Film-PhilosophyPub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.3366/film.2022.0208
Rick Zinman
{"title":"Immortality, the Good Life and Romantic Love in Groundhog Day and Only Lovers Left Alive","authors":"Rick Zinman","doi":"10.3366/film.2022.0208","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2022.0208","url":null,"abstract":"Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993) and Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, 2013) are fantasy films that use the device of practical immortality in order to raise important philosophical questions about what constitutes a good life and to explore the nature of romantic love. Groundhog Day provides fairly conventional answers about how to live a good life by focusing on issues of spiritual redemption, selflessness, and developing one’s human potential. In contrast, Lovers provides a dark portrayal of a civilization on the brink of extinction but offers a glimmer of hope for the future. The lifestyle and values of married vampires Adam and Eve represent an alternative vision of the core values needed to sustain a better world: greater reliance on human imagination, maintaining a sense of wonder and curiosity about the world, creating and appreciating works of art and living in harmony with the natural world. Both films also offer a perspective on the importance of romantic love in living a good life. Although these perspectives often diverge from one another, they do overlap in some interesting ways. The style of film criticism used in this paper is inspired by the film philosophy of Stanley Cavell.","PeriodicalId":42990,"journal":{"name":"Film-Philosophy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44692407","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Film-PhilosophyPub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.3366/film.2022.0211
James Zborowski
{"title":"Hans Maes and Katrien Schaubroeck (2021) (eds.) Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight: A Philosophical Exploration","authors":"James Zborowski","doi":"10.3366/film.2022.0211","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2022.0211","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42990,"journal":{"name":"Film-Philosophy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47580460","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Film-PhilosophyPub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.3366/film.2022.0202
L. Tuan
{"title":"The Matter of Manual Traces: Letters, Photographs and Bean Paste in Naomi Kawase’s Cinema of Touch","authors":"L. Tuan","doi":"10.3366/film.2022.0202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2022.0202","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the representation of the hand in three recent fiction films by Naomi Kawase: Sweet Bean (2015), Radiance (2017) and True Mothers (2020). Extending current scholarship that discusses the director’s use of haptic visuality, I argue that Kawase’s haptic cinema further exhibits its hapticity by framing the hand as both a Derridean trace and conduit that leaves behind traces in objects such as bean paste, letters, photo cameras, and photographs. Kawase’s framing of these objects in close-up shots emphasizes not only their materiality and haptic texture but also their foreshadowed physical absence. By reading Kawase through Jacques Derrida’s notion of trace, the article highlights not only the relevance behind understanding Kawase’s recent fiction films through a Derridean lens but also how the director’s own attitude towards cinema, as one that aims to simultaneously frame absence and presence, can also be read as a Derridean approach to cinema.","PeriodicalId":42990,"journal":{"name":"Film-Philosophy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43837053","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Film-PhilosophyPub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.3366/film.2022.0212
A. Philip
{"title":"Ewa Mazierska and Lars Kristensen (eds.) (2020) Third Cinema, World Cinema and Marxism","authors":"A. Philip","doi":"10.3366/film.2022.0212","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2022.0212","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42990,"journal":{"name":"Film-Philosophy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43465283","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Film-PhilosophyPub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.3366/film.2022.0205
Kyle Barrowman
{"title":"The Availability of Jim Jarmusch’s Film-Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Derrida and Private Language in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai","authors":"Kyle Barrowman","doi":"10.3366/film.2022.0205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2022.0205","url":null,"abstract":"To date, film scholars have found the films of Jim Jarmusch to be tantamount to works of postmodern philosophy. For as intriguing and productive as such interpretations of Jarmusch’s films have been, I submit that the postmodern framework occludes a crucial aspect of Jarmusch’s film-philosophy, namely, his investment in the ordinary. From this perspective, I intend to show the availability of Jarmusch’s films to Wittgensteinian interpretation. More specifically, I plan to situate Jarmusch’s arthouse action film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Derrida in order to demonstrate the profound affinities between Jarmusch’s film-philosophy and Wittgenstein’s conception of ordinary language. Through a consideration of character dialogue, I will demonstrate the extent to which Jarmusch rejects the private language argument – which, by extension, amounts to a rejection of linguistic relativism as an instance, or species, of skepticism – in favor of ordinary conceptions of language, expressiveness, knowledge, and responsibility.","PeriodicalId":42990,"journal":{"name":"Film-Philosophy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47937012","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Film-PhilosophyPub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.3366/film.2022.0206
