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Philosophy of Film
Edited by Clotilde Torregrossa (Uppsala University)
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 (91)
Audience Engagement in Film (101 | 28)
Genres of Film (154 | 10)
Film Theory (1,257 | 24)
Classical Film Theory (257)
Cognitive Film Theory (135)
Continental Film Theory (783)
Film Theory, Misc (58)
Philosophy Through Film (308)
Philosophy of Film, Misc (140)
Contents
5472+ found
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| 1 — 50 / 5472 |
Material to categorize
- Triangulating Depiction: Pictorial Experience, Vision Science, and the Standard of Correctness.Luca Marchetti - 2026 - Argumenta 22:243-258.Smith’s "Film, Art and the Third Culture" is dedicated to developing a naturalized aesthetics of film, and at the heart of his proposal for a methodological “triangulation” is the principle that our research should take serious account of three levels of analysis, each with its respective type of evidence: the phenomenological level, the psychological level, and the neurophysiological level. While Smith addresses many aspects of our perceptual, emotional, and cognitive engagement with movies within this framework, he rarely discusses what underlies (...)
- Introduction.Luca Marchetti - 2026 - Argumenta 22:217-219.This introduction presents the Argumenta book symposium on Murray Smith’s "Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film". It traces the symposium’s genesis and introduces the individual contributions, offering a roadmap to the central issues explored across the symposium.
- PROPOSITIONAL AESTHETICS: Form, Judgment, and the Authority of Beauty.S. C. Sayles - 2026 - Morecambe: Evolsiay Tulip.What gives us the right to say that something is beautiful? -/- In an age where aesthetics is increasingly reduced to personal preference, emotional reaction, or cultural fashion, Propositional Aesthetics makes a bold and unfashionable claim: aesthetic judgment is a serious, normative act, and beauty is accountable to reason, form, and authority—not feeling alone. -/- This book does not ask how art makes us feel. -/- It asks by what authority we judge it at all. -/- Drawing on philosophy, theology, (...)
- Epistemological Horror.Philip Atkins - forthcoming - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.This is an exploratory essay about epistemological horror, which can be understood broadly as horror fiction that engages with epistemological questions, and more narrowly as horror fiction that engages with questions about the boundaries of human knowledge. It’s suggested that there are at least two interesting categories of epistemological horror. One relates to the question of what should and shouldn’t be known, while the other relates to the question of what can and can’t be known. These categories can be broken (...)
- Accessing the ethics of collective attention through film.Michael Quinn - 2026 - Synthese 207 (5):222.Recent philosophical work on attention has probed what attention is in general, what collective attention is, and the ethics specifically of the latter, e.g., when it is virtuous, and how one might accordingly apportion praise or blame. An unexplored topic in this realm, though, is the importance of empowering non-academics to be able to draw on ideas developed in the academic debate in their reflection on the ethics of collective attention. This gap is evidenced by calls to explore how harmful (...)
- After the Hunt. Luca Guadagnino y la fragilidad del juicio.Ramsés Radi Hernández - 2026 - Dialektika.Org.After the Hunt: Luca Guadagnino y la fragilidad del juicio – Por Ramsés Radi Hernández. No es una reseña para decidir “si la película es buena” ni para repartir culpables: es un análisis de cómo se descompone el juicio cuando el relato llega incompleto. En el marco elitista de la Yale University, Luca Guadagnino monta un “teatro social” donde poder, deseo, reputación y sospecha convierten la moral en zona gris.
- Series What America Changed About Black History Hollywood as Historical Policy: Whitewashing, Mythmaking, and the Manufacture of National Memory.Lyric Helena Emerson - manuscriptAbstract This paper argues that Hollywood functions as a state-adjacent institution that governs historical memory by shaping how the public understands violence, responsibility, and legitimacy. Through repetition, omission, and substitution, film and television do not merely reflect dominant narratives but actively manufacture national memory in ways that stabilize existing power structures. Drawing on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Black media scholarship and analysis of recurring cinematic tropes, the paper demonstrates how Black presence is erased, Black agency is reassigned to white protagonists, and (...)
