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Philosophy of Film
Edited by Clotilde Torregrossa (University of St. Andrews)
About this topic
| Summary | "Philosophy of Film" is often used to describe a few different kinds of work. Two are most important. We should distinguish between philosophy in or through film, and the philosophy of or about film. When one does philosophy through film, one seeks to either illuminate some philosophical idea or to make progress on some philosophical issue through a discussion of a movie. One might even attribute the philosophical work to the film. We might call this philosophy in film. In contrast, the philosophy of film is the philosophy about film. It asks about the nature of film, our experience of it, how it works its magic on us, and what limitations it might have. The analytic philosophy of film is principally issue driven. One of the issues concerns the philosophical limits of film, whether philosophy in film is possible. This mid-level category is home to both kinds of work, philosophy through film and the philosophy of film. |
| Key works | Carroll's Philosophy of Motion Pictures and Gaut's A Philosophy of Cinematic Art are two leading monographs offering opposing views on a wide range of issue in the analytic philosophy of film. |
| Introductions | Livingston and Plantinga's Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film is by far the best source for survey articles on topics and figures in the area. Thomson-Jones's Aesthetics and Film provides a clear, brief introduction to several important topics in the area. |
Show all references
Related
Subcategories
Ontology of Film (87)
Audience Engagement in Film (88 | 23)
Genres of Film (152 | 8)
Philosophy Through Film (292)
Philosophy of Film, Misc (130)
Contents
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- Cinema e nuove visioni: tra schermi e societ à multimediale.Sandra Telve - 2021 - [Dueville]: Ronzani numeri.Remove from this listExport citation
Bookmark - Quando il cinema era giovane: i fantasmi dell'opera, i fantasmi all'opera.Sergio Arecco - 2021 - Pistoia: Petite plaisance.Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Be more Obi-Wan.Kelly Knox - 2022 - New York, N.Y.: Dorling Kindersley.A fun, pocket-size book packed with inspiration from the galaxy's most cool and composed Jedi Master. Stay true to yourself with confidence and class. Is your new home more hive of villainy than sandy beach resort? Friends not the chosen ones you thought they were? Don't throw a tantrum - keep it classy and ask yourself, "What would Obi-Wan do?" Glide elegantly through anything life throws at you with pearls of wisdom from Obi-Wan Kenobi and fellow sages. Learn how to (...)Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- As deep as it gets: movies and metaphysics.Randall E. Auxier - 2022 - Chicago: Open Universe.About the author -- Note to the reader -- From the Alamo Draft House to the livingroom couch (or there and back again) -- Part I: Rated G: General Audiences -- 1. I know something you don't know: The Princess Bride -- 2. Lions and tigers and bears: scary stuff in the Wizard of Oz -- 3. The monster and the mensch: a child's eye view of Super 8 -- 4. Chef, Socrates, and the sage of love: finding love in (...)
- The Dweller on the Threshold: Whiteness, the Family and the End of Classical Cinema.Conall Cash - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (1):169-198.Through a discussion of two key American films of the 1940s and 1950s – Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and John Ford's The Searchers (1956) – this article situates the breakdown of classical cinema, or what Gilles Deleuze calls the “crisis of the action-image”, in relation to the critique of whiteness and the family. Focusing on the figure of the “dweller on the threshold” within these two films, the article shows how this individual's deprivation of action is tied (...)
- Dwelling in the Abyss: Society in Werner Herzog and Martin Heidegger.Haotian Wu - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (1):144-168.This article articulates a dialogue between Werner Herzog’s films and Martin Heidegger’s philosophy to illuminate human dwelling. In the light of Heidegger’s ideas of dwelling, thrownness, they-self, authenticity, abyss and being-towards-death, I look into the abyss of society as represented by Herzog, considering dwelling with humans in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) and Into the Abyss (2011) as dwelling through language and dwelling in proximity to death. This article’s primary purpose is to redress society’s overly negative connotation as monstrous (...)
- The Action Mode: Mile 22 and the Tension of Hypermediated Embodiment.Jonah Jeng - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (1):119-143.This article contends that, despite the naturalization of hypermediacy in everyday life, a tension persists between the proliferation of digital media and human phenomenal experience. Everyday phenomenal experience, in its delineation of a unified spatial field populated with bounded physical objects, exists in palpable tension with the subperceptual digital networks and data flows that underpin contemporary society and are indexed by aesthetics of hypermediacy. I contend that cinema, which simultaneously appeals to phenomenal experience and has itself become permeated by hypermediacy (...)
