Thinking Film: Philosophy at the Movies
Ebook
Overview
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.
A guide to how to think think through film featuring writing from internationally renowned scholars and including previously untranslated material.
Internationally renowned contributors including Stephen Mulhall and Vivian Sobchack
Includes translations of excerpts from key French thinkers, including Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze
Each section is introduced and contextualised by the book editors
Includes thinkers from both the continental and analytic traditions and is geared towards students of both schools of thought.
Film and philosophy is a growing area in both the disciplines of film studies and philosophy.
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
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.
- Title: Thinking Film: Philosophy at the Movies
- Authors: Richard Kearney, M. E. Littlejohn
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2023
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 424
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781350113473, 9781350113466, 1350113468, 1350113476
- Resource ID: LLS:9781350113473
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T10:09:03Z
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.