Refractions of reality : philosophy and the moving image / John Mullarkey.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ó Maoilearca, John, 1965-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Motion pictures--Philosophy.

Motion pictures.

Physical Description:

xviii, 282 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Basingstoke [England] ; New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Summary:

Why is film becoming increasingly important to philosophers? Is it because it can be a helpful tool in teaching philosophy, in illustrating it? Or is it because film can also think for itself, can create its own philosophy? Indeed, many film-philosophers claim that film does more than merely illustrate philosophical texts: rather, film itself can philosophize in direct audio-visual terms. Too often, however, when philosophers claim to find indigenous philosophical value in cinema, it is only on account of refracting it through their own thought: film philosophizes because it accords with a favoured kind of extant philosophy.

Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image is the first book to examine all the central issues surrounding the vexed relationship between the film-image and philosophy. In it, John Mullarkey tackles the work of particular philosophers and theorists (Zizek, Deleuze, Cavell, Bordwell, Badiou, Branigan, Ranciere, Frampton, and many others) as well as general philosophical positions (Analytical and Continental, Cognitivist and Culturalist, Psychoanalytic and Phenomenological). Moeover, he also offers an incisive analysis and explanation of several prominent forms of film theorizing, providing a meta logical account of their mutual advantages and deficiencies that will prove immensely useful to anyone interested in the details of particular theories of film presently circulating, as well as correcting, revising and re-visioning the field of film theory as a whole.

Throughout, Mullarkey asks whether the reduction of film to text is unavoidable. In particular: must philsophy (and theory) always transform film into pre-texts for illustration? What would it take to imagine how film might itself theorize without reducing it to standard forms of thought and philosophy? Finally, and fundamentally, must we change our definition of philosophy and even of thought itself in order to accommodate the specificities that come with the claim the film can produce philosophical theory?

Contents:

Preface: The Film-envy of Philosophy ix

Who wants to be a philosopher anyway? ix

Philosophical cinema or cinematic philosophy? xi

Convergence on the film process: the elan cinematique xiv

Philosophy's perpetual identity crisis xvi

Introduction: Nobody Knows Anything! 1

Oh, they both make such good arguments! 1

The circular logic of paradigms and examples 3

Between theory and post-theory 6

Continental or analytic? Once more unto the breach 8

Rapprochement or impasse? Film as relational process 10

Towards a non-philosophical cinema 11

Nobody knows everything: knowing, being and process 13

1 Illustrating Manuscripts 15

The meta-en-scene 15

The advent of high-concept cinema: 'once upon a premise...' 18

Extreme pretexts 20

Philsophies through films 22

Gone to the movies 24

2 Bordwell and Other Cogitators 29

Introduction: going back to the future 29

Classical and art-house:hurray for Hollywood 33

Messages are for Western Union 35

Science, empiricism, culture 40

Closely observed frames 42

From reflection to refraction 46

Play time 48

Moving the continuum 52

The representationalist axiom of analytic film-philosophy 55

3 Zizek and the Cinema of Perversion 58

Good theorist, bad theorist: Bordwell contra Zizek 58

Freudianism for beginners 61

The return of the Real 64

The film gaze 67

Representationalism again: Zizek and the pre-cogs 68

Traversing the fantasy or transcending the Real? 70

The return of the Real to reality 71

Films, time and time again 74

4 Deleuze's Kinematic Philosophy 78

Deleuze's ambivalence: philosophia sive cinema? 78

Cinema's concepts 80

A non-reductive materialism 84

From movement to time: images and signs 87

Time regained 92

Is cinema Bergsonian? 97

Movement-image and time-image: when is a cut irrational? 100

Films and their makers: from the automatic art to the autonomy of art 104

Amongst the Delezians: a thousand tiny examples 107

5 Cavell, Bdiou and Other Ontologists 110

Cavell and the ontology of ordinary film 110

The philosophical ordinary 111

Reflections on the ontology of film 114

Automatism of the medium 117

Contra Deleuze? 118

Modernism 120

Reflexivity: film's other minds 121

Other Cavellians 123

More ontologies: Frampton's affective thinking 126

Badiou's inessential cinema 129

6 Extended Cognitions and the Speeds of Cinema 133

Anderson's elusive reality 133

Branigan's radial camera 136

When is a film? The cinematic event 140

Nothing happening: events in the blink of an eye 145

Bringing us up and down to speed 150

7 Fabulation, Process and Event 156

Jacques Ranciere's Film Fables 156

Thoughts taken out of context 163

Making movies and art with time 169

Fabulating the film event 173

Paradoxical feelings: moved by movements 180

8 Refractions of Reality, or, What is Thinking Anyway? 188

Outline of an outline 188

Affective embodiment 191

New mediations 193

Differential spectatorship 197

Sound and false fidelity 198

Acting realism 199

Animal cinema 201

A non-philosophy of cinema 204

What is thinking (again)? 208

Conclusion: Code Unknown - A Bastard Theory for a Bastard Art 214

In praise of being unphilosophical 214

Filmology: from unknowing to pluriknowing 215

Beyond coprology 217.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 261-272) and index.

ISBN:

9780230002470

0230002471

OCLC:

236331478