- Cinematic Mythmaking in Andrey Zvyagintsev's The Return and The Banishment.Louis Samuel Mealing - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (1):94-118.Since his debut feature The Return (2003), Andrey Zvyagintsev's films have drawn focus from film critics and theorists seeking to investigate a contextual analysis or the director's religious allusions. Hailed as the New Tarkovsky by some, a western-centric perspective has placed Zvyagintsev within the Russian canon from which he originates. However, in doing so, there has been a tendency to overlook a form and aesthetic that seeks to avoid these categorisations. By attempting to engage with his films independently from these (...)
- Plastic Surgery: Under the Skin, Suture, Destructive Plasticity and Post-Cinematic Ontologies.Greg Hainge - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (1):264-282.Analysing Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013), this article provides an overview of the importation of suture theory from psychoanalysis into film theory and Žižek’s revisiting of this theory, then bringing about a rapprochement between the concepts of suture and Malabou’s destructive plasticity, as expounded in her work The New Wounded. The forms of wounded subjectivity we find there are unable to stitch themselves into the illusory narratives needed to enable them to access a fixed sense of individual or shared (...)
- From Ascetic Ideals to Honest Illusions: A Nietzschean Interpretation of Inception.Yonghwa Lee & Kyoung-Min Han - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (1):244-263.This article illuminates the open ending of Christopher Nolan's film Inception (2010) in light of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy. Drawing particularly on Nietzsche's notions of ascetic ideals and honest illusions, the article contends that Cobb's refusal to look at the spinning top can be seen not necessarily as his renunciation of autonomy but as his new attempt to affirm his existence and create meanings. Mal's tragic death has turned Cobb into an ascetic idealist who paradoxically resorts to self-torture to alleviate his (...)
- Eternity Descending into Time: Badiou and the Cinematic Temporality of Love.Lu Zeng - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (1):221-243.This article brings Alain Badiou’s philosophy of love and truth into the consideration of the cinematic real. It argues that love has been overlooked in the discourse of the cinematic real and that love should be recuperated in and for cinema so that a version of the cinematic real informed by Badiou’s philosophy can emerge. Differing from the Althusserian–Lacanian concept of the real or reality, Badiou’s version of the cinematic real is infused with intensity and contingency; it accommodates love and (...)
- Speculative Transitions: Hegel, John Huston’s Moby Dick and the Dissolve.Joshua Harold Wiebe - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (1):199-220.This article draws out a potential encounter between Hegel and film studies. Following a line of thought instantiated by Theodor Adorno, it constructs a method of reading Hegel through cinematic formal analysis. In particular, the article argues that the speculative proposition should be thought through the structure of the dissolve. The speculative proposition is a sentence whose subject and predicate rest in uneasy relation to one another, and which is not a proposition of simple identity. Making use of a famous (...)
- Jenna Ng (2021). The Post-Screen through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie.Shaopeng Chen - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (1):296-299.
- Victor Fan (2022). Cinema Illuminating Reality: Media Philosophy through Buddhism.William Brown - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (1):292-295.
- Jean Ma (2022). At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators.Juan Camilo Velásquez - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (1):288-291.
- Julian Hanich & Martin P. Rossouw (Eds.) (2023). What Is Film Good For? On the Values of Spectatorship.Francesco Sticchi - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (1):283-287.
- The Ethics of Refusal in Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life.Marguerite La Caze & Magdalena Zolkos - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (1):72-93.Terrence Malick’s 2019 film A Hidden Life explores the ethical and political problem of refusal as an act and utterance of “not doing” violence and injustice that is expected. The film offers a nuanced and poetic depiction of Austrian peasant Franz Jägerstätter (1907–1943), who refused to give an oath of loyalty to Hitler ( Führereid), and was subsequently imprisoned and executed under the Nazi laws criminalizing conscientious objection as an “offence of sedition.” We argue that Malick complicates the question of (...)
- Kracauer and Tarkovsky’s Cinema of Redemptive Estrangement.Daniel Sullivan - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (1):46-71.Despite striking parallels between their philosophies and artistic work, there have been no prior dedicated studies of the reinforcing ideas of Siegfried Kracauer and Andrei Tarkovsky. I contend with other interpreters that Kracauer’s philosophy of film is best understood as a form of revelationism, with strong sociological and ontological theses about the nature of modern psychological life and the medium specificity of film. Essentially, Kracauer felt that certain films which adhere to what he called “truly cinematic” content by depicting the (...)