- Screwball Comedies’ Midsummer Dream: Shakespeare, Cavell, and Magical Weakness.Joshua M. Hall - forthcoming - The Journal of Aesthetic Education.This article expands Cavell’s interpretation of The Philadelphia Story (1940) in relation to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1596) and gendered democratic flourishing. My first section rehearses Geraldine Heng’s argument in Empire of Magic (2004) that the medieval romance genre channels Crusades trauma into imagined British nationhood, as embodied by Merlin. My second section finds a second wave of romantic overflow in Shakespeare’s play via the fairy king Oberon. My third section identifies Cary Grant's “C. K. Dexter Haven” as the (...)
- The Media Tomb.Joe Larios - 2025 - Journal of Continental Philosophy 6 (1):59-92.In this paper, I analyze the potential that generative AI technologies have to allow for the production of closed media ecosystems in which any connection to exteriority would be severed. This would happen through the possibility of an endless algorithmic generation of content without any indexical relation to perceptual reality except insofar as what is generated is modeled on images indexed to that reality. Phenomena such as the production of new works by the dead, their reappearance after death, and the (...)
- (1 other version)Extremely Tiny and Indivisible Dust: Cinematic Buddhist Studies and the Spatial Experience of Seeing Hans Richter’s Rhythmus 21.Ao Chen - 2026 - Film-Philosophy 30 (1):1-20.Rhythmus 21 (Hans Richter, 1921) has earned a highly influential position in abstract or absolute film, presenting the rectangles of various sizes that seem to initiate a sense of depth. Nevertheless, the spatial experience of seeing this film can fall apart if Buddhist dust theory is applied to the discussion of spatial experience. This article uses wufen weichen (extremely tiny and indivisible dust) in Buddhist studies as a philosophical methodology for scrutinising the spatial experience of seeing Rhythmus 21, arguing that (...)
- (1 other version)Extremely Tiny and Indivisible Dust: Cinematic Buddhist Studies and the Spatial Experience of Seeing Hans Richter’s Rhythmus 21.Ao Chen - 2026 - Film-Philosophy 30 (1):1-20.Rhythmus 21 (Hans Richter, 1921) has earned a highly influential position in abstract or absolute film, presenting the rectangles of various sizes that seem to initiate a sense of depth. Nevertheless, the spatial experience of seeing this film can fall apart if Buddhist dust theory is applied to the discussion of spatial experience. This article uses wufen weichen (extremely tiny and indivisible dust) in Buddhist studies as a philosophical methodology for scrutinising the spatial experience of seeing Rhythmus 21, arguing that (...)
- Francesco Casetti (2023). Screening Fears: On Protective Media.Tobijah Rogers - 2026 - Film-Philosophy 30 (1):175-177.
- Dominic Lash (2023). Robert Pippin and Film: Politics, Ethics, and Psychology After Modernism.Logan Canada-Johnson - 2026 - Film-Philosophy 30 (1):171-174.
- The Crisis of Voice in the Songs of Pyaasa.Tanya Desai - 2026 - Film-Philosophy 30 (1):21-44.Actor-director Guru Dutt’s 1957 film Pyaasa (The Thirsty One) is about a poet, Vijay, and depicts his increasing despair over the world and loss of faith in the power of poetry. This political and artistic crisis is dramatized in the songs that Vijay performs as well as in the three women’s songs in the film. Through Stanley Cavell’s writings on voice, language and community, I argue that an idea of the poetic voice, identified literally in the case of Vijay and (...)
- First Nations Australian Cinema and the Unrepresentable: The Sublime in Warwick Thornton’s Sweet Country.Carl Reinecke - 2026 - Film-Philosophy 30 (1):90-114.That which exceeds the frame is a persistent focus of First Nations Australian filmmaking. The Kaytetye director Warwick Thornton’s Sweet Country (2017) exemplifies this formal and theoretical interrogation of the representation of Indigenous peoples within settler Australian visual culture. To make sense of the already existing yet overlooked philosophical importance of this work in its material specificity, to read Sweet Country as theory requires new theoretical approaches. As such, this article centres the unrepresentable, as it is often invoked in the (...)
