Film-Philosophy

In Jacques Rancière and the Politics of Art Cinema, James Harvey contends that Rancière’s writing allows us to broach art and politics on the very same terms: each involves the visible and the invisible, the heard and unheard, and the distribution of bodies in a perceivable social order. Between making, performing, viewing and sharing films, a space is constructed for tracing and realigning the margins of society, allowing us to consider the potential of cinema to create new political subjects. Drawing on case studies of films including Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Climates and John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses, this books asks to what extent is politics shaping art cinema? And, in turn, could art cinema possibly affect the political structure of the world as we know it?

Hunter Vaughan interweaves phenomenology and semiotics to analyze cinema's ability to challenge conventional modes of thought. Merging Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception with Gilles Deleuze's image-philosophy, Vaughan applies a rich theoretical framework to a comparative analysis of Jean-Luc Godard's films, which critique the audio-visual illusion of empirical observation (objectivity), and the cinema of Alain Resnais, in which the sound-image generates innovative portrayals of individual experience (subjectivity). Both filmmakers radically upend conventional film practices and challenge philosophical traditions to alter our understanding of the self, the world, and the relationship between the two. Films discussed in detail include Godard's Vivre sa vie (1962), Contempt (1963), and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967); and Resnais's Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and The War Is Over (1966). Situating the formative works of these filmmakers within a broader philosophical context, Vaughan pioneers a phenomenological film semiotics linking two disparate methodologies to the mirrored achievements of two seemingly irreconcilable artists.

How can we describe movements in animated films? In Figure and Force in Animation Aesthetics, Ryan Pierson introduces a powerful new method for the study of animation. By looking for figures--arrangements that seem to intuitively hold together--and forces--underlying units of attraction, repulsion, and direction--Pierson reveals startling new possibilities for animation criticism, history, and theory. Drawing on concepts from Gestalt psychology, Pierson offers a wide-ranging comparative study of four animation techniques--soft-edged forms, walk cycles, camera movement, and rotoscoping--as they appear in commercial, artisanal, and avant-garde works. In the process, through close readings of little-analyzed films, Pierson demonstrates that figures and forces make fertile resources for theoretical speculation, unearthing affinities between animation practice and such topics as the philosophy of mathematics, scientific and political revolution, and love. Beginning and ending with the imperative to look closely, Figure and Force in Animation Aesthetics is a performance in seeing the world of motion anew.

This work outlines a new methodology for film analysis based on the radical materialist thought of Baruch Spinoza, re-evaluating contemporary cognitive media theory and philosophical theories on the emotional and intellectual aspects of film experience.
Sticchi’s exploration of Spinozian philosophy creates an experiential constructive model to blend the affective and intellectual aspects of cognition, and to combine it with different philosophical interpretations of film theory. Spinoza’s embodied philosophy rejected logical and ethical dualisms, and established a perfect parallelism between sensation and reason and provides the opportunity to address negative emotions and sad passions without referring exclusively to traditional notions such as catharsis or sublimation, and to put forth a practical/embodied notion of Film-Philosophy. This new analytical approach is tested on four case studies, films that challenge the viewer’s emotional engagement since they display situations of cosmic failure and depict controversial and damaged characters: A Serious Man (2009); Melancholia (2011); The Act of Killing (2012) and Only Lovers Left Alive (2013).

