Not Thinking But Questioning (original) (raw)
Related papers
New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images
2011
The relationship between film and philosophy has become a topic of intense intellectual interest. But how should we understand this relationship? Can philosophy renew our understanding of film? Can film challenge or even transform how we understand philosophy? New Philosophies of Film explores these questions in relation to both analytic and Continental philosophies of film, arguing that the best way to overcome the mutual antagonism between these approaches is by constructing a more pluralist film-philosophy grounded in detailed engagement with particular films and filmmakers. Sinnerbrink not only provides lucid critical analyses of the exciting developments and contentious debates in the new philosophies of film, but also showcases how a pluralist film-philosophy works in the case of three challenging contemporary filmmakers: Terrence Malick, David Lynch, and Lars von Trier. Table of Contents Preface \ Introduction: Why Did Philosophy Go To The Movies? \ Part I: The Analytic-Cognitivist Turn \ 1. The Empire Strikes Back: Critiques of “Grand Theory" \ 2. The Rules of the Game: New Ontologies of Film \ 3. Adaptation: Philosophical Approaches to Narrative \ Part II: From Cognitivism to Film Philosophy \ 4. Cognitivism Goes to the Movies \ 5. Bande à part: Deleuze and Cavell as Film-Philosophers \ 6. Scenes from a Marriage: Film as Philosophy \ Part III: Cinematic Thinking \ 7. Hollywood in Trouble: David Lynch’s INLAND EMPIRE \ 8. ‘Chaos Reigns’: Anti-cognitivism in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist \ 9. Song of the Earth: Cinematic Romanticism in Malick’s The New World \ Coda: ‘The Six Most Beautiful Minutes in the History of Cinema’\ Bibliography \ Filmography \ Index. Reviews: Reviewed by Jason M. Wirth in Notre Dame Philosophy Reviews (November 2012): http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/35702-new-philosophies-of-film-thinking-images/ Reviewed by Deborah Knight in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol 70, no. 4 (Fall 2012): 401-403. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1540-6245.2012.01531\_5.x/abstract [DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6245.2012.01531_5.x] Reviewed by Adam Melinn in Philosophy in Review, vol. 32, no. 5 (2012): 428-430 http://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/pir/article/view/11591 Reviewed by Jane Stadler in the British Journal of Aesthetics: http://bjaesthetics.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/07/31/aesthj.ays025.extract" "Both an excellent introduction and an original contribution to the field, New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images covers a large range of theoretical positions with impressive adroitness. By offering incisive philosophical analyses alongside brilliant film readings, Sinnerbrink achieves that rare thing, a true marriage of the abstract and the concrete that will be of huge value to scholars and students alike." Professor John Mullarkey, Kingston University, London, UK "Robert Sinnerbrink’s New Philosophies of Film is a captivating, challenging, smart, and highly readable exploration of the aesthetic encounter between cinema and philosophy. As an introduction to the recent philosophical turn in film studies, the book offers a rich and insightful critical perspective on many influential developments in film theory such as cognitivism. As a contribution to the emerging field of philosophical engagement with film New Philosophies of Film shows that films can do more than just illustrate or serve as metaphors for philosophical ideas. Films are philosophically valuable in themselves insofar as they can engage in philosophizing as ‘thinking agents’. Furthermore, films can invite us to invest in them philosophically, to meet them in dialogue as philosophical discussion partners. This idea comes alive in Sinnerbrink’s exceptionally vivid examples, in which he analyzes the philosophical-aesthetic receptivity to the work of such filmmakers such as David Lynch, Lars von Trier and Terrence Malick. This book is a ‘must read’ not only for philosophers and film scholars, but also for anyone seriously enthusiastic about cinema." Tarja Laine, Assistant Professor, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. "New Philosophies of Film is an ambitious attempt to overcome the Analytic-Continental divide in theorizing about film and to develop a new understanding of the relationship between film and philosophy. Beginning with a critical overview of recent developments in the philosophy of film and ending with interpretations that present film as a new mode of thinking, this book breaks new ground and will have to be reckoned with by anyone interested in film and philosophy." Thomas E Wartenberg, Professor of Philosophy, Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts, USA."""
