Film as Philosophy

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Film as Philosophy • •

FILM AS PHILOSOPHY Bernd Herzogenrath Editor

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis • London

Copyright 2017 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401–­2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-­opportunity educator and employer. 23 22 21 20 19 18 17

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Contents Introduction. Film and/as Philosophy: An Elective Affinity? BERND HERZOGENRATH 1. Striking Poses: Gesture, Image, and Remake in the  Cinematic Bergson JOHN Ó MAOILEARCA

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2. Hugo Münsterberg, Film, and Philosophy ROBERT SINNERBRINK

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3. Different, Even Wholly Irrational Arguments:  The Film Philosophy of Béla Balázs ADRIAN MARTIN

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4. This Is Your Brain on Cinema: Antonin Artaud GREGORY FLAXMAN

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5. From Lyrosophy to Antiphilosophy: The Thought  of Cinema in Jean Epstein CHRISTOPHE WALL-­ROMANA

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6. Montage Eisenstein: Mind the Gap JULIA VASSILIEVA

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7. André Bazin’s Film Theory and the History of Ideas ANGELA DALLE VACCHE

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8. Strange Topologics: Deleuze Takes a Ride down  David Lynch’s Lost Highway BERND HERZOGENRATH

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9. Hurray for Hollywood: Philosophy and Cinema  According to Stanley Cavell ELISABETH BRONFEN

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10. Thinking Cinema with Alain Badiou ALEX LING

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11. Thinking as Feast: Raymonde Carasco NICOLE BRENEZ

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12. Rancière’s Film Theory as Deviation TOM CONLEY

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13. Movie-­Made Philosophy NOËL CARROLL

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14. “Not Time’s Fool”: Marriage as an Ethical Relationship  in Michael Haneke’s Amour THOMAS E. WARTENBERG

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15. Experience and Explanation in the Cinema MURRAY SMITH

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Acknowledgments

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Contributors

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Index

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INTRODUCTION

Film and/as Philosophy AN ELECTIVE AFFINITY?

Bernd Herzogenrath

Media and thinking are intimately related. Our memory, perception, and cognition are not just a given, as weightless, immaterial processes taking place purely mentally behind the walls of our skull, but also always already rest on a medial basis. As Nietzsche claims, “Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts” (Unser Schreibzeug arbeitet mit an unseren Gedanken).1 From here we can derive the media-­philosophical insight that a new medium makes us think differently. Media thus reveal themselves as the body or, better, the different bodies of thought. It is important to note these bodies are not retroactive to those thoughts that they materialize, just as the microscope is not retroactive to the discovery of bacteria: media are coextensive to the thoughts they allow. Media generate potentialities of thought, make things “thinkable” in different, medium-­specific ways. Thinking thus cannot be said to be taking place within the confines of our skull, only—­thinking is noncentered, taking place on multiple levels and in feedback loops. Thus, media philosophy in general and film philosophy in particular are events, even praxes, rooted in the horizon of media themselves. They take place through and within the media in question and can be “put into words” only by translating them into the master medium: writing-­thinking. During the past ten to fifteen years, the convergence of film studies and philosophy has become the “next big thing” in (not only) the field of media studies. For a long time, academic discourse had considered film as the (or an) Other of philosophical reflections—­as a dissipation and pastime, maybe as an aesthetical illustration of certain ideas. In an alternative “line of tradition,” however, philosophy • •

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takes film as a serious field of scholarly engagement: beginning with Henri Bergson and Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, this tradition culminated in recent decades in the approaches of cognitive film studies (in the tradition of analytical philosophy as represented by David Bordwell, Noël Carroll, Murray Smith, etc.), perspectives rooted in academic philosophy (e.g., Thomas E. Wartenberg and Martin Seel), and the film philosophies (in the wake) of Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze, who argued for an appreciation of film as philosophy. How can this relationship between film and philosophy be thought anew? Can philosophy renew our concepts of film as a piece of art and/or as a medium? And vice versa, can film change our understanding of philosophy as a scholarly practice and endeavor? Or should the concepts film and philosophy be reconsidered (or revised) in their entirety once we dare their encounter? With the recent ubiquity of neuroscience in the humanities, which has found its way into film studies and philoso­phy as well, a new perspective has opened, one that puts a focus on the process of thinking itself, asking, what is thought and where does it occur? Questioning the philosophical status of film is thus situated within a grander context: Is there something like cinematic thought, thinking-­with-­images? How does it relate to philosophical thoughts and inquiries or to scientific analyses of this process? Can those disciplines benefit from each other? Once the disciplines of film studies and philosophy become mutually exposed to these conceptual extensions, they might allow for new contributions that benefit them both. This volume argues the questions, what is film? (as a slight rephrasing of Bazin’s What Is Cinema?), and, what is philosophy? (as Deleuze and Guattari have asked), are intimately intertwined—­in a very pragmatic and institutional way. When Roger Odin, one of the pioneers of “institutionalized” film studies in France, was called to office in the early 1980s, he was faced with the fact that film studies as a discipline did not (yet) exist. Far from despairing, Odin felt confirmed, rather, in his belief that film and cinema were not suitable objects for an academic discipline. By that he did not mean to discredit cinema as an object worthy of academic analysis—­on the contrary, Odin’s firm belief was that cinema opened up a whole field of research, with a whole range of disciplines contributing. While Odin was taking Gilbert Cohen-­Séat’s Institut de filmologie as a model,