Philosophie, so pflegte der Philosoph Hermann Lübbe in seinen Seminaren zu sagen, ist alles, was unter diesem Namen auftritt. Dies gilt, so könnte man hinzufügen, auch für die Filmphilosophie.
Da die Zugehörigkeit der Filmphilosophie zum weiteren Feld der Philosophie damit gesichert ist, lässt sich die weiterführende Frage, was denn genau unter diesem Namen auftritt, unter Rückgriff auf Verfahren klären, die in der Philosophie, wie sie unter diesem Namen als Fach auftritt, gängig sind.
Mit Wittgenstein könnte man sich auf die Kraft des Beispiels stützen und sagen, dass die hier versammelten Texte auf eine jeweils eigene und durchaus programmatische Weise, die nicht ohne Rest unter eine große Oberkategorie subsumiert werden kann, exemplifizieren, was ‚Filmphilosophie‘ ist. Die vier Beiträge wären demnach vier verschiedene Gesten des Zeigens: „Das ist Filmphilosophie. So wird es gemacht.“ Um die Beruhigung im Transzendentalen, die von großen Oberkategorien immer ausgeht, wäre es damit aber vorerst einmal geschehen.
Will man hingegen den alten Ehrgeiz der Philosophie nicht so ohne weiteres preisgeben, den Dingen an den Erscheinungen vorbei auf den Grund und damit nachträglich vorauszugehen, dann lässt sich die Frage nach dem ‚Was‘ der Filmphilosophie auch schulmäßig beantworten: Indem man den Begriff zunächst einmal in historischer und systematischer Perspektive erläutert.

Der Begriff des Interface kategorisiert die Ausprägungsstufen einer kommunikationsstabilisierenden Schnittstelle als Interaktionsmechanismus, wobei die Interaktion von maschinellen Komponenten (Hardware, Software) sowie die vielfältigen Interaktionen zwischen UserIn und Maschine zur Geltung gebracht werden.

"Non, il n’y a pas qu’une manière d’analyser les films... Parmi toutes celles qui ont les faveurs des cinéphiles, des critiques et des universitaires, en voici six, qui se répondent et se complètent : historienne, esthétique, culturelle, genrée, cognitive et philosophique. Leur point commun ? Nous faire comprendre comment les films font sens, nous captivent ou nous émeuvent.
De la vue muette au blockbuster, des frères Dardenne à Intouchables en passant par toutes sortes de genres et d’époques, c’est plus d’un siècle de cinéma qui défile en 31 films à travers ces manières différentes d'analyser – donc d’aimer – le cinéma."

What happens to philosophy and the way we think, which is to say write, once philosophy opens itself to an encounter with film? What happens to our experience of film once we approach it as a philosophically creative medium of communication? In what follows I offer some fragmentary remarks in response to these questions, suggesting that we can find a more robust and meaningful way of understanding Cavell’s claims concerning the kinship between film and philosophy by entertaining the possibility that both stand to be transformed by their mutual engagement. [A shorter version of my Cavellian Meditations: How to Do Things with FIlm and Philosophy]

This essay investigates the marked disappearance of body horror elements in David Cronenberg’s films since A History of Violence (2005). While the absence of body horror’s conventional iconography is undeniable in Cronenberg’s recent cinema, the essay contests that this disappearance signals a departure from his longstanding investment in the politics and spectacular possibilities of flesh. By developing Jacques Derrida’s discussion of contemporary capital punishment’s ‘anesthesial logic’ in The Death Penalty Vol. 1, I contend that Cronenberg’s apparently fleshless cinema functions anesthetically whereby his avoidance of the shocking iconography that characterizes his archive does not signal its complete erasure. Rather than eradication, anesthetics redirect the anticipated avenues of synesthetic transmission and perception; in Cronenberg’s cinema, they generate a virtual encounter with the 'fleshiness' distinguishing the Cronenbergian signature. The essay begins its discussion of ‘Cronenberg’s anesthetics’ through an analysis of the short video, The Nest (2014), and then proceeds to identify how this mode of concealment functions throughout his films since 2005.

Upon being invited to take part in this symposium I gave myself to musing over the theme, "Repetition as an Aesthetic/Epistemological , which has great resonance in my forays into the intersections between philosophy and movingimage culture. Cinema is a rich subject for this inquiry: an industry that was born from the assembly-line era of mechanical reproduction, that quickly secreted codes and conventions of aesthetic language, and that is archived in spools and on disks meant to be projected in a uniform manner. And, yet, today I want to take to speak of the impossibility of repetition, and how this is connected to the potential of film expression and to certain concepts central to the field popularly known as filmphilosophy. If time moves and the universe's molecules redistribute, can anything actually repeat? If I ask this question again, it will not be the same. With temporal change, flux and impermanence are the only absolutes. Bearing witness to this essential condition of all things existent in time is the great magic and intrigue of cinema: the film reel moves in a spiral, not a circle. Repetition is impossible.