Benedict Welch
{"title":"David Lynch, Embodiment and Mediality: Dealing With a Human Form","authors":"Benedict Welch","doi":"10.3366/film.2022.0206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2022.0206","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers the role of disembodiment in the visual art and films of David Lynch. This line of inquiry, I argue, allows us to consider the ways scholars do and do not conceptualise the relationship between Lynch’s works of different mediums. Specifically, I pursue the conviction that Lynch’s preoccupation with an injured or fragmented body corresponds to his intermedial creative practice. I turn my attention to Lynch’s early short film The Alphabet (1968) which exemplifies how the violence inflicted on the body represents the violence wreaked by the separation of art into different media. Using Jacques Rancière’s definition of mediality and his idea of the sensorium, I offer a new perspective on the questions of disembodiment that manifest in tricky and unpredictable bodies in Lynch’s work and thus on how we should read Lynch’s output as joined up across mediums. 1","PeriodicalId":42990,"journal":{"name":"Film-Philosophy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44735372","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Film-PhilosophyPub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.3366/film.2022.0207
Greger Andersen
{"title":"The Cinematic Anthropocene and the Future Politics of Killing","authors":"Greger Andersen","doi":"10.3366/film.2022.0207","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2022.0207","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers two films, Elysium (Neil Bloomkamp, 2013) and What Happened to Monday (Tommy Wirkola, 2017), in order to demonstrate that they foreshadow a paradigmatic shift in the relationship between biopolitics and thanatopolitics. According to Michel Foucault, and later Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito, it is chiefly the association of humans with biological danger that causes biopolitics to mutate into thanatopolitics. However, in these two films, humans are construed as an ecological danger that prompt thanatopolitics. They depict futures in which the regimes in power act on ecological threats by brutally micromanaging and killing members of their populations. In this the films unveil how the idea of sustainability as equilibrium can never benefit all, but must always leave some human beings out, either by abandoning them to die or by actively killing them. This is important because it brings to light the risk that the Anthropocene could engender regimes that will kill on different grounds than regimes have in the past.","PeriodicalId":42990,"journal":{"name":"Film-Philosophy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43202685","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Film-PhilosophyPub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.3366/film.2022.0196
D. Yang
{"title":"Robert Breer’s Perpetual Motion Machine","authors":"D. Yang","doi":"10.3366/film.2022.0196","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2022.0196","url":null,"abstract":"Embodying and balancing the European avant-garde movement of the 1920s and the dialectical U.S. neo-avant-garde aesthetics of the 1960s, Robert Breer encompassed various art forms in his painting, sculpture and film. In doing so, he created a distinct style that embraces both photographic representation and non-figurative abstraction – a heterogeneous assemblage of sorts – to advocate taking an intermediate stance in the act of rendering the relation between artistic tradition and innovation. By looking at A Man and His Dog Out for Air (1957), Fuji (1974) and LMNO (1978), I show three strategies devised by Breer that help generate the vital energy in these animations: metamorphosis, gradational abstraction, and self-moving objects. All three strategies point to Breer’s dualistic endeavour to experiment with the aesthetic and ontological possibilities of moving images and with the animated objects within the frame in spite of photographic, realist and rational confinements.","PeriodicalId":42990,"journal":{"name":"Film-Philosophy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48534333","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Film-PhilosophyPub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.3366/film.2022.0193
Patricia Aleksitch Castello Branco
{"title":"Kant and Burke’s Sublime in Werner Herzog’s Films: The Quest for an Ecstatic Truth","authors":"Patricia Aleksitch Castello Branco","doi":"10.3366/film.2022.0193","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2022.0193","url":null,"abstract":"The German filmmaker Werner Herzog controversially associates “truth” and “reality” in film with Kant’s notion of the sublime by explicitly treating the sublime as a key element in developing his notion of ecstatic truth. I critically examine Herzog’s interpretation of Kant’s sublime and the relations he establishes between the sublime and his own key aesthetic notion of ecstatic truth. I examine how the sublime in Herzog’s films arises from encounters with the overwhelming force and power of nature experienced by his characters in the feature films and participants in the documentaries. I question whether Kant’s conception of the sublime is the one that best aligns with Herzog’s aesthetic aims and I contrast Kant’s transcendental sublime with what I describe as the physiological sublime of Edmund Burke. I draw some conclusions about the moral dimension of the sublime in the context of the relationship between humans and nature within the frame of contemporary ecological concerns.","PeriodicalId":42990,"journal":{"name":"Film-Philosophy","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45759245","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}