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which was an interdisciplinary institute par excellence, he found his own institute was still miles away from that ideal. Nevertheless, the number of film scholars worldwide who have a degree in another subject (Odin himself is a linguist by training)—­be it one of the national philologies, art history, musicology, or philosophy—­is overwhelming. So also institution-­wise, an interdisciplinary approach to film (including philosophical expertise) is not only desired but fact.2 In the 1980s cognitive film studies discovered the brain for the analysis of film. Against the Grand Theories of psychoanalytic and (post)structuralist theory, they employed the findings of cognitive psychology for explaining the processes in the spectator’s mind to “make meaning,” seeing the understanding of film as a rational and cognitive endeavor that applied scientific “theories of perception, information processing, hypothesis-­building, and interpretation”3 At that time, the dominant strand in neuroscience was the field of computation, which took the computer as its model: the brain here was seen essentially as an input/output machine of representation. Approximately at the same time, Gilles Deleuze, in the “new image of thought” he developed (among others) in his two Cinema books, also used the concept of the brain, with implicit and explicit references, on the one hand, to Henri Bergson and, on the other hand, to a more constructivist brand of neurosciences in the wake of Maturana, Varela, and Changeux, seeing both film and brain as agencies of the “creation of worlds”: “The brain is the screen.”4 Certainly, the brain that cognitive film studies, neuroscience, and Deleuze talk about is not the same object/concept in these discourses. Recent developments in cognitive neuroscience into 4EA cognitivism, which considers the brain as embodied, enacted, extended, embedded, and affective, might create new insights, however, into the encounters of brains and screens. Here, in contrast to classical computation and, even, to connectionism, which is more advanced than computation insofar as it involves a more complex (and acentered) dynamics, thinking finally takes place not inside our skulls (only) but “out of our heads” (to quote the title of Alva Noë’s book). Yet one of the main difficulties that impede a smooth and simple marriage of film studies, (Deleuzian) philosophy, and the neuro­ sciences is the fact that the brain in question is in fact many brains. Not only do the concepts of the brain among these various disciplines

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differ, but Deleuze himself uses the brain in different guises. First, on a very general level, he traces the motif or metaphor of the brain in movies by Alain Resnais and Stanley Kubrick. Far more important in the context of our interest, however, are Deleuze’s references to the philosophy of Henri Bergson and his “new conception” of the brain: Bergson “introduced a profound element of transformation: the brain was now only an interval [écart], a void, nothing but a void, between a stimulation and a response.”5 In a universe that consists, as Bergson has it, of images in motion that all react on one another, the subject (and the brain) functions as “centers of indetermination,” in which the direct cause/effect or stimulus/response reaction is slowed down.6 This idea of the brain as a center of indetermination is supported by findings in neurosciences that focus on the brain as “an uncertain system,”7 as rhizomatic neural networks. Deleuze is here referring to Jean-­Pierre Changeux’s Neuronal Man: The Biology of Mind and Steven Rose’s The Conscious Brain (which also refers to Delisle Burns’s The Uncertain Nervous System). For Deleuze it boils down to the following: We can consider the brain as a relatively undifferentiated mass and ask what circuits, what kinds of circuit, the movement-­image or time-­image traces out, or invent, because the circuits aren’t there to begin with . . . the brain’s the hidden side of all circuits, and these can allow the most basic conditioned reflexes to prevail, as well as leaving room for more creative tracings, less “probable” links. The brain’s a spatio-­temporal volume: it’s up to art to trace through it the new paths open to us today. You might see continuities and false continuities as cinematic synapses—­you get different links, and different circuits, in Godard and Resnais, for example. The overall importance or significance of cinema seems to me to depend on this sort of problem.8