Artificial intelligence is often portrayed in science fiction as conscious and humanlike. We explore this phenomenon by analyzing mostly recent TV series and movies in the context of philosophical issues such as the problem of other minds, cognitive theories (computationalism and connectionism), thought experiments such as the Turing Test, the Chinese room, the brain in a vat, what is it like to be a bat and Mary's room. After discussing if direct access to an AI's mind is possible and useful in terms of determining its (un)conscious status, we compare fictional AIs to their human counterparts in terms of relationships, emotions, physicality, and mortality, which ultimately leads to considering the non-humanity of consciousness outside an anthropocentric viewpoint.

Animatic apparatus; history of animism; history of mechanism; animation; animatic automaton; animatic; automaton; robot; cyborg; vital machine; cinema; anima; plasmaticness; simulacrum; lifedeath; the living dead; the uncanny; simulation; representation; the Death Drive; the evil demon; the crypt, the haunted house, of cinema; cinema studies; animation studies; theory of animation; Film Studies; film theory; film philosophy; philosophy; humanities; J. David Bolter; Ctesibius, Hero of Alexandria, and Philo of Byzantium; Jacques de Vaucanson; Pierre Jacquet-Droz; Frederik L. Schodt; Mary Shelley; Frankenstein; René Descartes; La Mettrie; Donald Crafton; David F. Channell; Sergei Eisenstein; Roland Barthes; Jacques Derrida; Sigmund Freud; Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe; the Mystic Writing Pad; Thierry Kuntzel; Sigvard Strandh; Gilles Deleuze; Jean Baudrillard; Philip Brophy; Franz Kafka; Plato; Jean-Pierre Vernant; Tom Gunning; C.W. Ceram; Villiers de l’Isle-Adam; L’Eve future; Blade Runner

Since the emergence of embodied cognitive theories, there has been an ever-growing interest in the applic ation of these theories to media studies, generating a large number of analyses focusing on the affective and intellectual features of viewers' participation. The body of the viewer has become the central object of study for fi lm and media scholars, who examine the conceptual physicality of the viewing experience by associating body states with parallel intellectual and moral constructions. In this article, I contribute to the study of embodied cognition and cinema by drawing upon Baruch Spinoza's philosophy, especially from his process-based notion of the body. I will put this ecological and dynamic concept of the body in connection with recent studies on enactive cognition, and defi ne a radical enactivist approach to be applied in the discussion of the experiential dynamics of Lynne Ramsay's You Were Never Really Here.

This paper proposes a film aesthetics rooted in ecological processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, and hovering between Eastern and Western paradigms of thought. I call this aesthetics "Horizon Aesthetics" and regard the cinema of Hong Sang-Soo to be an illuminating exemplification of its workings. With an intercultural and transhistorical methodology derived from the Western philosophy of Deleuze and the Eastern thought of Chuang-Tzu, this type of aesthetics will be understood as a liminal or "in-between" space-time embodiment of autonomous forces, assemblages, and affective materiality that stages acts of becoming anew onscreen, particularly through the open form of the wandering and striated narrative structure. Such an aesthetics, I argue, exposes the viewer to an affective experience of unfamiliarity and foreignness, hence to a series of variant "becomings" which create a sense of diasporic consciousness. As a case study on horizon aesthetics, I turn to an exemplary South Korean film In Another Country (Hong Sangsoo, 2012). Through the main character Anne's repetitive wandering in the small seaside village of Mohang, the question of personal identity and geographic destination is suspended, allowing an immanent and affective materiality of her being-in-the-world to emerge from the background and into the foreground of the film. It comes to light that there are three versions of the Anne character, the same yet different, each a unique material potentiality framed by the infinite horizon of the sea. A French fish-out-of-water surrounded by a colorful cast of Korean characters, the default mode of communication becomes a broken English, the limits of which compel the characters to use their bodies to speak, discovering in the process new materialities of embodied time-space. Hong's wandering and liquid narrative gently hovers over a vanishing line that is everywhere yet always relatively changing to (no)one's position in the world. The narrative architecture of the film is articulated, I suggest, through everyday life as a series of focused and peripheral events which unfold and recur constantly on an affective register, in this reading of Deleuze, assembles the changing and nomadic materialities of time and space without reducing their radical singularity.

