Film has been discussed in relation to philosophical issues for over 100 years. Sometimes by philosophers such as Henri Bergson and Martin Heidegger (however dismissively), but mainly by film theorists such as Hugo Münsterberg, Rudolf Arnheim and André Bazin, who took a philosophical approach to art. The American critic Dwight Macdonald complained in 1964 that film critics nowadays (i.e. in the 1960s) had to translate everything from "the language of art" to "the language of philosophy". I wonder what he would say today when "film philosophy" has become a fast-growing approach within film studies, whether it is to use films to illustrate philosophical issues or to make interpretations of films from a philosophical perspective. There are also those who claim that films in themselves are philosophical, not just because of the content of the film but due to it being a film; that films "philosophize" or "do philosophy." There are several anthologies on these issues, such as The Philosophy of Film: Introductory Texts and Readings (2005) or The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (2009). There are journals like Film-Philosophy (published by Edinburgh University Press) and Film and Philosophy (published by the Society for the Philosophic Study of the Contemporary Visual Arts). A fairly recent edited collection I can recommend is Film as Philosophy (2017), edited by Bernd Herzogenrath. For anyone who wants an accessible introduction, Robert Sinnerbrink's New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images (2011) is a good starting point.
Sinnerbrink wants New Philosophies of Film to be an introduction to the philosophical discussion of film and also an independent contribution to philosophical film criticism. The first part of the book is a background to philosophers' interest in film, the second part is an overview of the last decades' philosophical discussions of cinema, and the third part is Sinnerbrink's analysis of three films. The book's division into chapters and parts is a bit unclear, and overall the book should have received better editing. As an example, a chapter begins with the question "Can films philosophize?" The question is relevant and linked to Sinnerbrink's ambition, but it is found in the beginning of chapter seven, on page 141. It would have made more sense if it had been asked on page 1. The slight confusion, and the repetitions that also occur, may be because parts of the book have been published before, as individual articles in journals or anthologies. It is common that academics publish what seems to be a new book which, it turns out, is instead a collection of previously published material, and such books are especially in need of a skilful editor.
In the second part, Sinnerbrink describes which questions have been, and still are, the focus of the philosophical discussions. Questions such as whether film is art; whether film has unique properties, specific to itself; and about the relationship between film and spectators. As usual, he divides the philosophical traditions into two groups, or schools: the analytic-cognitive and the continental (or, as he also calls them, the "rationalist" versus the "romantic" school). The most prominent advocates of the "rationalist" school are Noël Carroll and David Bordwell, while Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell are represented as members of the "romantic" school. The traditional division of analytical vs. continental philosophy is a simplification though, there are clear and important links between the two, and it is one of the book's strengths that Sinnerbrink does not want to put them against each other but tries to find the best from both schools, to find a synthesis.
In the third and final section, Sinnerbrink analyses three films from a philosophical perspective. What he is looking for is "the exploration of cinematic thinking by way of detailed film-philosophical criticism” (p. 139). The films he has chosen for this are INLAND EMPIRE (David Lynch, 2006), Antichrist (Lars von Trier, 2009) and The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005) because, he says, they are non-mainstream narrative; genre hybrids; and "display a 'resistance to theory'" (p. 135) and as such they are especially suitable for philosophical readings. I disagree.
Letter from an Unknown Woman
One of the biggest issues I have with film philosophy is that they too often focus on the obvious and ready-made, and it is often the same examples over and over again. Particularly popular are, for example, Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa 1950), The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman 1957), The Matrix (the Wachowskis 1999), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry 2004). But it is not particularly interesting to discuss The Matrix as being about the world as an illusion, since they hardly talk about anything else in it. It is more interesting to have a discussion about the world being based on illusions in relation to, say, The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch 1940), Laura (Otto Preminger 1944) or Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls 1948). There are plenty of books and articles about Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy of ethics and its relationship to the films of the Dardenne brothers, but since the brothers themselves have mentioned Levinas in every other interview, that is not particularly interesting to discuss either. I have written about the ethics in the films of Henry Hathaway, and I mentioned Levinas at one point, because that is not obvious and therefore often interesting to explore.
Despite the fact that one of the inspirations for the current vogue of film and philosophy is Stanley Cavell, who wrote about the importance and joys of Hollywood cinema of the 1930s and 1940s, it is rare for such films to be under consideration today, and for many others as well. There are primarily three kinds of films that feature in film philosophy texts: high concept art cinema such as Michael Haneke, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, David Lynch and Terrence Malick; puzzle-films (or mind-game films); and a certain kind of science fiction, such as Stephen Mulhall's work on the Alien-series. While there is nothing wrong with such films, and I have written about some myself, it would be a richer and more interesting field of cinema studies if it was more widespread and broad-minded, because any kind of film is suitable for a philosophical enquiry, discussion, or analysis.
