Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy

The collection brings together a wide range of contributors, including both philosophers and film scholars. All of them address the question of whether philosophy can take the form of, or be articulated through, film. A new text for the growing field of philosophy of film, engaging with a variety of questions concerning the relationship between film and art, aesthetics and philosophy. Explores a wide variety of forms and periods of film, such as the avant-garde, continental film and popular American cinema, to present diverse answers to this question. Draws on a range of films, from the works of Hitchcock to Mission: Impossible and Being John Malkovich.

Table of Contents:
Preface Murray Smith and Thomas E Wartenberg Introduction 1 I The Very Idea of Film as Philosophy Paisley Livingston These on Cinema as Philosophy 11 Thomas E Wartenberg Beyond mere Illustration: How Films Can Be Philosophy 19 Murray Smith Film Art, Argument, and Ambiguity 33 II Popular American Film: Entertainment and Enlightenment Richard Allen Hitchcock and Cavell 43 Lester H Hunt The Paradox of the Unknown Lover: A Reading of Letter from an Unknown Woman 55 Dan Flory Spike Lee and the Sympathetic Racist.' 67 George Wilson Transparency and Twist in Narrative Fiction Film 81 Stephen Mulhall The Impersonation of Personality: Film as Philosophy in Mission: Impossible 97 Daniel Shaw On being Philosophical and Being John Malkovich 111 Christopher Grau eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the Morality of Memory 119 III: Continental Philosophy, Continental Film Andras Balint Kovacs Sartre, the Philosophy of Nothingness, and the Modern Melodrama 135 Paul C Santilli Cinema and Subjectivity in Krzysztof Kieslowski 147 Katherine Ince Is Sexy Comedy or Tragedy? Directing Desire adn Female Auteurship in the Cinema of Catherine Breillat 157 IV: Films as "THEORY": The Avant -Garde Jinhee Choi Apperception on Display: Structural Films and Philosophy 165 Noel Carroll philosophizing Through the Moving Image: The case of Serene Velocity 173 Trevor Ponech The Substance of Cinema 187 Whitney Davis The World Rewound: Peter Forgacs's Wittgenstein Tractatus 199 Contributors 213 Selected Bibliography 217 Index 221

About the Author :
Murray Smith is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Kent, UK. He is the author of Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford, 1995) and Trainspotting (British Film Institute, 2002), and the co-editor of Film Theory and Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 1998) and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (Routledge, 1998). He has published widely on the relationship between ethics, emotion, and films, including essays in this journal and Cinema Journal. Thomas E. Wartenberg is Chair of the Philosophy Department at Mount Holyoke College, where he also teaches in the Film Studies Program. He is the author of Unlikely Couples: Movie Romance as Social Criticism (Westview Press, 1999) and The Forms of Power: From Domination to Transformation (Temple University Press, 1990), the editor of The Nature of Art (Wadsworth Publishing, 2001), and the co-editor of Philosophy and Film (Routledge, 1995)and The Philosophy of Film: Introductory Text and Readings (Blackwell, 2005).