("Horizon Aesthetics" is my PhD research-creation project. Parts of the theme was presented at SCMS, Toronto (2018), Deleuze Conference in Seoul (2018) and Pusan International Film Festival's Forum (2017). Some sections of this thesis will soon be uploaded.)

Drawing from Alain Badiou's concept of inaesthetics, which proposes that art conditions philosophical thought, this essay offers an inaesthetic reading of The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros (2005) and suggests that it is a film that offers enabling possibilities in the thinking of love by providing the spectator with a different experience of cinematic attention in the visual field. The author suggests that the film raises the philosophical question " What is love? " and attempts to answer the very question it poses through punctual encounters, which are moments of cinematic interruption—described by Roland Barthes as " what I add. .. and what nonetheless is already there " (A Lover's Discourse 55)—that may offer opportunities for philosophical speculation. This essay further argues that those punctual moments initiate a new form of attention that is not sustained by " visual pleasure, " as theorized by Laura Mulvey, but by the " movement of thought " (Badiou, Cinema 17). The film uses that mode of attention as a way to think about love while also suggesting that love itself is a form of attention.

Automata (2014), is a dystopian film that reveals postmodern tendencies around the materialization and conceptualization of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s  philosophical notions like territority, deterritorialization, reterritorialization. Deterritorialization becomes the key element of the film as it describes displacement, emplacement and replacement of human and automata in both geographical and individual aspects. Humans emigrate from radioactive places to narrow zones, also from human to automaton which becomes more human than human. On the other hand automata move over inversely from narrow zones to radioactive places, from slavery to freedom and from automata to human.
This paper discusses the future design of Automata, in which human beings and automata, the innate and design reciprocate roles, focusing on its content built by many deterritorializations and reterritorializations between biological, geographical, intellectual and ideological territories. It explores the film as a cultural text revealing a postmodern discourse through its transitions between territories and searches the meaning of this transition as a postmodern fact both in positive and negative aspects. It searches viability and importance of these notions in a postmodern reality and analyzes how Automata uses them through its content.

The viewer’s experience of Malick’s cinema can be arguably approached from the notion of dwelling. As Toles points out, the essence of this dwelling derives from the use of the medium’s capacities to reveal the world as something real. In contrast with earlier films, ‘The Tree of Life’ (2011) opens up the possibility of transcendence by pushing the limits of the world revealed by the film medium: here the world is no more an absolute presence, but the visible sign of a further presence, that of its Creator. The chain of revelations is thus expanded: the filmic dwelling holds the world’s presence and, in turn, this screened world points towards God’s presence. In this vein, the image of Jack O’Brien standing at the enigmatic doorframe in the wilderness might well illustrate the experience of the viewer of ‘The Tree of Life’.

Michael Bay’s Transformers series presents impossible spaces, unbelievable characters and almost incomprehensible narratives. Instead of spatially and psychologically orienting the spectator, these films aim for a maximum of action and affect, a cacophony of movement and metal. My paper will interrogate the use of continuity in Bay’s films in order to understand their chaotic mode of narration and the implications of this for spectatorial engagement. Classical continuity defined a specific mode of spatial production and a concomitant notion of character creation and storytelling. Without cognitive traction on space to provide the perspective and psychology of the characters, and with the speed of editing and abundance of digital spectacle threatening to take over from narrative concerns, Transformers marks a shift in how we engage with stories.

