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The Philosophy of Film course at la Universidad del Zulia offers a deep dive into the intersection of cinema and philosophy. This field connected to the meaning of being human, explores human complexities through the seventh art, going beyond traditional philosophical theory. From the early days of cinema to the digital era, it delves into global cinematic movements and technological revolutions. The competency-based approach enables students to develop practical and theoretical skills, analyzing cinematic works through the lenses of philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Bergson, and Deleuze. Additionally, it examines Latin American cinema, connecting it with regional philosophies and scrutinizing social and political aspects. The course encourages knowledge generation through research, debates, critical analyses, and presentations, molding students into critical thinkers capable of unraveling philosophical messages in diverse films. This contributes to the academic field and provides a deeper understanding of humanity and the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interactive documentary theory has oversimplified concepts of narrative in order to accentuate the contrast between traditional documentary and interactive documentary. In doing so, there is a risk of imagining the interactive documentary as an impermeable and incomprehensible artefact, resistant to hermeneutic examination. This paper will show that by approaching the question of narrative coherence as a phenomenological proposition, a theory of narrative can be developed which is able to account for interactive documentary traits which are not shared with traditional documentaries. In order to reimagine the role of narrative in interactive documentary, the philosophical approach of Paul Ricoeur will be adapted and extended. Ricoeur's combination of phenomenology and hermeneutics encourages a nuanced and philosophically rigorous approach to narrative, which helps us expand on the role of narrative in interactive documentary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does a film affect the sensuality and corporeality of the viewer? This question is raised by modern researchers concerned with phenomenological theory of film and the embodied viewer. They mostly rely on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's findings, according to which we - corporeally embedded in the world - project the field of potential gaze and motion, we grasp the expression of a gesture. Such conceptions, as Daniel Yacavone states, do not consider the film as a work of art; they focus on basic visuality (and aurality) of film. In this vein, Vivian Sobchack limits her theory. She describes film in the categories of embodied perception: she treats it as a vision of the world offered from within, with a specific point of view, directing the attention, grasp of a gesture. In order to broaden this perspective I refer to Hermann Schmitz's new phenomenology. His concept of the embodied subject, the sensitivity open for the world, and also the concept of the world experienced through atmospheric drives or ambiguous sensations, allows the conceptual apprehension of many elusive phenomena, which cinematography has learned to skilfully exploit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considered a "classic" text in film theory, Jean-François Lyotard's "Acinema" (1973) has been subject to recent critical reappraisal. Part of that consideration, I argue, would benefit from an excavation of Lyotard's own specific set of resources, an area left under-examined in the contemporary discussion of his work. In this essay, I look at one of Lyotard's philosophical forebearers, a figure who Lyotard engages in order to overcome the hegemonic theories of Freud and Lacan. With the aid of the erotic novelist and philosopher Pierre Klossowski, Lyotard crafts an alternative film theoretical discourse in distinction to the classical arguments of psychoanalytic film theory, as well as both realist and formalist notions of film economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A typical strategy in the philosophy of film is to identify a question or theory and then consult the data of cinematic phenomena that might speak to it. Here I take somewhat the opposite approach. I start with a particular phenomenon and make the case for its application to a fairly wide range of issues. The phenomenon in question is the "fictional film," which may be either an embedded fiction or a fictional document. I argue that the fictional film helps us work through some particularly thorny issues in film ontology, meaning, engagement, authorship and ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to Wittgenstein's claim that our "seeing a thing as" is strongly dependent on what he calls "world-picture" and vice versa, motion pictures present "surveyable representations" of our world-picture and therefore influence the way we see the world. Insofar as understanding means to see coherences, motion pictures help humans understand world-pictures. But the insights imparted by motion pictures are not of a mere cognitive kind, since motion pictures do not present arguments. By making use of imaginative identification they have such an impact on humans that they directly "embody" insights and thereby changing what is accepted as knowledge within a world-picture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this short article, in response to the urgent invitation of Arcilla's book, I would like to address the question of how to resuscitate liberal education today and how this might be possible with education through film. First, I shall highlight the perfectionist dimension of Arcilla's idea of liberal education from the perspective of Emersonian moral perfectionism—especially in relation to his thematisation of education as a journey, as being on the way. Second, and questioning anew what it means to gather knowledge throughout one's life, I shall offer some critical remarks regarding Arcilla's characterisation of knowledge as associated with know‐how—in his dichotomisation of useful and useless knowledge. To go beyond such a dichotomy, I shall advert to the concept of beautiful knowledge—an idea originally expressed by Henry David Thoreau that does not divide the functional and the aesthetic. Finally, as a concrete way of resuscitating liberal education in higher education, I shall recommend a way of using film in the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers some thoughts in response to René Arcilla's stimulating new book on road movie philosophy. I consider the book's case for separating the ēducāre and ēdūcere functions of education from one another by examining the teacherly role of the child in Wim Wenders' films. I then reflect on the nature of train travel as a mode of journeying that troubles the distinction between fate and destiny. The paper concludes by viewing the road movie as the route to coherence in life and language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Deuce observes the transformations of the notorious 42nd street of New York across the 1970s and 1980s. Aim of this paper is demonstrating how the series enacts this urban mutation through the integration of the affective and experiential texture of the story-world into a unitary, yet multifaceted and transformative, ecology. The analysis will be carried out by drawing from Mikhail Bakthin's notions of chronotope and dialogism, demonstrating the pragmatic power of artistic experience in enacting space-time dimensions characterised by an intrinsic emotional and conceptual polyphony. These concepts will be examined within the framework of an enactivist and film-philosophical understanding of cinematic experience addressing the ethical power entangled in viewers' aesthetic engagement. I will resort to these ideas to discuss how The Deuce offers a complex and critical enactment of the socio-economic dynamics of the Neoliberal Turn, metonymically embedded, in its conflicts and contradictions, within the series' mutating environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dank der Zunahme an Video-onDemand-Angeboten hat die filmwissenschaftliche Forschung und Lehre einen scheinbar schrankenlosen Zugriff auf ihren zentralen Untersuchungsgegenstand. Allerdings birgt diese neue Situation eine ganze Reihe von Problemen und Herausforderungen, nicht nur in rechtlicher, technischer und organisatorischer Hinsicht, sondern ebenso in methodischer und in filmtheoretischer Perspektive. Der Beitrag benennt und skizziert diese Probleme und verweist auf mögliche Lösungen zur Verbesserung der Lage. Thanks to the growing number of video on demand services, film studies are seemingly blessed with unrestricted access to their main subject of research. However, in reality the current situation is fraught with a number of problems and challenges, not only with respect to legal, technical or practical aspects, but also in the perspective of methodology and film theory. This article presents and describes these problems and aims to contribute to possible ways for their mitigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks into the aesthetic refusal in cinema as a refusal to communicate. It mentions that refusal of communication, refuses not simply the image but also the temporality of capitalist modernity, of spectacle and circulation time, of time that is continually reduced to a time-less present. It also informs on the film "Howls for Sade" by Guy Debord on aesthetic refusal and anxiety.