- Aesthetic Experience, Film Comedy and Suffering in Sullivan’s Travels: The Prisoners’ Laughter.Scott Robinson - 2026 - Film-Philosophy 30 (1):115-138.This article examines the way aesthetic experience is represented in contrast to direct experience in Preston Sturges’s film Sullivan’s Travels (1941). The film portrays the efforts of a successful Hollywood film director to acquire the experience of suffering in order to make a film with social significance. The film suggests a contrast between lived experience and aesthetic experience in conveying a political message and social knowledge. Framed in terms of Jacques Rancière’s Kantian aesthetics, I defend the view that aesthetic representations (...)
- Hegel and the Hollywood Western: Violence, Law and the Right of Heroes in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.Dylan Shaul - 2026 - Film-Philosophy 30 (1):139-161.This article explores the conjunction of Hegel and the Hollywood Western through a close analysis of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, adjudicating between competing readings of Hegel by considering their varied application to the interpretation of the film. In particular, I examine how Pippin’s reformist reading and Žižek’s revolutionary reading of Hegel produce different understandings of key themes of the Hollywood Western, including violence, law and the right of heroes. I argue that Pippin’s view of the central drama of (...)
- Kierkegaard and the Education of Anxiety in A Fortunate Man: A Labyrinth of Inwardness.Rafael Garcia Pavon & Catalina Elena Dobre - 2026 - Film-Philosophy 30 (1):67-89.In this article, we examine the lights and shadows of the inwardness of spiritual life that constitutes the human self through the drama of Per Sidenius in the film by the Danish director Bille August, A Fortunate Man (Lykke-Per, 2018) within the framework of the existential philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard. The film is a labyrinth in which the narrative deepens as a conflict in the quest for oneself that reaches a limit of the renunciation of the world. It exhibits a (...)
- Francesco Sticchi (2025). The Politics of Monstrous Figures in Contemporary Cinema: Witches, Zombies, and Cyborgs Re-Enchanting the Ends of the World.Nikolaj Lübecker - 2026 - Film-Philosophy 30 (1):167-170.
- Tanya Shilina-Conte (2025). Black Screens, White Frames: Gilles Deleuze and the Filmmaking Machine.Chiara Quaranta - 2026 - Film-Philosophy 30 (1):162-166.
- Surrender to the Silence Following a Question.Eleanor Furness - 2026 - Film and Philosophy 30:119-129.If a film could resist the satisfying, commodifying, pacifying forces of the culture industry, what would it be like? In this review, I argue that Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s film Memoria responds to these conditions by inhibiting the viewer from identifying with what they see, quelling their drive for explanations, and, rather than providing answers, inculcating more interesting questions. Many ideas endemic to the Frankfurt School and Ludwig Wittgenstein respectively are communicated not only in the way the film is shot and edited, (...)
- Shot Composition as Philosophy.Thomas E. Wartenberg - 2026 - Film and Philosophy 30:111-117.This article shows how the distinction between the foreground and the background in a film shot can be used by a film to philosophize. The argument proceeds by means of an analogy between verbal irony as in Marc Antony’s speech in Julius Caesar and a film’s use of a contrast between a shot’s foreground and background. To establish its case, the article shows how the recent film The Zone of Interest illustrates Hannah Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil by (...)
- Fake News and Partisanship in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.Dakota Layton - 2026 - Film and Philosophy 30:29-39.The 2016 DC Comics film Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, directed by Zack Snyder, depicts the tense conflict between Batman and Superman as they become embroiled in the perilous plot of LexCorp CEO Lex Luthor. I contend that the film serves as an interesting philosophical device that explores the relationship between partisanship and fake news. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice argues that partisanship makes us vulnerable to the influence of fake news. This paper traces the contours of the (...)
- Mr. Robot, or the cost of being right.Benjamin James - 2026 - Internet Archive.Television has entered a golden age, or so we are told. Premium cable and streaming platforms have gifted us with countless programs described in breathless detail as “unflinching,” “provocative,” or “darkly relevant.” These shows gesture toward systemic critique the way a debutante gestures toward the punch bowl, with practiced elegance and no intention of actually drinking. They deploy anti-capitalist aesthetics as set dressing with corrupt executives, soulless corporations, and montages of urban decay scored to melancholy indie rock. One watches and (...)
