What does cinema think that nothing but it can think?

Maska ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (200) ◽  
pp. 68-77
Author(s):  
Anja Banko
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
American Film ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
Contemporary Film

The article deals with questions of contemporary film theory by explaining and reflecting on the theses as proposed by the American film and literary critic Nico Baumbach in his work Cinema/Politics/Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2018). Baumbach is able to analyse the questions of what status film has in relation to politics, philosophy and art in a contemporarily relevant way, approaching film studies through reading authors such as Rancire, Badiou and Agamben in dialogue with Althusser, Deleuze and Benjamin. The article focuses on the positioning and meaning of Baumbach’s thought in the contemporary field of film theory. We position the author’s thought as necessarily dependent on historical context and emphasise its potential for further contemplation, especially as regards the fruitful connection of the dominant branches of film theory that understand film in other ways than merely as the ‘seventh art’.

Affect, or Postmodern Sentimentalism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Burnetts
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Basis ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Contemporary Film

Chapter Four provides a wider theoretical basis for the ‘sophistication’ and self-consciousness that characterises post-classical or postmodern forms of sentimentality in US film culture, with particular attention paid to notions of ‘excess’ and distanciation. It accounts in particular for the influence of key modernists like Adorno, Benjamin and Brecht on taste categories that persist in contemporary film studies, with particular reference to the ‘ideological stoicism’ that is alleged to predominate in critical film culture. The discussion will provide context for a discussion of the ‘affective’ turn in film theory, around which the contributions of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell loom large in their centralisation of a film-as-thought paradigm.

Vertigo

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adriano D’Aloia
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Neuroscience ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Mirror Neurons ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Emotional Experience ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Embodied Simulation ◽  
Contemporary Cinema ◽  
Contemporary Film

The chapter ‘Vertigo. Towards a Neurofilmology’ offers an introduction to the book’s contents and methods. The implementation of psychology of perception, philosophy of mind, and suggestions from cognitive neuroscience (in particular the role of ‘mirror neurons’ and the hypothesis of ‘embodied simulation’) has the capability to renew contemporary film theory and to reduce the distance between competing approaches (i.e. cognitivist and phenomenological film studies). ‘Neurofilmology’ adopts an enactive and embodied approach to cognition and provides interpretative tools for the exploration of contemporary cinema. Through a series of recurrent ‘aerial motifs’ in which the film character loses his/her equilibrium—acrobatics, fall, impact, overturning, and drift—the cinema offers an intense motor and emotional experience that puts the spectator’s somatosensory perception in tension. At the same time, it provides compensation by adopting embodied forms of regulation of stimuli and a dynamic restoration of gravity and orientation (the so called ‘disembodying-reembodying’ dynamic).

Modern Thought and the Phenomenology of Film

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cleo Hanaway-Oakley
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Edmund Husserl ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
Siegfried Kracauer ◽  
Modern Thought ◽  
Franz Brentano ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Film Viewing

This chapter situates Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of film in its historical context through analysing its key insights—the reciprocal and embodied nature of film spectatorship—in the light of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century philosophy and psychology, charting Merleau-Ponty’s indebtedness to thinkers as diverse as Henri Bergson, Max Wertheimer, Hugo Münsterberg, Rudolf Arnheim, Victor Freeburg, Sergei Eisenstein, and Siegfried Kracauer. The historical Bergson is differentiated from the Deleuzian Bergson we ordinarily encounter in film studies, and Merleau-Ponty’s fondness for gestalt models of perception is outlined with reference to the competing ‘persistence of vision’ theory of film viewing. The chapter ends with a consideration of some of the ways in which James Joyce could have encountered early phenomenology, through the work of the aforementioned philosophers and psychologists and the ideas of Gabriel Marcel, Franz Brentano, William James, and Edmund Husserl.

Deleuze and Lola Montès

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Rushton
Keyword(s):  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
World Today ◽  
Film Interpretation ◽  
The World ◽  
Time Image

Gilles Deleuze represents the most widely referenced theorist of cinema today. And yet, even the most rudimentary pillars of his thought remain mysterious to most students (and even many scholars) of film studies. From one of the foremost theorists following Deleuze in the world today, Deleuze and Lola Montès offers a detailed explication of Gilles Deleuze’s writings on film – from his books Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985). Building on this foundation, Rushton provides an interpretation of Max Ophuls’s classic film Lola Montès as an example of how Deleuzian film theory can function in the practice of film interpretation.

The Real of Reality: The Realist Turn in Contemporary Film Theory

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Reeh-Peters ◽  
Stefan W. Schmidt ◽  
Peter Weibel
Keyword(s):  
Film Theory ◽  
The Real ◽  
Contemporary Film

Beyond Hollywood

2018 ◽  
pp. 113-128
Author(s):  
Maite Conde
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
American Film ◽  
Slave Labor ◽  
The North ◽  
Brazilian Cinema ◽  
Material Reality ◽  
Hollywood Movies ◽  
Brazilian Film

This chapter examines Brazilian director Humberto Mauro’s 1927 film Thesouro Perdido, which was influenced the North American film Tol'able David, directed by Henry King in 1921. The chapter examines discussions regarding mimicry, bringing them to bear specifically on early Brazilian cinema and Brazilian film theory and what has been dismissed as its imitative relationship to Hollywood movies. Analyzing the structure and aesthetics of Mauro’s film, the chapter discusses the differences between it and its Hollywood template, and it locates this difference in the country’s material reality, that is, the remnants of traditional patriarchal structures in Brazil and their roots in slave labor.

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