- Existential and Phenomenological Horror in Les Diaboliques.Daniel Tilsley - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (1):23-45.This article will show how, through an expressionist style that references Gothic and noir cinema, Les Diaboliques (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955) mediates concepts found in contemporary post-war French existentialism, in particular the phenomenology of horror of Sartre, with whom the director had a personal association. It will examine how the experience of horror is presented as a conscious apprehension of the world as irrational and no longer conforming to deterministic and conventional order. Les Diaboliques asserts that horror results from a distorted (...)
- Self-Effacing Barbie: The Ideal, the Real and the Quest for Authentic Selfhood.John Michael Corrigan & Justin Prystash - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (1):1-22.This article argues that the immediate critical responses to the blockbuster film Barbie (Greta Gerwig, 2023), which diverged along ideological lines, fail to account for the extent to which the film undercuts the very ideological divisions that sustain them. Rather than or in addition to presenting a left-wing or right-wing critique of contemporary gender roles, the film positions this contest within the vexed relationship between the ideal and the real. This metaphysical quandary is what propels the protagonists on a Buddhist-inspired (...)
- Redemption in Oblivion — Psychopathology of Charlie Chaplin.Morteza Shahram - manuscriptThe character of Charlie Chaplin in his movies is the personification of forgetfulness but not forgiveness ------ Someone who is not susceptible to bad conscience: (Nietzsche: the sting of conscience teaches one to sting). He carries no guilt, no regret, and is a mechanism of historical forgetfulness (like a happy beast which grazes free from past and future) ------ He undergoes misfortunes and occasional fortunes and comes out the same mechanism of historical forgetfulness he used to be ------ He is (...)
- A filmelmélet változásai.Károly Nemes - 1981 - Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Editor's Introduction.Laura T. Di Summa - 2025 - Film and Philosophy 29:3-6.
- Crisis of the Pseudoreal.Shaler Keenum - 2025 - Film and Philosophy 29:1-21.This article discusses the history of film ontology and advocates to shift from traditional film interpretations to understanding all images as pseudoreal. Historically, film and images have been understood with an inherent connection to pro-filmic reality: the captured image represented what was in front of the camera at some point in time. While theories of how to retain a sense of film realism have evolved as the processes for capturing and altering images have improved, a proclivity towards the real has (...)
- A Biosemantic Type of Anti-intentionalist Film Analysis.Joseph McKenna - 2025 - Film and Philosophy 29:107-124.The Ontological Question seems to be the main source of controversy in the Anti-intentionalism versus Intentionalism debate. The Ontological Question asks what determines the meaning of an artwork? Intentionalists argue that the intention of the artist determines the meaning of the artwork, while Anti-intentionalists argue that the artwork alone determines its own meaning. In this article I answer this question as it relates to film analysis. I propose a Biosemantic variety of film analysis, rooted in semantic externalist philosophy of language. (...)
- Wings of Desire and the Joys of Finitude.Joseph Kupfer - 2025 - Film and Philosophy 29:75-92.The film Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1987) begins to answer the startling question, “How could being human be superior to enjoying an angelic existence?” The film’s elevation of ordinary humanity is so persuasive that a few angels forego eternity, “take the plunge,” and become mortals. The first layer of human attraction is found in the uncomplicated pleasures of physical embodiment. To the enjoyment of bodily sensations such as warming our hands on a chilly day, the film adds the ecstasy (...)
- Inside/Outside.Glória Nogueira - 2025 - Film and Philosophy 29:23-44.In this article, I explore the ways in which the humor and narrative arc of Bo Burnham’s comedy special Inside (2021) reflects the existential attitude of today’s chronically-online youth, which I describe as dominated by online aestheticism. First, a Kierkegaardian reading will be offered of Bo’s character as he struggles between pursuing an aesthetic or ethical life-view, watching his own eventual downfall into despair from within. The impact of the film upon its audience, who watches the film from without, will (...)
- Shannon Sullivan’s White Privilege and Antisemitism in James Gray’s Armageddon Time.Seth Vannatta - 2025 - Film and Philosophy 29:61-74.This paper investigates Shannon Sullivan’s concept of white privilege through the lens of James Gray’s 2022 film, Armageddon Time. Sullivan investigates the concept of white racial privilege and the problem with middle-class, white anti-racism. In Armageddon Time, the Graff family, “good white people”, progressives with anti-racist intentions, actually strive to achieve the white privilege Sullivan analyzes. The dynamics of white privilege in the film are more complex because the family is Jewish. I argue that antisemitism provides a problem for Sullivan’s (...)
- You and me, same!Logan Canada-Johnson & Sara Protasi - 2025 - Film and Philosophy 29:45-60.In this paper we argue that political envy is central to unraveling the racial dynamics in Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing. Building upon Sara Protasi’s taxonomy of envy and, in particular, from her analysis of some DTRT scenes, we conduct a more thorough interrogation of how political emotions, most notably envy, shape race relations in the film. We start by summarizing Protasi’s account of envy and then review two alternative accounts of political emotions. After elucidating what envy is and (...)
