Abstract
This chapter contrasts the broadly empirical, pluralist, and construction device–oriented approaches to film study of analytic philosophy of film with the broadly socially hermeneutic, artistically and politically avant-gardist stances of Continental film theory. Analytic philosophy of film has tended to focus on classic Hollywood films and continuity editing, in order to explore the achievements of these films as art, while Continental film theory frequently finds such films to be regressive and technically uninteresting. I explore in detail the work of such analytically oriented film scholars as Cavell, Danto, Walton, Carroll, Wilson, Bordwell, Plantinga, and Wartenberg, among others, against the background of this broad divergence in styles of work. I conclude by suggesting possibilities of rapprochement between these two styles, possibilities that embrace both the insights of analytic philosophers concerning specific devices and effects of film construction and the insights of Continental theorists concerning human subject formation and human social, political, and artistic interests.
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Notes
- 1.
Eds. Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White with Meta Mazaj (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s).
- 2.
Eds. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell).
- 3.
In his landmark essay, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” André Bazin contrasts (a) the relatively more montage-oriented style that derives from silent film, that “evoked what the director wanted to say,” and that “insidiously substituted mental and abstract time [in place of] …real time” with (b) the more explicitly realist style, developed through Orson Welles’ use of the deep-focus shot that built on “the realism of sound” (introduced in 1927) to develop “a reborn realism” (Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” in Bazin, What is Cinema?, Volume 1, trans. Hugh Gray [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967, pp. 23–40, at pp. 39, 38). Even here, however, enormous qualifications are necessary, many of which Bazin supplies. Franco-Spanish Surrealism (Bunuel, Dali), German Expressionism (Lang, Murnau), and SovietMontage (Eisenstein, Vertov) are distinct avant-garde traditions. Realism in sound films was established in the 1930s well before Welles by Ford, Hawks, and Capra, among others working in Hollywood and by Jean Renoir and others working in France, all drawing on an earlier realist narrative style in Griffith, Flaherty, Chaplin, and others. There are strong narrative realist elements (along with intensive stylization) in Lang, Murnau, and Dreyer, and so on. Bazin’s broad defense of realism against avant-gardism set the stage, however, for the reaction against realism and in favor of avant-gardism that emerged in the 1960s’ structuralist and post-structuralist film theory.
- 4.
As we shall see, the best contemporary Continental film theory that focuses on social meanings and embodied experiences of specific films is no longer “Continental” in the sense of the high structuralist and post-structuralist theory of the 1960s and 1970s practiced by Christian Metz and Stephen Heath, among others, just as the best contemporary analytic film theory is no longer dominated by appeals to cognitive science.
- 5.
Bordwell coined the term Saussure, Lacan, Althusser, and Barthes “(SLAB) Theory” in “Historical Poetics of Cinema,” in The Cinematic Text: Methods and Approaches, ed. R. Barton Palmer (New York: AMS Press, 1989), pp. 369–98, at p. 385. Bordwell and Carroll together discuss this approach under the title “Grand Theory” in their editors’ introduction to Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), pp. xiii-xvii.
- 6.
Noël Carroll, “Prospects for Film Theory,” in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (pp. 37–68).
- 7.
Contra what SLABtheory sometimes suggests, these successes are by no means limited to experimentalist or avant-garde works produced outside the (Hollywood) mainstream. Who would deny the artistic as well as commercial successes of Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock, Coppola, or Scorsese? No more, however, should we assume a priori that successful film must be primarily realist rather than avant-garde. Who would deny the artistic and commercial success and interest of late Godard, Maya Deren, Dziga Vertov, or Ang Lee? Neither avant-gardism nor realist narrative is either necessary or sufficient for artistic success.
- 8.
Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed [1971], Enlarged Edition, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 22.
- 9.
Ibid.
- 10.
Ibid., p. 30.
- 11.
Ibid., p. 39.
- 12.
Ibid., p. 25.
- 13.
Cavell’s Bazinian realism about photography and photographically produced film (as opposed to cartoons or, more recently, computer generated imagery (CGI) movies) is consistent with—in fact, it presupposes and implies—the further thought that the presentation of the real that is achieved is itself also the result of directors’ and other producers’ decisions about angle of shot, lighting, focus, and so forth. See Richard Eldridge, “How Movies Think: Cavell on Film as a Medium of Art,” Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LIVIII, No. 1 (2014), pp. 3–20, for a full development of this point.
- 14.
Cavell, The World Viewed, p. 122.
- 15.
Ibid., p. 27.
- 16.
On the role of Hegel and post-Kantian European thinking more generally in Wittgenstein’s thought, especially as Cavell receives and develops it, see Eldridge, Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Intentionality, and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
- 17.
Arthur C. Danto, “Moving Pictures,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 4, 1 (Winter 1979), pp. 1–21; reprinted in Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, eds. Carroll and Choi, pp. 100–112, at p. 100.
- 18.
Ibid., p. 101. In the terminology of Nelson Goodman in Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1976), film is an allographic medium of art while painting is autographic.
