Film, Philosophy, and The Cinematic Event

When philosophers say that film 'can think', all too often what is meant is that it is capable of illustrating philosophical concepts. Film is used by philosophy, especially when philosophy tells us what film is: it fixes film in a set of ontological categories. This project in 'Film, Philosophy, and The Cinematic Event' proposes to explore the set of issues that surround the relationship between film and philosophy with a view to assessing whether cinema can only ever illustrate extant philosophy or whether it can also create new philosophy without the proxy of a guiding subject.

The primary objective of the research is to establish the possibility of film as an event, a becoming that enfolds within its moment a multiplicity of properties that cannot be set into any philosophically-informed ontological hierarchy (of artist over audience, of material medium over author's intention, of audience reception over genre convention, and so on). In place of philosophical illustration by film, there is the becoming-philosophical of film itself, that which resists any singular, reductive theorisation of its evental being. An ecumenical position is espoused; a pluralistic approach to film as textual and material artefact, visual cognition and ontological world-view, art-work and consumer product. This ecumenism stems from film itself being a becoming-art, an event that resists an essence, that resists theory. The resistance of film to (any one) theory is itself theoretically rich and forces us to rethink, not just our ontology of film, but consequently what philosophy is as well. Film itself can make us think by refusing to allow us us enforce our thoughts (of what it is) on it.

The current situation in film-philosophy can be separated broadly into two rival approaches that would take film interpretation in only one direction. Chapter 1 attempts to negotiate the contrary claims of such paradigms. On the one side, Culturalism, which term I'll use to cover the broad sweep of culture- and text-based approaches to the technology, ideology and/or materiality of production, distribution, and consumption of film. It is often influenced by philosophies coming from the 'Continental' school, psychodynamics, critical theory, historicism, and hermeneutics. On the other side is Cognitivism, which takes empirical psychology as its modus operandi and is also often inspired by Analytical and linguistic philosophy. It sees film meaning primarily in terms of representation, and tends to be scientistic, apolitical (in aspiration), and naturalistic. The philosophical axioms informing the choice of philosophical paradigm, Culturalism and Cognitivism, will then be critiqued for the totalising and question begging nature of their relationship with film.

Chapter 2 will focus on three specific cases of film-philosophy in terms of how they manipulate film in the name of theory: the film-theorist David Bordwell's cognitive-philosophical approach, Alain Badiou's subtractive ontological approach, and the materialist rhizomatics of Gilles Deleuze. The methodology used will be metatheoretical and comparative, by which I mean that the various approaches to film and philosophy will be tackled through a disparate range of examples, which these three represent. It will be argued in each case that these film-philosophies always involve the mix of an a priori theory that construes specific films or aspects of film per se in order to prove (illustrate) their own theory in a circular manner.

Chapter 3, finally, aims to explore how film can, indeed, think for itself, by resisting and reforming our philosophical presuppositions through its social, technological, narrative, visual, and auditory structures in all their evental hybridity. A number of case studies will be offered, looking at how various films can reform numerous philosophical categories, not through any explicit theory, but in their multiple, evental being.