- Joshua Heter and Richard Greene, editors, Back to the Future and Philosophy: Essays on Traveling Through the Space-Time Continuum. [REVIEW]Ian K. McDaniel - 2026 - Film and Philosophy 30:131-133.
- (4 other versions)Editor's Introduction.Laura T. Di Summa - 2026 - Film and Philosophy 30:3-6.
- It’s Not Called the Wheel, It’s Called the Carousel. Mad Men and the Philosophy of Nostalgia.Enrico Terrone - 2026 - Film and Philosophy 30:1-11.This paper argues that the Kodak Carousel pitch in Mad Men functions as a piece of “television-philosophy” that articulates the nature of nostalgia. By situating Donald Draper’s speech within psychological and philosophical debates on emotions, the paper shows how Mad Men exemplifies nostalgia’s intentional structure—memory, imagination, and desire fused in a bittersweet attitude. Through Draper’s slideshow, visuals, and sound, the series highlights the dual role of nostalgia in identity: fostering self-continuity, esteem, and connection, while also masking existential fracture.
- Teaching contested philosophical articulations of attention through 'Ex Machina' and 'Her'.Michael Quinn - 2025 - Journal of Philosophy in Schools 12 (2):112-130.Given the increased use of technology in and out of schools, and that such technologies deliberately attract and arrest the attention of their users, students learning about how attention is considered philosophically becomes significant. As such, attention, as a topic of philosophical interest at secondary school level, is a worthy philosophical inquiry for contemporary students. However, given that defining attention is contested, with significantly varying perspectives, teaching these articulations simultaneously can prove difficult. I argue that using film, by capitalising on (...)
- Teaching contested philosophical articulations of attention through 'Ex Machina' and 'Her'.Michael Quinn - 2025 - Journal of Philosophy in Schools 12 (2):112-130.Given the increased use of technology in and out of schools, and that such technologies deliberately attract and arrest the attention of their users, students learning about how attention is considered philosophically becomes significant. As such, attention, as a topic of philosophical interest at secondary school level, is a worthy philosophical inquiry for contemporary students. However, given that defining attention is contested, with significantly varying perspectives, teaching these articulations simultaneously can prove difficult. I argue that using film, by capitalising on (...)
- Philosophical Theories of Political Cinema. [REVIEW]Sheryl Tuttle Ross - 2024 - British Journal of Aesthetics 64 (1):130-133.Urban legend has it that when the Lumiere brothers first showed their film L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat in 1896 (which was literally the moving ima.
- Surrender to the Silence Following a Question in advance.Eleanor Furness - forthcoming - Film and Philosophy.If a film could resist the satisfying, commodifying, pacifying forces of the culture industry, what would it be like? In this review, I argue that Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s film Memoria responds to these conditions by inhibiting the viewer from identifying with what they see, quelling their drive for explanations, and, rather than providing answers, inculcating more interesting questions. Many ideas endemic to the Frankfurt School and Ludwig Wittgenstein respectively are communicated not only in the way the film is shot and edited, (...)
- Shot Composition as Philosophy in advance.Thomas E. Wartenberg - forthcoming - Film and Philosophy.This article shows how the distinction between the foreground and the background in a film shot can be used by a film to philosophize. The argument proceeds by means of an analogy between verbal irony as in Marc Antony’s speech in Julius Caesar and a film’s use of a contrast between a shot’s foreground and background. To establish its case, the article shows how the recent film The Zone of Interest illustrates Hannah Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil by (...)
- On the Documented Subject in advance.Tyler Olds - forthcoming - Film and Philosophy.In his “Moving Pictures,” Arthur Danto distinguishes between the subjects of fictional and non-fictional films by claiming that fictional films center characters, while non-fictional films feature people. I argue that this distinction is too coarsely drawn: the subjects of non-fictional films are not just presented to the audience as they are out in the real-world, rather the audience is presented with the filmmaker’s characterizations of these subjects. I also distinguish between this notion of characterization and the presentation of non-fictional subjects (...)