- 19.
Ibid., p. 102.
- 20.
Cavell, The World Viewed, p. 170.
- 21.
Danto, “Moving Pictures,” p. 104.
- 22.
Ibid., p. 107.
- 23.
Ibid., p. 101.
- 24.
Kendall L. Walton, “Transparent Pictures,” Critical Inquiry 11 (December 1984), pp. 250–273; excerpted as “Film, Photography, and Transparency,” in The Philosophy of Film, eds. Thomas E. Wartenberg and Angela Curran (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1988), pp. 70–76 at p. 71.
- 25.
Ibid., p. 73.
- 26.
Ibid., p. 76.
- 27.
Gregory Currie has argued against Walton and all versions of a transparency thesis by noting that “seeing a photograph of X is a matter of seeing a representation of X rather than of seeing X itself ” (Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and the Cognitive Sciences [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995], p. 51, emphasis added). While it is certainly true that what we see directly (Walton might say) when we see a photograph of X is the photograph, that is, a representation of X, it is also true that (as Currie concedes) “the representations photographs give us are certainly very different in kind from those we get by drawing and painting” (p. 51). The issue then is whether these differences can adequately be understood and explained without saying, as Walton does, that we also see X prosthetically (as it were) by or in our seeing of the photographic representation (of X). For more on visual depiction, with particular reference to Walton on making-believe and Wollheim on the twofoldness of representation (seeing the painting as a painting versus/and seeing what a painting is a painting of), see Eldridge, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art, 2d. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 38–44.
- 28.
Carroll, “Defining the Moving Image,” in Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 49–74; reprinted in Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, eds. Carroll and Choi, pp. 113–133, at p. 116.
- 29.
Ibid., p. 117.
- 30.
Ibid., p. 122.
- 31.
The five conditions are listed and argued for in Ibid. pp. 124–130.
- 32.
This is true even for 3D movies, which are displayed on a 2D screen; this condition is necessary in order to rule out ballerina music boxes, for example. Ibid., p. 130.
- 33.
But see note 4 on contemporary developments. In his important 2007 essay “An Elegy for Theory,” the film scholar D. N. Rodowick traces the emergence of the New Cognitivism not only to the invocation of ideas from cognitive science and experimental psychology but also both to a generalized frustration with failures of specificity in readings of individual films within Continental film theory and to developing interests in film history and in emerging new media, especially digital media. “Since the early 1980s,” as he puts it, film theory in Film Studies departments has been marked by “a decentering of film with respect to media and visual studies and by a retreat from theory.” Rodowick notes that Bordwell’s Narration in the Fiction Film is shaped not only by his reliance on psychology but also by his engagement with “concrete problems of aesthetic practice” (“An Elegy for Theory,” October, 122 (Fall 2007), pp. 91–109; reprinted in Critical Visions in Film Theory, eds. Corrigan, White, and Mazaj, pp. 1110–1126 at pp. 1111, 1113).
- 34.
Gregory Currie, “Narrative Desire,” in Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, eds. Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 183–99; excerpted in The Philosophy of Film, eds. Wartenberg and Curran, pp. 139–47 at p. 140.
- 35.
Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 73–5, 81–95, 108; reprinted in The Philosophy of Film, eds. Wartenberg and Curran, pp. 160–69.
- 36.
Ibid., p. 168.
- 37.
Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), pp. 48–61.
- 38.
George M. Wilson, Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), p. 2.
- 39.
Carroll, “On the Narrative Connection,” in Carroll, Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 118–133, at pp. 121, 123–24.
- 40.
Carroll, “Narrative Closure,” Philosophical Studies 135 (2007), pp. 1–15 at p. 5.
- 41.
Ibid.
- 42.
Wilson, Narration in Light; Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, and Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style and Style in Modern Movies (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2006).
- 43.
Carroll, “Film, Emotion, and Genre,” in Passionate Views, eds. Plantinga and Smith, pp. 21–47; reprinted in Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, eds. Carroll and Choi, pp. 217–33, at p. 222.
- 44.
Ibid., pp. 227–29.
- 45.
Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System (New York: Random House, 1981), excerpted in Critical Visions in Film Theory, eds. Corrigan, White, and Mazaj, pp. 454–65, at pp. 455, 460.
- 46.
Ibid., p. 457.
- 47.
Ibid., p. 456.
- 48.
Rodowick notes that if the role of individual cognitive psychology is over-emphasized (at the expense of social facts) in determining the structures of films, then what results is a promotion of a “concept of the [decontextualized] rational agent [in production, spectating, and theorizing] …in a perspective that strives to be free of ideological positioning and to assert an epistemology that is value neutral.” When this happens, “the activity of theory is given over to science,” ethical and political concerns are displaced, and “philosophy itself begins to lose its autonomy and identity” as a form of humanistic critique (Rodowick, “An Elegy for Theory,” pp. 1114, 1115). Pointedly, Carroll denies any commitment to “film theory [as] a science,” and he urges a dialectical-critical conception of theory (Noël Carroll, “Prospects for Film Theory,” pp. 59, 56).