Emphasising the spectacular in “post-cinema” allows Steven Shaviro to argue for the importance of the affective engagement offered. Against this, I will read the Transformers series through a concept of epistemological noise, informed by Cecile Malaspina’s genealogy of the idea in cybernetics and information theory. Instead of placing noise on the negative side of a Manichean dichotomy with information, Malaspina foregrounds the “role of noise in the formation of knowledge.” By reading Bay’s narratives as “noisy,” my paper will explore the epistemological gain that we, as spectators, can take when this “noise can become possible information.” Finding signal in a noisy narrative thus becomes a metonymic task of spectatorial engagement, where understanding the story in Transformers and deciphering information from noise can be epistemological training for a self-grounding of reason, a way of learning to navigate the contemporary media landscape that the films are part of. The incomprehensibility of Bay’s narratives allows this flexing of reason; it is the spectator’s agency that can be affirmed through the task of making sense of the story.

This paper will explore the aesthetic strategies of Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal (NBC, 2013-15) in the context of film-philosophy and what appears as a sort of methodological Cartesian dualism – which is to say, approaches that posit film as mind and/or film as body – in order to suggest the possibilities for (re)introducing psychoanalytic theory into such psyche-soma-screen debates. Identifying a recurring stylistic motif throughout the series – which I will designate the “shudder-image” – I will ask whether established models such as Frampton’s (2006) concept of “filmind”, on the one hand, or Sobchack’s (1992) encounter with perceiving bodies, on the other, are sufficient for understanding the audio-visual techniques of Hannibal, and what scope there might be to bring notions such as “unconscious” and “symptom” into this conversation.  Where Adorno (1970) famously described the “shudder” provoked by the work of art, I will consider what is at stake when it is the image itself that convulses. This analysis will be framed in terms of the mind-body relation expressed in psychoanalysis, and developed with reference to Freud’s (1900) emphasis on the priority of form in the interpretation of dreams and Žižek’s (2019) dialectical understanding of the relationship between style and story. In short, in dialogue with phenomenology and affect theory, I ask: What contribution can Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis make to the study of aesthetics in general and Hannibal in particular?

Tra le varie ricorrenze dell'anno in corso, una delle più significative e attraenti è, forse, quella del ventennale della morte del grande Maestro Federico Fellini, regista che guardava agli uomini con ironia e solidarietà, che credeva nella bellezza e nella forza narrativa del cinema, la cui materia -ha dichiarato -è la luce, che egli ha definito ideologia, sentimento, colore, tono, profondità, atmosfera, racconto. Lo vogliamo ricordare parlando di lui e di uno dei suoi capolavori maggiori, Casanova.

This book provides philosophical insight into the nature of reality by reflecting on its ontological qualities through the medium of film. The main question is whether we have access to reality through film that is not based on visual representation or narration: Is film—in spite of its immateriality—a way to directly grasp and reproduce reality? Why do we perceive film as “real” at all? What does it mean to define its own reproducibility as an ontological feature of reality? And what does film as a medium exactly show? The contributions in this book provide, from a cinematic perspective, diverse philosophical analyses to the understanding of the challenging concept of “the real of reality”.

https://brill.com/view/title/60426

In his 1990 book Toward a Transpersonal Ecology, developing a new foundation for environmental philosophy, Warwick Fox proposed to consider self in an expansive sense through a process of identification with the environment. The shift between an anthropocentric to an ecocentric perspective referred to a psychologization of ecophilosophy. In this sense, the so called “deep ecology” (Næss, 1973) identifies an egalitarian and holistic concept of the world based on the recognition of the equal intrinsic dignity of all biota as well as of their ecological interconnectedness and interdependence. Reconsidering these theoretical premises, my first claim will be that the notion of the film world allows us to identify the basis on which an ecophilosophical study of film can be carried out. How can a film world identify an environmental philosophy? How can it suggest an ecocentric perspective? Moving from the theses of the film as philosophy, this paper will focus on the cinematic representation of the relationship between human and nonhuman and, in particular, on the expression of ecophilosophy in contemporary Italian cinema. The analysis of some movies, such as Bella e perduta (Marcello, 2015) and Spira Mirabilis (D'Anolfi and Parenti, 2016), will be proposed in order to identify the key aspects of a film ecophilosophy for which the film world represents the hermeneutic horizon through which filmgoers can reflect on their own identity and role within the ecosystem.

