OUTLINES OF READING ASSIGNMENTS
PHIL 490: Philosophy and Film
9/6/2009
BACKGROUND
Philosophy and film: the general connection between philosophy and film
Philosophy in (though) film
Philosophical issues raised in a film’s plotline or dialog
Pedagogical value in illustrating philosophical points
Well-chosen examples that reach the masses
Thought experiments
The Problem of Evil: Seventh Seal
Free Will: Gattaca, Minority Report
Appearance and reality: Matrix, Terminator
Personal identity: Heaven Can Wait, Memento
Moral relativism: Crimes and Misdemeanors
Conflicting moral obligation: Casablanca, The Music Box, The Third Man, Fail-Safe, The Seige
Individual vs. community: Antz
Dehumanization in modern society: Modern Times, The Trial
Philosophy of film
A branch of aesthetics, parallel to philosophy of literature, which investigates the essence of film
Philosophical questions raised by the medium of film itself
e.g., is film an art form, what is film, is there a cinematic author, why do we react emotionally to film, is there an implicit narrator in all films, can documentaries be a vehicle to objectivity
THOMAS WARTENBERG: “PHILOSOPHY AND FILM” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
1. The Idea of a Philosophy of Film
Contributors to discussions in philosophy and film
Includes non-philosophers
Includes writers in film theory (subset of film studies)
Justification for philosophical input on the subject: Anglo-Americans do not share the psychoanalytic assumptions of many film theorists, and thus think that they need to overhaul the discipline
Philosophers have always been interested in specific art forms (e.g., Aristotle’s poetics)
Cognitive film theory (Carrol): modeled on studies of natural sciences
Emphasizes viewers' conscious processing of films
This is opposed to a more humanistic approach, modeled on Wittgenstein
2. The Nature of Film
Whether film is an art form: two problems
Problem 1: films were originally vulgar entertainment (vaudeville, peepshows)
Problem 2: films borrow too much on other art forms (plays, music)
Classical film theorists on the essential nature of film (from Wartenberg)
Technical devices
Hugo Münsterberg (1916): technical features of films differentiate it from other art forms, e.g., flashbacks, closeups; these features are objectified mental functions that parallel what goes on in our own mind (closeups parallel paying close attention to something)
Capturing motion
Rudolph Arnheim (1957): sound movies are a decline from film’s original art form; its essential nature is capturing motion, and sound adds a new artistic medium
Realism
André Bazin (realism, 1967): film has its basis in photography, which captures the real world; film has an ability to present the world to us as frozen in time. (Draws on Wells and Renoir)
Emphasizes the long shot, rather than the close up
Kendall Walton (1984): transparency thesis: since film is based on photography, we actually see objects that appear on the screen
3. Film and Authorship
Auteur theory: the director of the film is the creative intelligence who shapes the entire film (similar to authors of literature)
Francois Truffaut: to be a work of art, the director must have complete control over the screenplay and direction of the actors
Criticism of Auteur theory
The auteur theory underestimates the impact that other contributors to a movie have (specifically, the actors, cinematographers, and editors)
Most major films are the product of established film industries, e.g., Hollywood
Post-modern “death of the author”: films are the products of social contexts
4. Emotional Engagement: why should we care about a film’s fictional characters
We identify with them, particularly as idealized characters
Crit: why do we care about characters that we don’t identify with
We imagine things taking place that we care about
Simulation theory: our emotional response is running offline, and thus we do not express our emotions as we normally do
Account of horror movies: we enjoy having the emotion while being safe in our offline environment
Crit: no clear explanation of what it means to be “off line”
Thought theory: our mere thoughts give us emotions
e.g., by imagining an injustice, we have emotions about the injustice
Crit: it’s not clear why we would have emotional reactions to mere thoughts, rather than stronger mental states such as belief
5. Film Narration
Problem of unreliable narrators: how does the audience come to know that the narrator has a distorted view of the world
Implicit narrators: whether, in narratorless narratives, an implicit narrator is needed to give the audience access to the film’s fictional world
Imagined seeing thesis: viewers are imagining to see photographically-derived images of the narrative, not the narrative itself
What viewers actually see is not a pure view of the narrative, but one affected by film editing; thus they imagine seeing something like a movie of the narrative
6. Film and Society
Oppression in traditional film narrative: popular Hollywood film narratives perpetuate an unrealistically positive view of society that obscures the reality of social domination