There's Something about Malick: Film-Philosophy, Contemplative Style, and Ethics of Transformation
New Review of Film and Television Studies, 2017
Philosophers love to write about Terrence Malick. In this meta-critical essay, I examine recent philosophical evaluations of Malick’s film style – within the broader context of ‘film as philosophy’ or ‘film-philosophy’ – with the aim of laying bare the dominant motifs and values that film philosophers resort to when reflecting on the filmmaker’s pronounced stylistic hallmarks. First, I identify Malick’s widely perceived ‘contemplative style’ as a key catalyst behind philosophers’ fascination with his films and proceed to detail the diversity of stylistic devices and effects in terms of which philosophers describe it. The second movement of my analysis is to illustrate the decidedly ethical interests that accompany said configurations of Malick’s style and effects. I argue that Malick magnifies in philosophers a motive of personal transformation that is more widely at work within the project of film-philosophy. The philosophical achievements of Malick’s style, as commentators see it, always entail transformational effects on the viewer: his devices not only move us to contemplation, but potentially transform us to greater awareness, openness and connection. What are essentially value-laden interpretations of style are illustrated with reference to the three stylistic elements that feature most in philosophical writings on Malick: (1) his visual renderings of nature, (2) his uses of voice-over and (3) the ‘perspective effects’ that he is said to achieve. I conclude with some critical implications of my findings for the procedures and presuppositions underlying the project of film-philosophy. Keywords: Terrence Malick, film-philosophy, film style, contemplation, ethics, personal transformation
The Cinematic Life of the Figural. Mapping Shapes of Time in Terrence Malick's The New World (2005)
Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, 2015
THE CINEMATIC LIFE OF THE FIGURAL: MAPPING SHAPES OF TIME IN TERRENCE MALICK’S THE NEW WORLD (2005) Gabriella Blasi (The University of Queensland) This article investigates Terrence Malick’s cinematic treatment of nature in The New World and argues that cinema, as a figural technology, disrupts the Kantian time-space division informing modernist and postmodernist conceptions of the nature/culture divide. The argument takes Robert Sinnerbrink’s and Iain Macdonald’s divergent readings of Terrence Malick’s The New World and shows how a figural approach can overcome the nature/culture divide informing romantic (Sinnerbrink) and nihilistic (Macdonald) approaches to Malick’s treatment of human-nature relations. In using historical and romanticised figural gestures such as Pocahontas and John Smith, Malick’s film disrupts perception, sensations and significations associated with ideological and mythic readings of the tainted legend, and opens these gestures to their cinematic life. The arg...
2019
The Work of Terrence Malick: Time-Based Ecocinema develops a timely ecocinema approach to film analysis illuminated by Benjamin's notion of the turn of time. Current work on Malick's films emphasizes the spatial dynamics of his cinema, particularly as it pertains, from within a phenomenological framework, to the viewer's experience of films. This book redirects scholarly attention to the way Malick's directorial work shapes time and duration, laying new groundwork for the analysis of how films unsettle nature-culture binaries in modernity. The study performs this intervention through a rigorous engagement with Walter Benjamin's work on time, violence and technologies and the emergent figural approach to aesthetics in film studies. Each of these methods has important precedents in film studies and other fields. The combination of methods performed in this book contributes to understanding the relevance of a time-based approach to Malick's films and the practic...
The Cinematic Life of the Figural. Mapping Shapes of Time in Terrence Malick's The New World
Cinema 7, 2015
This article investigates Terrence Malick’s cinematic treatment of nature in The New World and argues that cinema, as a figural technology, disrupts the Kantian time-space division informing modernist and postmodernist conceptions of the nature/culture divide. The argument takes Robert Sinnerbrink’s and Iain Macdonald’s divergent readings of Terrence Malick’s The New World and shows how a figural approach can overcome the nature/culture divide informing romantic and nihilistic approaches to Malick’s treatment of human-nature relations. In using historical and romanticised figural gestures such as Pocahontas and John Smith, Malick’s film disrupts perception, sensations and significations associated with ideological and mythic readings of the tainted legend, and opens these gestures to their cinematic life. The argument draws on applications of Peter Fenves’ work on Benjamin’s conception of the turn of time to figural experiences of films. In order to illustrate the significance of Fenves’ study in film-philosophy, the analysis will pause at Malick’s use of the map-territory relation in the title sequences of The New World. A figural approach to the map-territory relation will crystallise time as a Benjaminian sphere of total neutrality, a non-subjective continuity of experience able to produce a temporal reduction that does not reside in subjective intentionality. Benjamin’s shape of time illuminates a vision of nature beyond nihilism and delusional romantic ideals, it contributes to a more defined philosophical role of the figural in film-philosophy and opens the film’s figural gestures to their posthumous and, indeed, posthuman, temporal plasticity.
There were periods when, in film schools and among film devotees, this book was cast aside as hopelessly outstripped by the progress of film art. If this is no longer the case, it is because the book has changed its character. Its relation to the films of the twenties, from which it took most of its examples, was that of a handbook of physiology to an actual human body moving in the light of day. At the same time, however, it was also a survey of these early productions, of their experimentation in the medium of silent imagery. This, of course, cannot be the book's relation to the films that were made after its publication during the subsequent fifty years. What, then, justifies its persistent presence?
Screening Landscapes: Film between the Picturesque and the Painterly
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 2021
Inherently connected to movement and to a sequential spatial experience in time, the picturesque has been considered as a precursor of the cinematic. In addition, the idea of the picturesque is closely connected to Heinrich Wölfflin’s notion of das Malerische or “the painterly,” which stands for a dynamic style of painting characterized by qualities of colour, stroke, and texture rather than of contour or line. Based on the keynote lecture delivered at the conference, The Picturesque: Visual Pleasure and Intermediality in-between Contemporary Cinema, Art and Digital Culture (Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, 25–26 October, 2019), the essay disentangles the complex network of connections between image and landscape, painting and film, the picturesque and the painterly.