- 49.
Ibid., p. 462.
- 50.
Ibid., p. 461.
- 51.
Ibid., p. 462. Recently, Robert Pippin, working from a Hegelian background, has completed two significant studies of film genres as embodiments of responses to socially shared political and moral anxieties and concerns: Hollywood Westerns and American Myths: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), and Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2012).
- 52.
Ibid., pp. 463–64.
- 53.
David Bordwell, “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice,” in Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 151–69; reprinted in in Critical Visions in Film Theory, eds. Corrigan, White, and Mazaj, pp. 559–73, at p. 561.
- 54.
Ibid.
- 55.
Ibid., p. 563.
- 56.
Carl Plantinga, “Notes on Spectator Emotion and Ideological Film Criticism,” in Film Theory and Philosophy, eds. Richard Allen and Murray Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 372–93; excerpted and reprinted as “Spectator Emotion and Ideological Film Criticism,” in The Philosophy of Film, eds. Wartenberg and Curran, pp. 148–59, at pp. 148–51.
- 57.
Ibid., p. 152.
- 58.
Ibid. See also Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).
- 59.
Plantinga, Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), p. 140.
- 60.
Ibid., p. 2.
- 61.
Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 300.
- 62.
Plantinga, Moving Viewers, pp. 225–26; emphasis added.
- 63.
Thomas E. Wartenberg, Unlikely Couples: Movie Romance as Social Criticism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), p. xv.
- 64.
Ibid., pp. 236–40.
- 65.
Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 9.
- 66.
On the limitations of demonstrative argument in philosophy in general and on the inevitability of at some point moving “beyond proof,” see Eldridge, Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Intentionality, and Romanticism, especially pp. 1–15, 264–290, and Friedrich Waismann, “How I See Philosophy,” in Contemporary British Philosophy, 3d. series, ed. H. D. Lewis (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1956), pp. 445–90. Perhaps “learning to see” is as much or more central to philosophy as demonstrative argument.
- 67.
See the sympathetic reviews of Thinking on Screen that also make this critical point by Cynthia Freeland, “Comments on Thomas Wartenberg’s Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy,” Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind 3, 1 (Summer 2009), pp. 100–109, and Eldridge, “Philosophy In/Of/As/And Film,” Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind 3, 1 (Summer 2009), pp. 109–116, as well as Wartenberg’s “Response to My Critics,” Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind 3, 1 (Summer 2009), pp. 117–25. Part I of Paisley Livingston’s Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) carefully surveys the film-as-philosophy issues. Livingston concludes his discussion and defends film as philosophy by arguing that “what must be rejected …is the idea that we must make a choice between doing philosophy with film and doing philosophy with the linguistic and conceptual tools with which philosophy has been done prior to the advent of cinema” (p. 56). Progress can be made by taking philosophy, filmmaking, and film criticism to be practices that work well when in dialogue with each other. Livingston goes to investigate Ingmar Bergman’s explorations of persistent human irrationality and cruelty in detail.
- 68.
Robert Sinnerbrink, Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience through Film (London: Routledge, 2016). Here, Sinnerbrink develops a suggestion of Rodowick’s that film theory and criticism in the style of both Deleuze and Cavell might amount to “intertwining projects of evaluating our styles of knowing with the examination of our modes of existence and their possibilities of transformation” in “a fluid, metacritical space of epistemological and ethical self-examination” (Rodowick, “An Elegy for Theory,” p. 1118). Against Rodowick, Malcolm Turvey has argued that philosophy should have at best a propadeutic role in clarifying certain basic concepts in film theory such as perception. Against film theory as philosophy, Turvey specifically recommends that “we …use our expertise—gained from watching large numbers of films, observing them and the responses of viewers to them carefully, and learning about the contexts in which they were made and exhibited—to evaluate the theories we take from other disciplines in terms of whether they successfully explain (or not) film” (Turvey, “Theory, Philosophy, and Film Studies: A Reply to D. N. Rodowick’s ‘An Elegy for Theory,’” October 122 (Fall 2007), pp. 110–20 at p. 120). Here, Turvey goes too far in taking philosophy, contra Wittgenstein, to consist in observing and explaining rather than in clarifying (and potentially changing) conceptual and practical commitments—a critical activity that philosophy, film, and film criticism in dialogue might best exemplify in helping us to see our lives and our lives with films more clearly (See notes 65 and 66.).
- 69.
Ibid., p. 14.
- 70.
Daniel Martin Feige, Kunst als Selbstverständigung (Münster: Mentis, 2012), especially “Film,” pp. 171–90.
- 71.
Martin Seel, Die Künste des Kinos (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2013).
- 72.
Daniel Yacavone, Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
- 73.
I am grateful to Daniel Yacavone for spectacularly detailed, focused, and useful comments on an earlier version of this essay.
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Eldridge, R. (2019). Analytic Philosophy of Film: (Contrasted with Continental Film Theory). In: Carroll, N., Di Summa, L.T., Loht, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_11
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