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Once upon a time, not so long ago, a serious discussion about the philosophy of film would have seemed ludicrous. While theorizing about cinematic meaning and form dates back to the medium's very early days, it was not until the mid-Eighties that a small number of journals, scholars, and academic departments acknowledged the study of film as a legitimate branch of professional philosophy. Cinema has long been denigrated either as a medium whose concerns were not primarily philosophical, or worse still, as simply a product of mass culture. Even today, now that film has constituted itself as an art, it is easy to overlook its potential to stimulate serious reflection and speculation and intellectually engage even the most spectacle-obsessed viewer. A new anthology, Film and Knowledge: Essays on the Integration of Images and Ideas (Kevin Stoehr, ed., McFarland & Company Inc., Publishers, 239 pp., $39.95), represents an impressive effort to remedy this situation. Containing 14 theoretical essays by both established and cutting-edge philosophers of film on different epistemological issues in classic and contemporary cinema, the book is a cut above the academic norm, thanks to the originality of its subject matter and the clarity of its ideas.
The first two essays in the anthology, discussing David Lynch's Lost Highway and Paul Schrader's Affliction, respectively link narrative structure with moral identity, contemplating the human quest for order and knowledge, and raise important ethical questions about inclusion and exclusion in human relations. The next four articles deal with skepticism, the book's main philosophical interest, using Hitchcock's Suspicion, Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, and Jordan's The Crying Game to explore excessive doubt, radical skepticism, and the deconstruction of political and gender identities. The discussion concludes with an illuminating analysis of Chris Marker's La Jetée, showing the strong parallels between Marker's film and the essentialism Plato evoked in his famous "Myth of the Cave" allegory from The Republic. Sticking with the classics, the final essays in the first section illustrate issues of multi-perspectivism in Kurosawa's Rashomon and Kant's ideas of consciousness and personal identity as reflected in Welles's Citizen Kane. Even if their ideas seem to be at times slightly imposed on the films (one can't help wondering: did Neil Jordan really read Wittgenstein?) - the first group of essays at least convince that film is a good starting point for the teaching and study of philosophy.
However, cinema does not just motivate the discussion of epistemology by challenging us with questions of free will in Sliding Doors or by revisiting the famous "brain in the vat" problem in The Matrix. Basic philosophical issues invite us to consider the medium itself and the overall nature of cinematic experience and cognition. Stoehr understands this, and dedicates the second section of the book to contemporary issues in film theory and criticism. In a critical analysis of Gregory Currie's seminal work Image and Mind, he questions the starting point of cognitivism: does mental simulation constitute our primary engagement with film? In the most intriguing part of the book, a mini-symposium with Nöel Carroll debates feminism's validity as a critical and interpretive approach to film, provoking reflection on the analysis of feminist film theory and criticism, and even more importantly, on the role of ideology in film studies.
Film and Knowledge, a collection valuable to people of any philosophical persuasion, joins a limited number of resources (such as the on-line journals Film-Philosophy and Senses of Cinema) whose ongoing devotion to this burgeoning field helps establish cinema as a medium examining the human condition.
Ohad Landesman
go to book reviews, page 3
Ohad Landesman is an intern at Film Comment.
© 2003 by The Film Society of Lincoln Center
© 2003 by The Film Society of Lincoln Center
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