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But what can be said about, as Sinnerbrink puts it, the marriage between film and philosophy? That films can be used to illustrate philosophical problems is obvious. Even a conventional action movie such as Executive Decision (Stuart Baird 1996) can address a concrete moral dilemma, in this case the question of whether it is right to sacrifice one or a few lives in order to save the lives of many more. (A thought experiment that is sometimes called the "trolley problem," first discussed, I think, by Philippa Foot.) Discussing film's "essence" on the basis of philosophical issues is also relatively unproblematic, as long as one is aware that it is just a discussion and that questions such as "is film an art form?" have no definitive answers. It is a matter of definitions, and therefore the discussion should be conducted at that level, about our definitions. If I claim that film is art, my opponent cannot say "You are wrong." (because on what ground?) but on the other hand, she can question my definitions and their consequences and use arguments in the style of "According to your own definition of what art is, it is not obvious that you should also classify film as art." Even when there are no definitive answers, one can still question whether the arguments are consistent and whether they are based on misconceptions or incorrect assumptions. Here is an example:
In the February 2020 issue of Film-Philosophy there is an article about boredom in cinema, how art films can be boring, and that this is a good thing because it makes it possible for “spectators to question what they see and hear, and more generally to problematise the relationship with audio-visual images” and ”it allows us to reflect on the ways we relate to and live in this extremely visible world” and "to question cinema and its images."
The problem I have with this is that boredom is not an objective property of a film, as colour or length is, but a subjective response from the spectator. L'Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni 1962) and Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman 1972) were used as examples of "boring" art films, yet I have seen both many times and never found either to be boring in any meaningful sense of the word. When I watch them, I am focused on them and my mind does not wander, and neither do I start to question the ways of the world we live in. I would think that those who like L'Eclisse and Cries and Whispers would, on average, not find them boring, and hardly anyone would start "an interrogation of cinema, its images and our relationship with them" because of any longueurs in either film.
I have on the other hand been bored, experienced deep boredom, by the Avengers films. Given the premise of the article, it would therefore be better for me to watch them instead of L'Eclisse. Alas, the article does not give any reason to believe that Chiara Quaranta, who wrote it, would agree with this. I am aware of the fact that she speaks of three different kinds of boredom, borrowed from Heidegger, and that by being bored by the Avengers films I am supposedly experiencing boredom of the first kind (which is bad, because the filmmakers did not mean for us to be bored), whereas those who are bored by L'Eclisse experience boredom of the third kind (which is good, because the filmmakers meant for us to be bored), but really, what is that? In any case, I am more likely to reflect on the ways of the world when watching Avengers: Infinity War (Joe and Anthony Russo 2018) than when watching any film by Bergman, or even Jeanne Dielman (Chantal Akerman 1975); a film which keeps me in a constant state of immediate presence within the film, and not on any mind-wandering or "thinking about our modes of producing and consuming visual images." The argument of the article leads to some interesting questions though. If the alleged boredom of L'Eclisse is supposed to be a good thing, and I do not feel any boredom, has Antonioni then failed as a filmmaker by making his film insufficiently boring?
It is definitely relevant to talk about how different approaches to filmmaking and narration have different effects on spectators, but you cannot do so from the perspective of making one kind of imagined response a universal, true response, and then make ethical or practical assumptions from said response, because they will be misleading.
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Melisa Sözen in Winter Sleep (Nuri Bilge Ceylan 2014)
Further, is the argument that anything, or at least any art form, has the potential to "do philosophy," so books or paintings or a symphony could also "do philosophy"? If so, then it is nothing special about films but just in the nature of art, or at least narrative art. But if not, what makes films special? Personally, I think it would be wiser to not pursue that chain of thought, except for specific examples that are focused on the style of a given film.
It also depends on how one defines philosophy, and what it means to be philosophical. If we say that you are philosophical if you discuss existential, moral and metaphysical issues in a coherent matter, then it is obvious that some directors make films that are consciously philosophical, such as Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Kelly Reichardt, Fred Zinnemann and Abbas Kiarostami, albeit mainly in terms of stories, actions and character development; the content of the films. But since the way the content is presented, the style of the films, is related to its content, it can be in the combination of the two that philosophy arises.
One can also think of other cases where the philosophical message is more subconscious and where perhaps it is precisely the film medium itself that provides the philosophising. An example is the films of Anthony Mann. His films are mainly discussed on the basis of their oedipal conflicts and their links to Greek dramas and myths. But if you just look at them, and Mann is one of the great visual filmmakers, then a specific message emerges (even with the sound muted). Mann's images are filled with sharp stones, high mountains, threatening clouds, sharp edges and shadowy interiors, of desolate cities and open spaces. These images, through Mann's collected works, together form a message that says that the world, perhaps even the universe, is threatening, but indifferent to us humans. That we are lonely and doomed in advance and that our mutual struggles fade before the real conflict, the conflict between man and the elements. The point here is that it does not matter if it is done consciously or unconsciously, it is the film images themselves that speak. It could be an example of how films "do philosophy" in the sense that a view of the world is formed outside of plot, dialogue or script.
Border Incident (Anthony Mann 1949)
This post is a translated, updated, and rewritten version of an article by me published in 2013 in the Swedish philosophy journal Filosofisk tidskrift (in print only).
The quotes from Aristotle, Macdonald, and Quaranta are from:
Aristotle, Poetics, (unclear but around 335 B.C.) my quote is from chapter 9, and taken from https://www.bartleby.com/library/prose/336.html
Macdonald, Dwight, “8½: Fellini’s Obvious Masterpiece” (1964), republished in Awake in the Dark, ed. David Denby (1977)
Quaranta, Chiara, "A Cinema of Boredom: Heidegger, Cinematic Time and Spectatorship" (2020), in Film-Philosophy, February 2020
More on Anthony Mann can be found in my earlier article: https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2018/01/anthony-mann.html
Henry Hathaway and ethics is discussed in this article for example: https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2018/06/summing-up-hathaway.html
Henry Hathaway and ethics is discussed in this article for example: https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2018/06/summing-up-hathaway.html