One of the most decisive questions that emerges in the wake of thinking the interrelation between media—­and here, more specifically, film—­and thought is related to the respective status of “philosophy.” As we have seen, there seems to be a great divide between analytic and continental “schools of thought.”9 However, there are also different “formats” that count as “film philosophy,” one way or the other. To a degree, one can distinguish between (at least) four types:

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Films about Philosophers Here, film (documentary films but also some feature films) is basically a “mouthpiece” for either philosophical theories or the biographies of Great Thinkers—­basically, the film version of a philosophical monologue or dialogue. Examples include Derrida (Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, 2002), Zizek! (Astra Taylor, 2005), Examined Life (Astra Taylor, 2008), The Ister (David Barison and Daniel Ross, 2004), and Being in the World (Tao Ruspoli, 2010) in the documentary section and Blaise Pascal (Roberto Rossellini, 1971), Socrates (Rossellini, 1972), Augustine of Hippo (Rossellini, 1972), Al di là del bene e del male (Beyond good and evil) (Liliana Cavani, 1977), and Wittgenstein (Derek Jarman, 1993) as examples of feature films.

Films as Illustrations of Philosophical Propositions This approach relates film to philosophical questions and axioms (ethics, justice, aesthetics, anthropology, etc.) but leaves the disciplinary boundaries intact: film may illustrate philosophical problems, but these problems “belong” to the field of (academic) philosophy proper. Film (unwittingly?) responds to or illustrates problems of a field external to it. Examples include The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962) and The Life of David Gale (Alan Parker, 2003). Both this and the first type could be put under the heading “Philosophy in Film.”

Philosophy of Film This field comprises two approaches—­analytic and continental, respectively—­sketched at the beginning of this introduction. In both of their reactions against the Grand Theories, they nevertheless revise some of the fundamental questions of “classical film theory” and thus are connected to some of the key figures in the long genealogy of film and philosophy that this book aims to present.

Philosophy as Film (Film as Philosophy) This approach, which I see as a continuation and radicalization of the ideas of Cavell and Deleuze, sometimes in a crossover with cognitivist theories (see, for example, the work of Robert Sinnerbrink, Patricia Pisters, and William Brown), is best summarized by the Cavell-­inspired words of Stephen Mulhall: “I do not look at these films as handy or

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popular illustrations of views and arguments properly developed by philosophers; I see them rather as themselves reflecting on and evaluating such views and arguments, as thinking seriously and systematically about them in just the ways that philosophers do. Such films are not philosophy’s raw material, nor a source for its ornamentation; they are philosophical exercises, philosophy in action–­film as philosophizing.”10 In this claim, films themselves are seen as capable of doing a unique kind of philosophical work (even though Mulhall’s characterization of films philosophizing “in just the ways that philosophers do” might still be in need of some qualification). Thus, the question is, What kind of knowledge (affects and percepts themselves giving rise to concepts) does the medium film generate qua medium?

Ultimately, the question, what is film philosophy? might better be restated as, where is film philosophy? Does it reside in the institutionalized version of (academic) philosophy (“proper”), or might it also be said to be inherent to film itself? An important qualification has to be made here: the question, what is philosophy? has to be addressed again at this point because the different relations of film and philosophy also owe a lot to the definition of the philosophical. If the rubric of film as philosophy claims films or cinema can do philosophy, then it is not the institutionalized version of academic philosophy (i.e., the production of propositional knowledge) but rather what Deleuze and Guattari call the “creation of concepts.”11 This entails a definition of philosophy that goes beyond its traditional territorialization, one that is extensional, forming assemblages rather than propositions, what—­ again—­Deleuze has called “the new image of thought.”12 Following this approach, “philosophy” and “thinking” do not necessarily refer to rational propositions and/or a purely neural activity, though. Thinking is not just a representation of the world as “it is”—­as Deleuze puts it, “Something in this world enforces thought. This something is the base of a fundamental encounter, and not of a recognition.”13 While the idea of “thinking as (re-­)cognition” is based on the verification of ideologies, of precollected knowledge, customs, and articles of faith, the notion of “thinking as an encounter” shatters our epistemological and experiential habits, producing a break in our “normal,” habitual perspective of the world and enabling