Socially conscious films: many films do critically portray the realities of class, race, gender, and sexuality (e.g., guess who’s coming to dinner)
7. Film as Philosophy
Film’s substantive contribution to philosophy
Film only have pedagogical value
Wartenberg: films provide valuable philosophical thought experiments
Stanley Cavell: many films portray philosophical skepticism
Minimalist avant garde films help show the necessary features of films
8. Conclusions and Prognosis
RICHARD A. GILMORE: DOING PHILOSOPHY AT THE MOVIES; INTRODUCTION: WHAT IT MEANS TO DO PHILOSOPHY
Main theses:
(1) philosophy can help us redefine a movie’s message to make it relevant to our own lives; (2) a philosophical approach to film can help transform our lives. (3) philosophy and movies each involve a process of discovery, and the two can be integrated
Wittgenstein’s view of philosophy
Philosophy as a kind of sickness that a person needs to be cured of, and his later antiphilosophy philosophy is meant to be just such a cure
Wittgenstein regularly went to the movies, perhaps using it as his own personal cure
One can go to the movies philosophically
Philosophy and popular culture
There’s a long philosophical tradition of considering the relation of the individual to popular culture
Plato: disliked popular art because it prompted emotions to override reason
Endorses government censorship of art because of art’s bad influence
Allegory of the cave: similar to the movie experience
Escape from the cave: transcend its emotional appeal, view emotional reactions with some intellectual detachment and thoughtfulness
Similar to Plato’s view of love: we must learn to be attracted to a person’s mind, not his/her body
Theater and music hit us so emotionally fast and hard that they can inhibit our developing a deeper understanding of reality, which gives us a choice.
Aristotle: art can be a therapeutic catharsis of our emotions
Plato and Aristotle: we need to escape from our usual ways of living which is a type slavery by which we become unhealthy emotionally attachment.
“To remain healthy in this philosophical way will require a constant exercise of those parts of us that can contribute to our freedom from certain kinds of restraints, and one of the most effective modes of exercise for those parts of us can be engaging with dramatic works of art that have a kind of narrative structure, like movies.”
Philosophy and movies as tools for transport
Each one is useful in its appropriate context and misused if used in an inappropriate context
“Against Plato, I advocate less censorship and more training in how to use the tools of popular culture to attain greater philosophical health”
Philosophy and movies can both be tools to transport us from our given condition and enter a new condition
“To examine our relation to movies works as an analogue to our relation to our own minds. In movies we find an objective correlative for all of our inner dramas of identity, of confidence (in ourselves and in others), in the reliability of the world. In this way we can say that not only was film as if meant for philosophy, but that philosophy is also as if meant for film. What movies do to a concatenation of experiences, philosophy can do to movies.”
Dewey:
To have an experience involves weaving a series of events into a narrative story with a beginning, middle and end
“The central feature of our having an experience, according to Dewey, is that what we do, what happens to us, gets framed in or woven into a narrative account. In order to have an “experience” a sequence of events in our life will have to acquire a kind of narrative form, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.”
Dramatic art, like movies, weaves a series of events into a narrative (e.g., the three-part story line with a beginning, middle and end).
Enemies of experience’s narrative
“The primary enemies of experience, for Dewey, are those things which interfere with our abilities to see the relations between events that happen to us; they obscure the connecting pattern that unifies an experience for us.”
Balance of energies
By recognizing the narrative structure of our lives, we gain a “balance of energies” whereby “insecurity is eased and is replaced by a sense of confidence in our own purpose, in our ability to act, and in the sense of having a place from which to act
For Gilmore, this is philosophical health
Philosophy can weave movie narratives into the narrative of our own lives
“the best part of going to the movies becomes the time after the movie when you get a chance to talk about the movie”
“we narrativize the themes of the film into the context of our own lives rather than having our lives narrativized by what we see in the movies”
“The movies then become tools for improving, empowering, and liberating our lives rather than oppressive or manipulating forces that corrupt our lives by making us more violent, solipsistic, or fetishistic in our relationships with other people.”
“To be prepared to redescribe movies in terms of one’s own life, one’s own truths, is to go to the movies philosophically.”