- Electric Light (o) in advance.Sydney Harvey - forthcoming - Film and Philosophy.This paper explores the use of conspicuous electric light in film as a formal element that can induce a cognitive experience of false purposiveness, particularly in narratives with anthropogenic themes. It draws on Kantian formalism to argue that the experience of purposiveness without a purpose in art reveals a hubris in human nature, as we project our own concepts onto purposeless forms. The paper defines conspicuous electric light as the intentional use of stark and dramatic lighting and analyzes four techniques: (...)
- Fake News and Partisanship in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice in advance.Dakota Layton - forthcoming - Film and Philosophy.The 2016 DC Comics film Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, directed by Zack Snyder, depicts the tense conflict between Batman and Superman as they become embroiled in the perilous plot of LexCorp CEO Lex Luthor. I contend that the film serves as an interesting philosophical device that explores the relationship between partisanship and fake news. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice argues that partisanship makes us vulnerable to the influence of fake news. This paper traces the contours of the (...)
- The Beast and Bêtise: Bad Faith, Stupidity, and Paradoxes of Faith in the Age of AI.Heewon Seo - 2026 - Film and Philosophy 30:41-60.In an era dominated by algorithmic reason and emotional sanitization, The Beast (2023) reimagines Henry James’s The Beast in the Jungle within a futuristic vision where human interior becomes a target of technological cure. This paper argues that the “beast” is not an external threat but the existential essence of humanity—fear and anxiety before an uncontrollable future. Drawing on Sartre’s concepts of bad faith and faith, and Derrida’s paradox of belief, it explores how belief, inherently impossible, enables a leap toward (...)
- When Virtue, Freedom, and Fortitude Are “Heroic and Divine” in advance.Marco Vorcelli - forthcoming - Film and Philosophy.At the beginning of book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle mentions “a certain heroic and divine virtue” that he describes as a superhuman, godlike virtue that transforms one into a godly being. Apart from these few remarks, however, Aristotle does not provide much information about heroic virtue, leaving his interpreters the task of fleshing out his scanty picture. If, on the one hand, such dearth of details poses serious hermeneutical challenges, on the other, it frees heroic virtue from the (...)
- On The Artistic Characteristics Of The Ninth Art ――From The Perspective of Benjamin's The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction.Runlin Cao - 2023 - Dissertation, Minzu University of ChinaThis paper analyzes the artistic features of the ninth art video game by using the worship value and exhibition value in Benjamin's art theory. In the first part, we analyzed the connotation of Benjamin's worship value, then analyzes the connotation of his exhibition value, and finally analyzes the differences and similarities between these two different artistic values. In the second part, we first analyzed the theory of game artistry. Then we analyzed the exhibition value of the ninth art by using (...)
- Simone Weil’s Ethics of Love and Film Form.Doga Col - forthcoming - Studies in Christian Ethics.Simone Weil is not a thinker one would usually associate with film. Her concerns are found in the philosophy of Plato, in Christian mysticism, and in an ethics of love that demands the withdrawal of the self from the world. Yet this article argues that her thought has a good deal to say about film, and specifically about what the formal conditions of filmmaking make possible ethically. It works through three of her central concepts (attention, metaxu, and decreation) and in (...)
- Jussi Parikka (2023). Operational Images: From the Visual to the Invisual. [REVIEW]Daniel E. Smith - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (3):804-808.
- Balkan Transits: Becoming-Other in Theo Angelopoulos’s The Suspended Step of the Stork.Konstantinos Retsikas - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (3):630-653.In affirming the figure of the refugee, Theo Angelopoulos’s 1991 film The Suspended Step of the Stork radically repositions the latter from its normative casting as another human being worth saving precisely because of sharing a basic likeness to oneself, to a fundamental an-other who is also a prophetic instance of a people to come. The current article argues that the film proceeds to accomplish this remarkable shift by making sovereignty itself an object of abandonment, something which turns Giorgio Agamben’s (...)
- (Don’t) Look Back: Three Portraits of a Lady on Fire.Ben Tyrer - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (3):600-629.This article explores the dialectical movement of Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire ( Portrait de la jeune fille en feu, 2019) through close attention to three visual logics, or “portraits” painted by the film. That Portrait of a Lady on Fire offers a cinematic meditation on the “gaze” is self-evident: Marianne’s first painting of Héloïse is created according to an aesthetic logic already described by Laura Mulvey, while the second, co-created painting embodies Sciamma’s declaration that the film (...)