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the possibility of approaching alternative points of view and means of thought and of questioning our common practices. Thus film-­ thought is philo­sophical, since it offers its own genuine cinematic reflections about the world. According to Deleuze these are especially new looks at concepts of images, time, space, and movement (concepts grounded in the peculiarity of the medium as a stream of “moving images”). In an interview with Raymond Bellour and François Ewald, Deleuze stated, “I’ve never been worried about going beyond metaphysics or any death of philosophy. The function of philosophy, still thoroughly relevant, is to create concepts.”14 This affirmative function of philosophy is also a call to transdisciplinarity, so that even when Deleuze was working on “painting and cinema: images, on the face of it . . . [he] was writing philosophy books.”15 In defense of Deleuze against Sokal/Bricmont’s attempt to control and regulate the limits of the disciplinary fields, Paul Harris points out that Deleuze’s work shows, in contrast, “how productive it is to work with and think through material from others and other fields . . . , working with ideas cooked up in geology and geography, zoology and ornithology, archeology and paleontology, and even mathematics and physics.”16 The philosophical practice of “creating concepts,” as a creation of “newness” as well, necessitates, according to Deleuze, that philosophy enter into manifold relations with arts and sciences, since philosophy “creates and expounds its concepts only in relation to what it can grasp of scientific functions and artistic ­constructions.  .  .  . ­Philosophy cannot be undertaken independently of science or art.”17 These reso­nances and exchanges among philosophy, science, and art make philosophy “creative,” not reflective. These relations—­ from the perspective of philosophy—­are vital for reasons internal to philoso­phy itself—­that is, vital for the creation of “concepts” and, from the perspective of film philosophy, for a resonance with the percepts and affective logics and modalities of art, in general, and film, in particular. This book attempts to bring film studies and philosophy into a productive dialogue without assigning the role of a dominant and all-­ encompassing referee to one of these disciplines. Rather, it is about relating the diverse entry points—­the many colors of the spectrum—­

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toward each other in a fertile manner in order to establish, ultimately, a media philosophy that puts the status, the role, and the function of the medium—­here, film—­into a new perspective: no longer are the representational techniques of the medium at the center of inquiry but rather its ability to “think” and to assume an active role in process of thought, in finding alternative and differentiating point(s) of view (and thoughts). With such an approach, the medium film is shown as possessing “agency,” and the dialogue between film and philosophy (and even neuroscience) is negotiated anew. The following sections provide a road map to this book and highlight the key figures in the history of film and/as cinema.

Henri Bergson (1859–­1941) Deleuze’s film philosophy makes much of the notion of virtual images in Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory, but in doing so it transforms a psycho-­meta-­physical thesis into a (very) un-­Bergsonian ontologi­ cal one. In his essay, John Ó Maoilearca offers a corrective by exploring Bergson’s own explanation of the image as an “attitude of the body”—­something that projects an actual, corporeal, and postural approach not only to cinema but also to philosophy. As Renoir famously claimed, “A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again.” So, too, Bergson wrote each philosopher makes only one “single point” throughout his or her whole career. This one point, he then declared, was like a “vanishing image,” one best understood only as an attitude of the body. Embodied image underlies an alternative Bergsonian cinema of the actual and the body, one Ó Maoilearca examines through Bergson’s thoughts about “attitude,” “gesture,” and “mime” and also looks at through a gestural concept enacted by a film—­to be precise, the five remakes comprised by Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth’s The Five Obstructions (2003). This brings Ó Maoilearca back to the idea of what it is that is being remade, both by directors and by philosophers, in Renoir’s “one film” and Bergson’s singular “vanishing image,” respectively. Is the “one” being remade an image understood as a representation? Or is it a gesture understood as a bodily movement? The latter stance provides a new and alternative view of Bergson’s philosophy of cinema.

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Hugo Münsterberg (1863–­1916) Hugo Münsterberg was the first psychologist and philosopher to undertake a serious study of cinema; his recently revived text, The Photo­ play: A Psychological Study (1916), is widely regarded as the first work of film theory. Robert Sinnerbrink discusses some of the key elements of Münsterberg’s theorization of film, focusing on the philosophical dimensions of The Photoplay: its combination of neo-­Kantian (and Schopenhauerian) aesthetic theory, empirical psychology, and an ontological-­aesthetic concern with the medium—­in particular, the question of film as art. On the one hand, Münsterberg was a pioneer in the empirical-­psychological study of cinema, anticipating elements of contemporary cognitive theory; on the other, his pioneering philosophy of film remained wedded to “classical” theories of aesthetics and sought to synthesize the analysis of cinematic experience within the prevailing system of the fine arts. Nonetheless, he recognized the aesthetic distinctiveness of the medium, exploring its aesthetic and cultural possibilities as an art capable of communicating the “free and joyful play of the mind.” In this regard, Münsterberg canvassed some of the central problems of classical film theory while struggling to articulate a coherent theory of cinema capable of synthesizing its psychological-­cognitive and aesthetic-­cultural dimensions.

