Film Figures

Warwick Mules’ Film Figures advances a bold thesis: that, in its multi-layered depictions of people, stories and worlds, cinema is always feeling its way toward a future, imagining other outcomes, contesting the world’s collective death-impulse. Exploring, in a new and original manner, a range of cinematic examples from Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles to Robert Bresson and Michelangelo Antonioni, Mules offers us not only an inspiring method of film analysis, but also an urgent rallying cry for planetary consciousness and renewal. * Adrian Martin, Monash University, Australia, and author of Mysteries of Cinema (2018) * Warwick Mules engages in a serious and ambitious attempt to ask what is really going on when we watch a movie, via the work of several philosophers but above all Bernard Stiegler. The highly original “figural” approach pursued by Mules sees films as ways in which we feel our way towards the future, where doing so, in the incompletion if not the failure to cohere of the individual, the collective and the film itself, comes to be seen as the very thing that opens pathways towards telling a future otherwise. The spiralling backwards and forwards movements and leaps of time described by Mules are exemplified in brilliant readings of a diverse range of movies – from Rear Window, The Third Man and L’Eclisse to Beckett’s Film, but especially the more recent The Father (by Florian Zeller) – leaving the reader with the feeling that, just perhaps, cinema has not yet exhausted its potential to reorient the disorientation that characterizes our contemporary inexistence. * Dan Ross *