Movies can be bad influences on people, but they don’t have to be if we go to the movies philosophically
The trajectory of philosophy: “The irritation of doubt causes a struggle to attain a state of belief.” (C.S. Peirce)
Philosophical thought involves a process of discovery
“It is the attempt to move from a place of confusion and doubt to a place of understanding and of knowing what to do.”
All moves narratives do involve this pattern of discovery
A good way to develop philosophical thought is to reflect on the pattern of discovery in movie narratives
“My goal is to combine these two ways of doing the same thing in order to have each augment the possibilities for discovery in the other.”
How to be philosophical at the movies
“To go to the movies philosophically is to become a protagonist oneself. It is to be sensitive to and to acknowledge certain mysteries, certain difficulties raised by a movie that cause an irritation of doubt. One must work with what one already knows, but also search for additional clues, be alert to the suggestion of as yet unperceived relationships. It involves seeing new connections between the characters in the movie, between the different parts of the plot of the movie, and between what happens in the movie and what happens in the world and in our own lives.”
Pragmatism
“There is always more to learn in the process of our ongoing lives, in this evolving world, which is to say that there is always more meaning that can be incorporated into our lives. This is the core idea of American pragmatism.”
The downside: our understanding is always only partial, and there is always more to know
Interpretation
Reductive interpretations (Y is really about Z): e.g., a heist movie is really about the oppression of people by capitalist forces
A good interpretation for me is one that leads in the direction of wisdom and leads a person to see more
Sontag’s “erotics of art” notion of interpretation
Interpretation that works the way a healthy love relationship works
Embrace the other in their otherness, to allow the other to be as they are and to grow into what they will grow into
GILMORE: JOHN FORD’S THE SEARCHERS AS AN ALLEGORY OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL SEARCH
Introduction
The goal of the Searchers:
“to move from a greater amount of confusion, anxiety, and unhappiness to a lesser amount; to progress from self-deception, despair, and a kind of madness to something like a condition of mental health and a sense of knowing how to go on”
“The problem is to undo the internal conflicts that we have by recognizing our self-deceptions, to see clearly “something that is in plain view.”
Significance of monument valley:
“It will not be long, in geological time, before they will all be gone, leveled as just more pulverized dirt in a vast and flat landscape. These buttes and mesas invoke the central problem of our lives, the problem of how to occupy space in time—how to maximize the time that we have, what we must do to make the time of our lives worth living.”
Ethan Edwards: “a figure caught in time, between an old order and a new order”
He is haunted by the violence in the world
Throughout the film, he transforms somewhat from isolation to assimilation
Searchers as an allegory for philosophy (both the history of philosophy and philosophical texts)
Searchers as a revisionist Western:
“To say that it is “revisionist” is to say that the film reflects a reevaluation of, or a reflection on, the old version, the old vision of western life.”
Old view of the west: clear distinction between the good and bad guys
Searchers view: Ethan is a morally ambiguous character: “He is hyperaggressive, violent, criminal, angry, insensitive, and a blatant racist. For all that, however, there is something attractive about him and we certainly identify with him.”
Philosophy as revisionist: “to begin to see what is ordinary as something extraordinary”
The Searchers structurally and allegorically like a text of philosophy, but that it is structurally and allegorically like the very best philosophical texts.
Complex structure of the Searchers
Not clear what Ethan’s past was, his relation to Martin, his relation to his brother’s wife, what he is searching for
Other characters in the film parallel Ethan in a more extreme way: Scar his violence, Marty and Debbie his innocence, Mose his madness
Ethan “thinks he knows what he is doing but he does not, and he sees that by the end of the movie”
He’s not an effective searcher; while he knows a lot about the wilderness and Indians, he misses clues, and Mose is the one who finds scar
Conflict within the viewer
At first we feel that Ethan needs to take revenge on Scar, but Ethan takes it too far and the viewer feels uncomfortable with that
Buffalo scene: “the point is to shock us into acknowledging our own complicity with what we really know to be a madman’s vicious quest for vengeance.”
Similarities between Ethan and Scar:
Their dialogue parallels each other, and “The two move into Scar’s teepee, his home, and Scar tells a tale of the murder of his family and of the need for vengeance that is virtually identical to Ethan’s own story.