Béla Balázs (1884–­1949) Among those we now consider classical film theorists, Béla Balázs offers a unique case. His first and most philosophically oriented book on film, Visible Man or the Culture of Film (1924), constituted an “originary” text on which each subsequent contribution, The Spirit of Film (1930) and Theory of the Film (1948), was built. Adrian Martin’s essay passes from the passion of the early work to the pedagogy of his final years. This essay concentrates on the philosophical ideas and possibilities announced in Balázs’s writing of the 1920s, taking up Anton Kaes’s questioning of his retroactive status as a classical aesthetician. For Balázs cinema was not just another art to join the established pantheon but an altogether new art. Balázs was open to cultural experiences that both promised and threatened to overthrow and, thus, radically redefine what the aesthetic categories

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of the truthful, the beautiful, and the dramatically expressive could mean in the filmic medium. To fully grasp this crucial dimension, one needs to connect Balázs’s writing to two bodies of work: first, the many contemporaneous writings, in the 1920s and 1930s, on the burgeoning of modernity and its radically changing social conditions and, second, Maurice Maeterlinck’s theories of “new drama,” which greatly influenced him.

Antonin Artaud (1896–­1948) Gregory Flaxman returns to Antonin Artaud’s cinematic writings, in particular his fragmentary body of film criticism, in order to recover the constituents of a remarkable philosophy of cinema. Compared with his work on theater, poetry, language, and performance, Artaud’s engagement with the cinema has inspired far less enthusiasm, and it is impossible not to read this response in light of Artaud’s ultimate renunciation of cinema. Nevertheless, in this essay Flaxman argues that Artaud renounced the seventh art for the same reasons he had formerly embraced it—­namely, the capacity of the moving image to affect the spectator, to move the senses, and finally, to inhabit the brain itself. Over the span of almost a decade, Artaud wrestled with the psychomechanics of the cinema, which he defined at various points as a drug, a waking dream, a trance, a spell, and a delusion. In each case, he described the moving image as if it consisted in a power to overtake consciousness. In line with this idea, Flaxman’s essay poses the idea of a “cinematic automaton” on the basis of a concept borrowed from Spinoza and Leibniz, the “spiritual automaton.” In light of this turn to classical philosophy, Flaxman contends that Artaud envisioned the cinema as a brain within the brain.

Jean Epstein (1897–­1953) Jean Epstein was a poet, filmmaker, theoretician, and philosopher of the cinema. Christophe Wall-­Romana’s chapter presents key facets of Epstein’s holistic philosophy of the cinema, beginning with early concepts—­lyrosophy and photogénie—­that demonstrate his intermedial aesthetics at the intersection of philosophy, poetry, and cinema. What subtends this intermediality is, on one hand, Epstein’s focus on

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“coenasthesis”—­that is, inner bodily sensations and their link with affects—­and, on the other, the relations of similarity and dissimilarity between cinema and language. The intermedial holism of Epstein is expressed by his notion of the “unified intellectual plane,” which is akin to (and inflected by) Deleuze’s “plane of immanence” as directly related to the screen. Epstein’s embodied philosophy devolved in important ways from his homosexuality, which lead him to develop a view of queerness and cinema as sharing an antinatural naturalism. Wall-­Romana concludes with a reading of Epstein’s philosophical summa, The Intelligence of a Machine (1946), an exploration of the cinema apparatus as presenting us with an autonomous cognitive agency. Epstein was the first to consider cinema not just as worthy of philosophical reflection but as generating a new understanding of time, space, and causality beyond the limits of our human scope and scale. Now that digital imaging has bracketed the issue of indexicality as the essence of cinema, his thought can be better understood, since he viewed cinema not as an inert tool confirming our ideas of realism but as an active prosthesis challenging and expanding them.