- Fraught Encounters on the Focus Plane.Steven G. Smith - 2025 - Film and Philosophy 29:93-105.A fraughtness in the human communicative situation—the impossibility of assuring collegial equality in our presentations to each other, given that we are striving to control each other’s attention—is compellingly figured in the treatment of the focus plane of show entertainment in film musicals. In Busby Berkeley’s seminal work in 42nd Street (1933), the portrait of the Great Showman in The Great Ziegfeld (1936), and Brian De Palma’s satirical Phantom of the Paradise (1974) it may be seen that the show musical (...)
- De wet als kunstwerk [The Law as a Work of Art]. [REVIEW]Martijn Boven - 2015 - Wijsgerig Perspectief 55 (2):42-42.Willem Witteveen, a member of the Upper House for the Dutch Labour Party and professor at Tilburg University, was among the passengers on the MH17 aircraft that crashed in eastern Ukraine in July 2014. Prior to this tragic incident, he had submitted the manuscript of “De wet als kunstwerk [The Law as a Work of Art]”. The posthumous edition of the book has been augmented with a foreword by his son, Freek Witteveen, and a series of collages and miniatures. Consequently, (...)
- Generative Disgust, Aesthetic Engagement, and Community.Erin Bradfield - 2022 - In Max Ryynänen, Heidi Kosonen & Susanne Ylönen (eds.), Cultural Approaches to Disgust and the Visceral. Routledge. pp. 175-187.How do individuals and communities respond to negative aesthetic experience? Historically, philosophical aesthetics has devoted much thought to positive aesthetic experience, including the beautiful, agreeable, charming, and tasteful. But this is only a partial picture. Some aesthetic experience displeases: the ugly, disgusting, and horrific are but a few examples with which aestheticians have grappled in recent decades. The aversive and visceral nature of disgust has generated particular interest. But as Carolyn Korsmeyer points out in _Savoring Disgust: The Foul & the (...)
- (1 other version)Philosophy through film.Mary M. Litch - 2014 - London: Routledge. Edited by Amy Karofsky.Truth -- Skepticism -- Personal identity -- Artificial intelligence -- Free will, determinism, and moral responsibility -- Ethics -- Political philosophy -- Problem of evil -- Existentialism.
- (1 other version)Trust in the world: a philosophy of film.Josef Früchtl - 2018 - New York: Routledge. Edited by Sarah L. Kirkby.Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: Evident Experience of Existence -- 1 Gilles Deleuze and Belief in the World -- 2 A Struggle Against Oneself: Cinema as Technology of the Self -- 3 The Evidence of Film and the Presence of the World: Jean-Luc Nancy's Cinematic Ontology -- 4 Cinema as Human Art: Rescuing Aura in Gesture -- 5 Exhibiting or Presenting? Politics, Aesthetics, and Mysticism in Benjamin's and Deleuze's Concepts of Cinema -- 6 Made (...)
- Viszontképek a filmben: képfilozófiai, képelméleti és médiafilozófiai megközelítés.Erika Fám - 2020 - Kolozsvár: Egyetemi Műhely Kiadó.Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- (1 other version)Film theory: the basics.Kevin McDonald - 2022 - New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.Fully updated and expanded throughout, this second edition of Film Theory: The Basics provides an accessible introduction to the key theorists, concepts, and debates that have shaped the study of moving images. The book examines film theory from its emergence in the early twentieth century to its study in the present day, and explores why film has drawn special attention as a medium, as a form of representation, and as a focal point in the rise of modern visual culture. It (...)
- Fī naqd al-sīnimā: taqāṭuʻāt al-sīnimā, al-adab wa-al-falsafah.ʻĀdil Khamīs Zahrānī - 2023 - al-Khubar al-Shamālīyah, al-Saʻūdīyah: Jusūr al-Thaqāfah lil-Nashr wa-al-Tawzīʻ.Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Uncovering memory: filming in South Africa, Germany, Poland and Bosnia/Herzegovina.Tanja Sakota - 2023 - Johannesburg, South Africa: Wits University Press.The book is an interdisciplinary work shaped around films made by different workshop participants using film to access personal interpretations of space and place. It is focused on interacting and engaging with remembering through different memory sites.Travelling along a timeline of memory Tanja Sakota takes us on a journey through South Africa Germany Poland and Bosnia/Herzegovina. Using a camera and short film format Sakota hosts several workshops in different countries focused on interacting and engaging with remembering through different memory sites. (...)