In a famous ‘false belief test’ of experimental psychology, we begin with two puppets and a concealed object whose location is known to both.  Puppet A leaves the room.  While she is gone, Puppet B conceals the object in a new location.  The human observer is then asked, ‘When Puppet A returns, where will she think the object is?’  If the observer answers ‘Puppet A will think the object is in its original location’, many psychologists would say s/he possesses a ‘theory of mind’ (ToM).  Cognitivism has informed Film Studies for several decades, but despite some work on the topic (Currie 1995), ToM’s implications for film viewing remain underexplored.

This paper takes as its case study Dial M for Murder (Hitchcock 1954), which can be seen as a highly elaborate false belief test.  It will argue that:

i) the appeal and achievements of the movie need to be accounted for not only via reference to ‘the cutting, the rhythm and the direction of the players’ (Truffaut 1985), but also to the sustained complexity of the inferences about multiple characters’ beliefs that the viewer must hold simultaneously.

ii) there are advantages for Hitchcock scholarship and Film Studies in exploring the fact that very many movies oblige the viewer to consider not only what a character thinks, believes, etc, but also what one character thinks/believes about that which another  thinks/believes, and so on.

iii) ToM is a powerful tool but also a limited one.  Intriguingly, criticisms of ToM from a phenomenological perspective (eg Ratcliffe 2007) use the same term of abuse that has been levelled against Dial M: ‘mechanistic’ (see Hall 2004).  This theory and case study therefore represent a particularly appropriate pairing, each shedding light upon the brilliance and the limitations of the other.

Works cited in abstract

Currie, Gregory. Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Hall, Sheldon. ‘Dial M for Murder.’ Film History 16.3 (2004): 243-55.

Ratcliffe, Matthew. Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Truffaut, Francois. Hitchcock. Revised edition. London: Simon & Schuster, 1985.

The films of Nuri Bilge Ceylan are always groping for the general condition of ‘humanity’ – that vague anachronism, ever the object of contempt for contemporary philosophers. It is now commonplace to hear that authorship, modernity, subjectivity, history and humanity are outmoded concepts of a bygone era. Yet, in countless art films of recent years, we continue to note a dominant thematic preoccupation with recognition, anxiety and subjectivity, begging the question: If we have departed from the humanist regime of art and philosophy, why do its primary concerns continue to dominate? In this article, I wish to analyse Ceylan’s oeuvre as a continuation of the themes and aesthetics of humanist film-makers and philosophers. With in-depth discussion of the themes and aesthetics of the breadth of his oeuvre, I argue that Ceylan’s films are humanist because they focus on human subjectivity as a matter of conflict: between our notion of selfhood and the world around us. In opposition to claims of some flaccid ‘liberal humanism’ derided by posthumanists like Hayles (1999), I wish to argue that Ceylan’s humanism persists with a critical condition intrinsic to the human, denying an escape into a historically rupturing, post-ist logic.

Inside Out (Pete Docter & Ronnie Del Carmen, 2015) develops novel cinematic means for representing memory, emotion and imagination, their interior relationships and their social expression. Its unique animated language both playfully represents pre-teenage metacognition, and is itself a manner of metacognitive interrogation. Inside Out motivates this language to ask two questions: an explicit question regarding the social function of sadness, and a more implicit question regarding how one can identify agency, and thereby a sense of developing selfhood, between one's memories, emotions, facets of personality, and future-thinking imagination. Both the complexity of the language Inside Out develops to ask these questions, and the complicated answers the film provides, ultimately serve as a manner of recognition of the effortfulness of finding one's place in the world. This article talks sequentially through the complex representative systems Inside Out advances in order to pay homage to the ways in which metacognitive cinemaas well as discussions and hermeneutic readings around that cinemacan make viewers feel recognised for invisible, internal labour that is existentially difficult to share due to its very interiority; an interiority that is reconstructed in imaginative processes such as autobiographical reminiscence, and filmic animation.