Sergei Eisenstein (1898–­1948) Over the past quarter century, as Sergei Eisenstein’s previously unpublished major works, including his magnum opus, Method, have come to light, it has become possible to construct a richer, more nuanced understanding of Eisenstein and his legacy. As Julia Vassilieva argues, however, within this emerging reconsideration of Eisenstein, his engagement with philosophy is arguably the one aspect in most need of revision. On the one hand, dialogue with Eisenstein’s heri­ tage defined some key philosophical issues in film studies—­such as André Bazin’s discussion of realism, Noël Burch’s analysis of formal dialectics in cinematic expression, Gilles Deleuze’s theorization of movement-­image, and Vivian Sobchack’s embodied account of cinematic experience. On the other hand, analysis of Eisenstein’s philosophy in its own right remains fixed on Marxist influence on Eisen­stein and on the contextualization of his work in relation to the project of construction of socialism in Russia. In her essay Vassilieva argues there are now compelling reasons to rethink Eisenstein’s philo­ sophical position—­beyond the ideological debates of the twentieth

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century. Drawing on recently published texts by Eisenstein in Russia and Vassilieva’s own research on still unpublished writings by Eisenstein, her essay proposes new ways of understanding Eisenstein’s philosophy of film.

André Bazin (1918–­58) Usually associated with French existentialism, André Bazin’s film theory was in touch with Jean Paul Sartre’s literary essays but rejected the philosopher’s nihilism in favor of Emmanuel Mounier’s personalist thought. The founder of the journal Esprit in 1932, Mounier was critical of American individualism, Soviet collectivism, and French capitalism. Although Sartre is usually credited for having invented the figure of the “engaged intellectual,” this role was first conceptualized by Mounier. For the personalist thinker, the Other was a Neighbor, whereas for Sartre, the Other was “hell.” In addition, Angela Dalle Vacche argues why and how Saint Augustine’s focus on ambiguity and resurrection, Blaise Pascal’s work on science and religion, Henri Bergson’s duration and intuition, and Maurice Merleau-­Ponty’s phenomenology are relevant to Bazin’s film theory.

Gilles Deleuze (1925–­95) and David Lynch (1946–­) How do we make sense of a film? And how do we make sense of a film if this film does not follow the expected trajectories of Hollywood filmmaking? Using the example of David Lynch’s Lost Highway, my essay argues for and makes useful Gilles Deleuze’s film philosophy, particularly in connection with Bergson’s conceptions of time and Deleuze’s notion of “the encounter,” calling for an approach that makes the “object in question” provide its own terms and conditions for a more affective mode of “making sense.” This essay aims at showing Lynch’s movie “doing philosophy,” as thinking in/with images.

Stanley Cavell (1926–­) Elisabeth Bronfen discusses how throughout his career Stanley Cavell has explored the interface between moral philosophy and Hollywood in order to claim a specifically American way of engaging philosophi­

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cally in the world. Given a play with visibility and invisibility, with presence and absence, the projected world we view on screen offers an explanation of our ability to know others as well as our own unknowability. How the specific issues of skepticism and moral perfection seminal to Cavell’s work have been brought to bear on classic Hollywood is shown in two close readings: one of The Philadelphia Story in relation to the comedy of remarriage and the other of Stella Dallas in relation to the melodrama of the unknown woman. Both readings discuss not only the autobiographical interest inscribed in Cavell’s writings on cinema but also the cultural moment in American history encoded in both films.

Alain Badiou (1937–­) Alain Badiou has held that philosophy is obliged to engage with cinema because it presents a unique “philosophical situation.” Alex Ling accordingly provides an overview of Badiou’s understanding of cinema itself—­taken in the generic sense as an art almost entirely defined by its relation to other arts (as well as nonart)—­while drawing out some of the more interesting artistic and philosophical consequences of his position. Following a brief examination of Badiou’s “inaesthetic” conception of art and its relation to truth and philoso­ phy, Ling’s essay unpacks Badiou’s (implicit) conception of cinema as an “inessential” art by isolating two central complications film presents to his inaesthetic program—­specifically, the crucial concepts of “singularity” and “immanence.” Ling then moves on to discuss cinema’s peculiar position among the arts before finally addressing some of the paradoxes Badiou’s understanding of cinema gives rise to, as well as some of the challenges it presents to his philosophical system as a whole.

Raymonde Carasco (1939–­2009) In her literary and cinematic work, French philosopher and filmmaker Raymonde Carasco has built a thorough study of the theoretical and practical forms of intersection and interchange between verbal and audiovisual thinking. Author of sixty articles, two books published during her lifetime, and one posthumous book; codirector

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with her husband, Regis Hébraud, of sixteen films shot in 16 mm and 35 mm; and director of two collective publications, Raymonde Carasco is perhaps the only professional philosopher to have simultaneously led a scriptural and a cinematic work. As Nicole Brenez argues, Raymonde Carasco offers a rare example, perhaps comparable only with that of Alexander Kluge, of a creator who as a philosopher and a filmmaker shed disciplinary partitions to merge the speculative resources for a large poetic project. How can such an endeavor be defined? And how does it intertwine the respective dynamics of philosophy and film? Raymonde Carasco’s project was to invent descriptive forms faithful to the event of encountering the world, seen at every moment in the depth of its infinite physical and mental movements. This meeting does not stem, however, from an ego that will be affected by some otherness but by a Carasquian encounter that requires a recasting of identities. To be true to life implies an experimental ethos.