- (1 other version)Psychoanalysis and ethics in documentary film.Agnieszka Piotrowska - 2023 - New York, NY: Routledge.This distinctively interdisciplinary book draws upon psychoanalytic theory to explore how expectations, desires and fears of documentary subjects and filmmakers are engaged, and the ethical issues that can arise as a result. Original and accessible, the second edition of this ground-breaking book addresses the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis and documentary film, reviews documentary film practice as a field, provides a personal account of the author's relationship with a subject of her own work, and presents a thorough interrogation of the (...)
- Black screens, white frames: Gilles Deleuze and the filmmaking machine.Tanya Shilina-Conte - 2024 - New York: Oxford University Press.This chapter delineates the theory of the black or white screen as a force of deterritorialization in minor, or modern political cinema. In the previous chapter I relied on the molar and the molecular for the description of deterritorializations in corporeal and cerebral modern cinema, but here I shift emphasis to the major and the minor. These latter concepts help us to better understand the connection between thought, body, and social milieu. Various impossibilities in the social field create conditions that (...)
- Monsters vs. patriarchy: toxic imagination in global horror cinema.Patricia Saldarriaga - 2025 - New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Edited by Emy Manini.Across the globe, the violent effects of patriarchy are manifest. Women, trans people, gender non-conforming people, and the racialized Other are regularly subjected to physical danger, beginning with the denial of vitally important health care, and, in its most horrific form, rape, trafficking, and murder. Monsters vs. Patriarchy links these real-world horrors to the monstrification and dehumanization of people as expressed in contemporary global cinema. This monstrification has been achieved through a toxic imagination attributed to women, a trait which historically (...)
- Hybrid documentary and non-binary cinema.Luke W. Moody - 2025 - New York, NY: Routledge.Hybrid Documentary and Non-Binary Cinema offers an expansive exploration of the contemporary documentary cinema form, aesthetics, and ethics. Beginning with a brief history of early seminal examples of magical realism, and constructed realities in documentary and ethnographic film the book will focus on recent and present-day examples of work that blur the lines between fiction and non-fiction. The book will also take a series of case studies to question the vision and motives of filmmakers working between documentary and fictional film. (...)
- (1 other version)Cavell on film.Stanley Cavell - 2025 - Albany: State University of New York Press. Edited by William Rothman.A collection of the philosopher Stanley Cavell's most important writings on cinema.
- Films that spill: beyond the cinema of transgression.Marie Sophie Beckmann - 2025 - New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.Films That Spill is a comprehensive study of the Cinema of Transgression, a hitherto under-examined moment in US underground film culture. Reconsidering the concept of transgressive cinema not only as a description of the intentionally provocative content of the films, but rather as a feature of a cross-disciplinary practice, the book explores how filmmaking in the context of the vibrant and intermingling art, music, performance, and film scenes in 1980s Lower Manhattan spilled over the boundaries of artistic disciplines, media formats, (...)
- (2 other versions)Le langage cinématographique.Marcel Martin - 1955 - Paris,: Éditions du Cerf.Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Shane Denson (2023). Post-Cinematic Bodies.Emma Dussouchaud-Esclamadon - 2024 - Film-Philosophy 28 (3):624-626.
- Matthew Rukgaber (2022). Nietzsche in Hollywood: Images of the Übermensch in Early American Cinema.Paolo Stellino - 2024 - Film-Philosophy 28 (3):620-623.
- Steven DeLay (ed.) (2023). Life Above the Clouds: Philosophy in the Films of Terrence Malick.Martin Woessner - 2024 - Film-Philosophy 28 (3):616-619.
- Francesco Sticchi (2021). Mapping Precarity in Contemporary Cinema and Television: Chronotopes of Anxiety, Depression, Expulsion/Extinction.Tim Lindemann - 2024 - Film-Philosophy 28 (3):612-615.
- The Pleasure of Self-erasure: Malabou, (Sexual) Anarchy and Agnès Varda’s Sans toit ni loi.Monique Rooney - 2024 - Film-Philosophy 28 (3):586-611.This article interprets Agnès Varda’s Sans toit ni loi (Without roof or law) through the lens of Catherine Malabou’s concept of anarchy as the “non-governable”: order without command or origin. I elucidate key elements of Malabou’s anarchy in my analysis of Varda’s character Mona Bergeron, a rebellious girl who wanders free from structures of domination. I read Varda’s Mona as an emblem of sexual anarchy, with detailed reference to Malabou’s argument that the clitoris – a “little pebble” of concealed pleasure (...)
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