Le 30 novembre 2019, à Chartres
L’expérience des séries télévisées peut être de nature philosophique. En effet, la philosophie doit aider à perfectionner nos façons de penser et d’agir. Or, regarder certaines séries télévisées peut changer nos façons de penser et de nous comporter, un changement qui conditionne leur amélioration. L’intervention exposera cet argument en l’illustrant à l’aide d’exemples tirés de plusieurs séries populaires.

This paper will address Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975) together with Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” – and its interpretation by Slavoj Žižek in Violence – in order to explore the concepts of mythic and divine violence within the film. First, I will explore the “law-preserving” and “law-making” powers of the state exerted by both the police and, more importantly, the press in the film as forms of mythic violence, which suggest a rapport between Benjamin’s text and Althusser’s well-known concepts of repressive and ideological state apparatus. I will furthermore attempt to approach this question at the level of genre: in the melodramatic excesses of Schlöndorff and Trotta’s film, I will suggest – via Thomas Elsaesser’s genealogy of melodrama in “Tales of Sound and Fury” – that it is possible to discern the functioning of mythic violence as the sudden reversals of fortune and egregious suffering that are fundamental to the genre. I will then ask whether, through Katharina’s acts of resistance and final, murderous outburst, the film could open up a potential space for divine violence. If – as Benjamin and Žižek suggest – it cannot be objectively defined, then can Katharina Blum at least point to the possibility for divine violence as, in Žižek’s terms, the counter violence to the excess of state power? By offering us, as spectators, a moment where we sympathise with – if not actively urge – the murder of Katharina’s tormentor, the tabloid hack and agent of institutional oppression, Werner Tötges, might the film place us in a position (as we could speculate did Katharina) to “wrestle with [the commandment “Thou shalt not kill”] in solitude and (…) to take upon [ourselves] the responsibility of ignoring it”?

Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979) by Andrei Tarkovsky as well as The Matrix (1999) by the Wachovski brothers are science fiction films with a highly metaphysical appeal. In addition, all three films deal with the possible falseness of what we generally suppose to be a “reality.” In The Matrix, a reality of millions is declared to be due to cognitive manipulations effectuated by machines and computers and thus not real; in Solaris, a strange kind of non-reality penetrates reality and creates doubts about the “cognitive correctness” of reality; and Stalker evokes, though in an ambiguous and ironical way, a spiritual reality more real than ordinary reality.

In this paper, the issue of boredom in slow film - a recent trend in art-cinema that increasingly has gotten critical and scholarly attention – is conceptualised as a paradoxical form of negative affect that can be a possible source of gratification for the viewer. In it, the leading question is thus what are the possible gratifications derived from elicited affects for viewers of the slow film genre? It adds to the debate on the topic by providing an emphasis on the spectatorial, affective engagement of the viewer, a research area that is previously overlooked in the debate that has so far mostly comprised of issues of aesthetics, culture criticism and film history. The paper proposes that boredom can be a source of gratification for some viewers, when it can give rise to contemplation and self-reflexivity and/or meta-emotions such as aesthetic pleasure (A-emotion), moral self-appraisal and identity building. The paper advances towards these conclusions by taking implications from (neo)formalist film studies and genre theory as well as the adjacent fields of psychology and phenomenology – more specifically synthesizing Matthew Flanagan’s aesthetic investigation of Slow Film, Anne Bartsch’ model of emotional gratification and Heidegger’s phenomenology of boredom. By providing a delineation of possible pleasures of the seemingly paradoxical pleasure in the negative affect of boredom, this paper has relevant implications for the philosophical and psychological debate on what is known as the ‘paradox of negative emotions’. Moreover, by adding a phenomenological account of contemplation, it enriches the debate on the Slow Film genre with a distinct audience-orientated approach.