Jacques Rancière (1940–­) A philosophy of cinema emerged from Jacque Rancière’s varied writings—­on historiography, on the aesthetic regime of the arts, on Flaubert and the French literary canon after 1789, on the politics of dissensus—­in which he instrumentalized the theory and practice of events. According to Tom Conley, treating the latter as experience of uncommon or heightened sensation calling into question the position an individual occupies in the world, Rancière showed the cinema was of political mettle when events allowed spectators to “do” or “make” with cinema what they wished. His work followed a trajectory from what he called a politics of the amateur (deviating from that of the auteur) who related to film in a sensorial and impassioned register, be it in classical or contemporary film, to that of deviation and difference.

Noël Carroll (1947–­) Noël Carroll explores the prospects for doing philosophy by means of the moving image. He examines and attempts to refute skeptical denials of the possibility of movie-­made philosophy by a number of

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scholars, including Paisley Livingston, Murray Smith, Bruce Russell, and Deborah Knight. Instead, he sides with philosophers such as Thomas E. Wartenberg and argues it is possible to convey original philosophy through the moving image, though he concedes to the skeptics this is not as common as it is often assumed.

Thomas E. Wartenberg (1949–­) Thomas E. Wartenberg examines Michael Haneke’s Academy Award–­ winning Amour in order to show the film makes a significant contribution to the ethics of assisted suicide, or euthanasia. The essay demonstrates that through the film’s portrait of the dilemma facing an elderly husband confronted with the gradual degeneration of his wife’s physical condition and his own mounting infirmity, there are circumstances in which killing one’s spouse is an ethically justifiable act—­indeed, even one that is morally required. His argument focuses on a claim made originally by Kant in his ethical philosophy: that dignity is the central value in human life. The wife in the film’s central couple is threatened with a loss of dignity as a result of her growing incapacity, forcing her husband to find ways to counter this threat. When the only way to maintain a person’s dignity is to end  their life, then it is the moral thing to do, according to the film and the argument of this essay.

Murray Smith (1962–­) Murray Smith explores naturalism as a philosophical stance and the extent to which a naturalistic approach to film and film theory has been, could be, or should be adopted. Naturalism as a philosophical stance entails a commitment to understanding the world in the light of scientific knowledge and methods. While naturalism in this sense has emerged as arguably the dominant philosophical stance in the contemporary analytic tradition, it is not nearly so prominent in other philosophical traditions and is rarely explicitly recognized in film theory. An assessment of naturalism from the viewpoint of film theory and the philosophy of film thus seems overdue. Smith begins by looking at the history and aims of philosophical naturalism before turning to its manifestation in film theory under the guise

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of cognitive film theory. He examines this body of theory and the prospects of naturalism via four key problems: our apprehension of depth and movement in motion pictures, our failure to perceive certain kinds of edit, our recognition and attribution of states of mind to characters, and our emotional responses to such characters. In each case Smith first lays an emphasis on the subpersonal dimensions of mind that play a role in explaining these phenomena, such as the phi phenomenon, change blindness, and human facial perception. Scientific research sheds considerable light on all of these phenomena. Nonetheless, our apprehension and appreciation of films encompasses higher-­order cognition as well, including that most abstract and refined form of cognition, which we think of as “philosophical reflection.” Naturalism must be able to accommodate such cognition as well as the lower-­level cognition that a focus on the subpersonal illuminates. Taking District 9 as a case study, Smith aims to show how the lower-­and higher-­level forms of cognition come together in our experience through the film’s play with facial and bodily expression and its exploration of personhood and social oppression. Smith thereby seeks to demonstrate, via an exercise in philosophical naturalism, that films may themselves be vehicles of sophisticated reflection on some philosophical problems. As the editor of this collection, I am by no means entertaining the illusion of completeness. In a much humbler gesture, the essays presented here attempt to draw some light on the various connections between film and philosophy, sometimes even film as philosophy, as doing philosophy with other means, in another realm. They present this connection in a wide range—­historically, thematically, and methodi­cally. The fundamental question, however, is not whether film actually is (indistinguishable from) philosophy but how these two “disciplines” can get into a dialogue, a fruitful encounter—­how far they entertain (or can enter into) some kinds of “elective affinities.” The field these essays chart is one of multiple logics, approaches, and perspectives that are by necessity sometimes incompatible. This should by all means not be seen as something negative but as something operative, provocative, and ultimately useful. It is our hope the reader will see for herself.

