter and the next, I will confront the debate on these theoretical issues, identifying and resolving any difficulties that might arise from the use of film as a tool for philosophical investigation.
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Notes
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (New York: The McGraw Hill Companies, Inc., 1997), p. 170.
Some of the arguments for and against realism I originally laid out elsewhere. See William Pamerleau, ‘Film Realism and Narrative Identity’, Film and Philosophy 11 (2007): 87–102.
Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Leo Bruady and Marshall Cohenby (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 841.
Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art, p. 79. Bordwell gives a much fuller account of this distinction in his text on film narrative. See David Bordwell, Narration in the Ficiton Film (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 50.
Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 21.
Noël Carroll, ‘The Power of Movies’, in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art — TheAnalytic Tradition, ed. Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 492.
‘The multiple authorship theory of films encourages us to look at films the same way as we do jazz: as a product of many individuals, whose work is inflected in a complex manner by their interactions with their colleagues.’ Berys Gaut, ‘Film Authorship and Collaboration’, in Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith (New York: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 166.
E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton. NI: Princeton University Press. 1969). p. 298.
See also Murray Smith’s description of a ‘person schema’ that allows audiences, even from widely different cultures, to construct essential elements of a character that are crucial to an appreciation of film narratives. Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Motion, and Cinema (New York: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 22. He also discusses the process whereby the general narrative is constructed largely through viewer expectations, pp. 47–51.
David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 9.
The attempt to account for the self without reference to a metaphysical core begins in earnest with Nietzsche. Alexander Nehamas argues that Nietzsche’s view of the self is also a narrative one. Since there is nothing to us but a set of dynamically related events and experiences, incorporating past events into a meaningful account of who we are amounts to a choice among possible narratives. See Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 155–169.
Noël Carroll, ‘Film, Emotion, and Genre’, from Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, ed. Noel Carroll and Jinhee Choi (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), p. 221.
James Monaco, How to Read a Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). p. 194.
Noël Carroll, ‘Philosophy in the Moving Image: Response to Bruce Russell’, in Film and Philosophy 12 (2008): 18–19.
I have argued elsewhere that Beauvoir’s descriptions of freedom in developmental terms, as described in The Ethics of Ambiguity, makes her philosophy more inline with views that acknowledge a socialized self than the standard phenomenological approaches of Sartre and others. See William Pamerleau, ‘Making a Meaningful Life: Rereading Beauvoir’, in Philosophy in the Contemporary World 6, nos. 3–4, (Fall–Winter 1999): 79–82. These observations will also be discussed in Chapter 4.
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Pamerleau, W.C. (2009). Film as a Tool for Philosophical Investigation. In: Existentialist Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230235465_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230235465_3
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