Monthly Archive for September, 2010

By Havi Carel and Greg Tuck from The Philosophers’ Magazine…

Film studies scholars have always drawn on philosophical ideas. Philosophers, and in particular those working on aesthetics and philosophy of art, have been interested in cinema for as long as it has existed. However, film as philosophy as an autonomous sub-discipline is relatively new, emerging in the 80s and coming into its own over the past five years.

The 00s have seen the emergence of extraordinary interest and a large number of publications focusing on the conjunction of film and philosophy. This is not to say that it is a well-defined field of enquiry or one that has broad agreement amongst its practitioners on what exactly it is and what it should be doing. This lack of agreement is what, in part, contributes to the richness of this sub-discipline.

Cognitivist film theorists appeal to philosophy of mind and perception and even neuroscience to analyse the experience of film viewing. Wittgensteinians, such as Cavell, have linked film and representation to the general problem of scepticism. Other philosophers, such as Deleuze, Adorno and Baudrillard, have each inspired a different range of film-philosophical understandings. What this diverse work shares are the questions: what film can bring to philosophy, how it can broaden our understanding of philosophical activity as going beyond the written and spoken word, and whether this practice will transform our views of what philosophy is. More…

From Emilie Bickerton at n+1…

In April 1922, D.W. Griffith traveled to London to promote Orphans of the Storm, his epic of the French Revolution. To a skeptical Times interviewer he described the literary origin of his signature contribution to film technique: the “‘break’ in the narrative, a shifting of the story from one group of characters to another group.” As Sergei Eisenstein observed on discovering the exchange, “Griffith arrived at montage through the method of parallel action”—cross-cutting—“and he was led to the idea of parallel action by—Dickens!” Motion Picture Studio, to which the young Alfred Hitchcock was a contributor, thought Griffith’s visit had made plain “for the first time the all-importance of the director to the films for which he is responsible.” Soon after, the Manchester Guardian’s Caroline Lejeune, later part of Hitchcock’s circle, noted the cults that had gathered around certain directors on the basis of a few films “built on the same lines.” Once canonized, she wrote, “every little gleam of beauty is magnified a hundredfold,” and their work, “even in embryo, will be enwrapped in a legend of quality which it would take a very serious blunder to destroy.”

Three decades before it was given a name, Lejeune had identified the politique des auteurs by which the young critics of Cahiers du Cinéma made their magazine’s reputation, beginning in 1953 when Jacques Rivette proclaimed “The Genius of Howard Hawks” on the release of his screwball-throwback, Monkey Business. A few months later, Rivette’s colleague Eric Rohmer, according to Emilie Bickerton in her Short History, “elevated Hitchcock to the pantheon of great directors, and named I Confess,” his thirty-eighth feature, “a modern masterpiece.” That the politique’s exponents, the “Hitchcocko-Hawksians,” so-called by André Bazin, one of Cahiers’s founders and editors, were regarded as loose cannons and iconoclasts is something like conventional wisdom now. “The proposition that the movies, and especially those westerns, noirs, and melodramas from Hollywood, could be art was preposterous in the mid-20th century,” says Bickerton. But mentored by Bazin and by the maverick archivist Henri Langlois, director of the Cinémathèque Française, the original auteurists—Godard, Truffaut, and Chabrol, as well as Rivette and Rohmer—saw what others missed and brought about a revolution in taste. Then, famously, they became auteurs themselves. More…