Hailed as one of America's original art forms, film has the distinctive character of crossing high and low art. But film has done more than this. According to American philosopher Stanley Cavell, film was also a place where America in the 1930s and 1940s did its thinking, a tradition that was taken up and enriched throughout world cinema. Can film indeed think? That is, can film do the work of philosophy?
Following Cavell's lead to think along the tear of the analytic-continental traditions, this book draws from both sides of the philosophical divide to reflect on this question. Spanning generations and disciplines, pondering everything from art house classics to mainstream blockbusters, Thinking Film: Philosophy at the Movies aims to fling open the doors to this conversation on all sides. Inquiring into both philosophy's word on film and film's word to philosophy, the interdisciplinary dialogue of this book traverses the conceptual and the particular as it considers how film catalyzes our thinking and sets us talking. After viewing the world through film, we find our world--and ourselves--transformed by deeper understanding and new possibilities.
This book aims to provide a novel and engaging way in to thinking with and about this enduringly popular art form.
Edited by:
Professor Richard Kearney,
Murray Littlejohn
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9781350113459
ISBN 10: 135011345X
Pages: 424
Publication Date: 21 September 2023
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Introduction – Richard Kearney and M. E. Littlejohn Part 1. Classic Philosophers on Film 1. The Thought of Movies, Stanley Cavell 2. On Cinema, Gilles Deleuze Part 2: Thinking on Films 3. Film as Philosophy and Cinematic Thinking, Robert Sinnerbrink 4. Theory, Therapy and Classic Hollywood Movies, M.E. Littlejohn 5. Missing Mothers/Desiring Daughters: Framing the Sight of Women, Naomi Scheman 6. Why is ‘Leap Year’ not a Cavellian Comedy of Remarriage?, Stephen Mulhall 7. Film and Television as Forms of Shared Experience, Sandra Laugier 8. What Does it Mean to Have A Cinematic Idea? Deleuze and Kurosawa’s Stray Dog, David Deamer 9. The Active Eye (Revisted): Toward a Phenomenology of Cinematic Movement, Vivian Sobchack 10. Rethinking Monster Movies: Men In Black, Alien Resurrection and Apocalypse Now, Richard Kearney 11. A Plural Transcendence: When Film Does Phenomenology, Anna Westin 12. I Wake up Screaming: Kansas and Beyond, Anthony Steinbock 13. Mediating Fairy Stories in Words and Images: Warring Magics in J.R.R. Tolkien and Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, Stephanie Rumpza Part 3: Thinking with Films 14. On Wim Wender’s Paris, Texas, Richard Kearney 15. On Larissa Shepitko’s The Ascent, Fanny Howe 16. On Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, Brian Treanor 17. On Sidney Lumet’s Serpico, Sam B. Girgus 18. On Antwone Fisher’s Antwone Fisher, Alberto G. Urquidez 19. On Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Our Little Sister, Paul Freaney 20. On Lars Von Trier’s The House that Jack Built, John Panteleimon Manoussakis 21. On Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest, J. E. Grefenstette 22. On Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice, Joseph S. O’Leary 23. On Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, Patrick Hederman 24. On Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Double Life of Veronique, Joseph Kickasola 25. On Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful 8, Matthew Clemente 26. On Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, John Fardy 27. On Persichetti, Ramsey, and Rothman’s Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse, Anne M. Carpenter 28. On the Dardenne Brothers’ The Young Ahmed, Joel Mayward 29. On John Huston’s The Dead, Magnus Ferguson 30. On Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, Jason Wirth
Richard Kearney is Charles B. Seelig Professor of Philosophy at Boston College, USA. He is the author of over 20 books on European philosophy and literature (including two novels and a volume of poetry) and has edited or co-edited 14 more. Murray Littlejohn is Senior Instructor, Humanities and Languages, University of New Brunswick, Canada.
Reviews for Thinking Film: Philosophy at the Movies
From the groundbreaking works of Cavell and Deleuze, through contemporary philosophies of film, to a philosophical working-through of particular films, this book provides a detailed guide to some of the most important philosophical work on film of the last half-century. Kearney and Littlejohn have done something remarkable here. * Joseph Westfall, Professor of Philosophy, University of Houston-Downtown, USA *