- Finding Sunbeams in the Darkness: Michel Serres's Analogical Thinking and the Ethics of Listening in The Zone of Interest.Kevin Hunt - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (3):575-599.This article addresses the fundamental concept underpinning Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, which recognizes selective empathy and extraordinary empathy dissonance within our contemporary cultures as a continuum, not a moment. The article uses Michel Serres's philosophical process to provide an ontological and epistemological framework within which The Zone of Interest can be understood analogously as a warning about darkness enveloping the world. Glazer has emphasized the axiom of his film is focusing upon the present. The Zone of Interest asks (...)
- Craig Fox and Britt Harrison (Eds.) (2023). Philosophy of Film Without Theory. [REVIEW]Ashish Dwivedi - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (3):809-811.
- Attention and ambience in The Zone of Interest.Emilija Talijan - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (3):551-574.Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023) eschews visually representing the Holocaust and is unique in displacing its representation of the atrocities taking place in the camps to the soundtrack. Ostensibly, the film allies itself with a commitment to not showing that has a long history in debates around how to represent the Holocaust. Yet, this has led to an unhelpful opposition between the film we watch and the film we hear. This cleaves the soundtrack too neatly away from the (...)
- Desire for Life: Stanley Cavell, Martin Scorsese and the Gangster Genre.Mynt Marsellus - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (3):731-752.This article argues that cinema studies should return to Stanley Cavell's conception of genre-as-medium for its promise as a method for engaging with film genre philosophically. Through a reading of Cavell's film work and his philosophical work on questions of skepticism, visibility, and moral perfectionism, the gangster films of Martin Scorsese are read as articulating the ordinary and normative force of the life of a gangster on its subjects. Describing the desire for that life as the desire for power over (...)
- Meek’s Cutoff, Hobbes and the Ambiguities of Political Foundation: An Alternative Political Philosophy of the Western.Christopher Holman - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (3):701-730.Theorists interested in the potential of film to express various conditions and possibilities of political experience are often particularly drawn to the Western genre. Typically, the cinematic Western is interpreted as narratively representing the logic of classical contractarian political philosophy, through its depiction of the effort to impose legal order on what is seen as a previously unregulated and chaotic natural state. In this article I provide a reading of Kelly Reichardt’s 2010 revisionist Western Meek’s Cutoff, in an effort to (...)
- The Proliferation of Representation in Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty and Sergei Parajanov's The Colour of Pomegranates.Alexander Dickow - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (3):677-700.This article argues that Antonin Artaud's theory of the theatre of cruelty, elaborated in The Theatre and Its Double, and the procedures of Sergei Parajanov's The Colour of Pomegranates (1969) bear a crucial affinity. Both offer many enigmatic emblems described as hieroglyphic and involving ritualized gesture. The theatre theorized by Artaud as well as Parajanov's film place representation into question, not by suppressing it, but by causing it to run riot. This runs counter scholars’ assertions that Artaud's theatre of cruelty (...)
- Radu Jude, Richard Rorty and the Barbarians: Art, Irony and Solidarity in a Hypernormalised World.Joshua J. Taylor - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (3):654-676.This article reads Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude’s incisive satire “I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians” (2018) through the lens of Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989) to consider the relevance and utility of liberal ironism in our contemporary political landscape. Where some have suggested authoritative, foundationalist arguments are necessary to overcome post-truth, relativism and the resurgence of fascism, Jude offers a contrasting exploration of the tension between contingency and authority inherent in our descriptive (...)
- Sicario and the Cinematic Infrastructures of Necroplasticity.Tom Nurmi - 2025 - Film-Philosophy 29 (3):778-803.A borderland thriller with an imperial unconscious, Sicario (Denis Villeneuve, 2015) is a film of our time. Drawing audiences into a world of ambient threat and righteous but morally ambiguous revenge in the context of clandestine US–Mexico drug wars, the film tells another, deeper story beneath its glossy veneer, one that rehearses the ways that citizen-viewers align themselves with state-sanctioned violence hiding under the cover of law. Sicario generates enemies and heroes alike who submit to these new procedures and ethics, (...)
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