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.
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