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Notes 1. Kittler, Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter, 204 (translation altered). 2. I am very grateful to Vinzenz Hediger for this information. 3. Currie, “Cognitivisim,” 106. 4. See Flaxman, The Brain Is the Screen. 5. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 211. 6. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 36. 7. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 211. 8. Deleuze, Negotiations, 60–­61. 9. For a brilliant overview of these “battles,” see Sinnerbrink, New Philoso­ phies of Film. 10. Mulhall, On Film, 4. 11. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 4. 12. With a nod to Arthur Danto, Robert Sinnerbrink has shown this tightrope act as an oscillation between the philosophical “disenfranchisement” of film and its “re-­enfranchising.” See Sinnerbrink, “Disenfranchising Film?”; and Sinnerbrink, “Re-­enfranchising Film.” 13. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 182. 14. Deleuze, Negotiations, 136. 15. Ibid., 137. 16. Harris, “Using Knowledge,” 24–­25. 17. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, xvi.

Bibliography Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Bordwell, David. “A Case for Cognitivism.” Iris 9 (Spring 1989): 11–­40. ———. “A Case for Cognitivism: Further Reflections.” Iris 11 (Summer 1990): 107–­12. Bordwell, David, and Noël Carroll, eds. Post-­theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. Brown, William. “Cognitive Deleuze: Conference Report on SCSMI Conference, Roanoke, Virginia, 2–­5 June 2010, and Deleuze Studies Conference, Amsterdam, 12–­14 July 2010.” Cinema: Journal for Philosophy and Moving Image 1, no. 1(2010): 134–­42, http://cjpmi.ifilnova.pt/1-contents. ———. Supercinema: Film-­Philosophy for the Digital Age. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2013. Carroll, Noël. Interpreting the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ———. Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory. Princeton, N.J.: Prince­ ton University Press, 1988.

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———. The Philosophy of Motion Pictures. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. ———. Theorizing the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Carroll, Noël, and Jinhee Choi, eds. The Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Cavell, Stanley. Contesting Tears: The Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. ———. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981. ———. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Enlarged ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979. Currie, Gregory. “Cognitivism.” In A Companion to Film Theory, edited by Toby Miller and Robert Stam. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-­Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. ———. Cinema 2. The Time-­Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and R. Galeta. London: Athlone 2000 Press, 1989. ———. Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. ———. Negotiations, 1972–­1990. Translated by M. Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Flaxman, Gregory, ed. The Brain Is the Screen. Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Harris, Paul A. “Using Knowledge: Denuding the Deluded, Including the Excluded.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 45, no.1 (2000): 23–­32. Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated with an introduction by Geoffrey Winthrop-­Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999. Mulhall, Stephen. On Film. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2008. Noë, Alva. Out of Our Heads. Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness. New York: Hill and Wang, 2009. Odin, Roger. “A propos de la mise en place de l’enseignement du cinéma en France: Retour sur une expèrience.” In Can We Learn Cinema?/Il Cinema si impara?, edited by Anna Bertolli, Andrea Mariani, and Martina Panelli, 93–­102. Udine, Italy: Forum, 2013. Pisters, Patricia. The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003. ———. The Neuro-­Image. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012. Seel, Martin. Die Künste des Kinos. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag S. Fischer, 2013. Sinnerbrink, Robert. “Disenfranchising Film? On the Analytic-­Cognitivist Turn

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in Film Theory.” In Postanalytic and Metacontinental: Crossing Philosophical Divides, edited by Jack Reynolds et al., 173–­89. London: Continuum, 2010. ———. New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images. London: Continuum, 2011. ———. “Re-­enfranchising Film: Towards a Romantic Film-­Philosophy.” In New Takes in Film-­Philosophy, edited by Havi Carel and Greg Tuck, 25–­47. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011. Wartenberg, Thomas E. Unlikely Couples: Movie Romance as Social Criticism. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999. Wartenberg, Thomas E., and Angela Curran, eds. The Philosophy of Film: Intro­ ductory Text and Readings. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Wartenberg, Thomas E., and Cynthia Freeland, eds. Philosophy and Film. New York: Routledge, 1995. Wartenberg, Thomas E., and Murray Smith, eds. Thinking Through Cine­ma: Film as Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.