In marked contrast to more recent discussions of cinematic affect, this article seeks to affirm the ineluctably passive experience of moving-images. In particular, the essay returns to the tradition of psychology and art history that developed, in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century, around the concept of Einfühlung. On this basis, I argue that cinema constitutes a kind of prosthetic perception whereby the brain is inhabited and vehicularized by images that are not its own.

How should critics approach narrative temporality in times of ecological disorder? Literary critics have attempted to bridge eco-criticism with narrative theory, shifting attention from narrative content to narrative form. Econarratology studies how narrative shapes our understanding of the environment. Yet, eco-critical interrogations of narrative form are lacking. Grounded in a homogeneous conception of time, narratology often relays a dichotomy between narrativity and "dysnarrativity". This dichotomy fails to translate the variety of temporal processes in film. I shall highlight the problem underlying Jacques Rancière's critique of Deleuze's film-philosophy and its relevance for narrative theory. My discussion of this dispute is grounded in the examination of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010). Critics invariably base their analyses on Boonmee's remembrances and reduce narrative complexity to dysnarrative indeterminacy by accommodating non-human storylines into a human plot. I argue that Uncle Boonmee both confirms and bypasses the critique of linear narrative that is at heart of the Rancière-Deleuze discussion. In doing so, Weerasethakul's feature calls for a new paradigmdifferent, yet unlike the crystalline narrative, positively determined. By bringing the event to the fore, Deleuze offers another theoretical backdrop for event narratology, that in turn proves useful to econarratology.

To write a book on ‘Vertigo’ (1958) appears to be a vertiginous task in itself. Sixty years after its release, the feature film by Alfred Hitchcock stills casts its shadow over new viewers, raising interpretations that might never manage to escape the enigmatic spiral that trapped detective Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart), the film’s protagonist. In this respect, this book by Robert B. Pippin refuses to be a mere interpretation: it is a ‘reading’, in the sense given by Stanley Cavell to this term, that is, a critical understanding of a film as a whole and, above all, of the experience that a viewer has of it. With a telling peculiarity: here the viewer is a philosopher who believes that sometimes the best though can take the form of film. As put by the author, “some films can be said to attempt to illuminate something about human conduct that would otherwise remain poorly understood”. In this sense, from his experience of ‘Vertigo’ stems a question that cannot be answered by just alluding to pleasure or entertainment: What is the reason for showing us this story in this precise manner? Why ‘Vertigo’?

The action sequences in Michael Bay’s Transformers series present impossible spaces. Instead of spatially orienting the spectator, these films aim for a maximum of action, a cacophony of movement where space once was. Bay states that he does not “get hung up on continuity”, arguing that the “intensity of the action doesn’t allow [the audience] to keep track of all these details”. My article analyses spatial noisiness in Bay’s films. 

Michel Serres states that “noise is a sign of the increase in complexity”, and Cecile Malaspina expands on this by tracing the ambiguities of noise in information theory. Eschewing the urge to place noise on the negative side of a Manichean dichotomy, Malaspina focuses instead on the “role of noise in the formation of knowledge”, arguing that “noise can become possible information”.

Instead of seeing the lack of spatial continuity in the Transformers films as an aberration from good filmmaking, this article will thus read the noisiness of Transformers as a kind of information. This will involve analysing Bay’s films through Steven Shaviro’s concept of “post-continuity” editing, where excessive affect trumps narrative concerns. If noise is a form of information, then perhaps Bay’s noisy films are indicative of future identities.

Análisis textual del universo Tim Burton. Escenas Fantasmáticas.

Análisis de varias escenas de la filmografía de Tim Burton acompañadas de
datos clave sobre el autor y sus influencias para el análisis de éstas.

Trabajo de Finde Grado para la consecución del Grado en Comunicación Audiovisual calificado con Matrícula de Honor.

The first chapter of my dissertation explores Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest feature film The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Lanthimos, 2017), in relation to Agamben’s concept of bare life. The aim of this approach is to show how a film with no philosophical premise can elucidate such a politically-charged philosophical concept.