Process Philosophy has a long history as a disciplined way of thinking about the world. Process thinking flows in film theories, too, though often unacknowledged as a framework. This essay contrasts process and substantialist accounts of the world, film, and aesthetics. Processual accounts promise new descriptions of photography, film, color, narrative, narration, fiction, the camera, semiotics, and the self. Performative aspects of aesthetic texts may be measured by such dynamic events as temporal gestalts, patterning, procedural schemata, judgment heuristics, working memory (which includes the stream of consciousness, adverbial sensing, and a flowing sense of selfhood), projections, radial associations, reidentifications (frequency, vibration), and the ever-present possibilia of paradigms and the nearly true. Processes engender immediacy and directionality – a flow toward continual becoming. The result is a new perspective on the nature of textuality – its fluid properties, its collective behavior – without necessarily displacing substantialist accounts that rely on long-term memory and the immobile signposts of sign, cue, form, and thingness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article focuses on the significance of children in New German Cinema. It mentions that the figure of the child in cinema has often been investigated in terms of its narrative or symbolic function, and in relation to the construction and signification of cultural images of childhood in specific historical, national or cultural contexts. It also mentions that linking perception and imagination of different aesthetic forms of the films.

The article focuses on cinephilic retreats and transient connections in Hispanic cinemas. It mentions that Malte Hagener has argued that cinephilia is a mode of intersubjectivity doubly predicated on the affirmation of self and the presentation of that self to others. It also mentions about problematic relocation of identity in motion pictures.

The close-up of the human face is regarded as an effective means of fostering audiences' identification with characters. Listen effects an empathic involvement with a character whose face remains covered throughout. A creative experiment with identification, Listen yields insights that contribute to debates in the philosophy of film. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the work of film scholar Richard Dyer. He mentions his personal relationship with Dyer, the sense of being that was nurtured by this relationship, and how it is reflected in his film studies.

The author discusses the changes in film studies following new areas of inquiry. She mentions the impact of cultural studies, the separation between the subdisciplines of film theory and film history, and the rise of new formalisms in the field.

The aim of this article is to outline a Spinozian-Deleuzian analysis of audio-visual experience and to combine this account with an embodied cognitive perspective on cinema. Thus, film experience integrates affection and intellection and is not a passive and contemplative phenomenon, but a constructive interaction that involves a creative encounter between the screen and the viewer. Furthermore, I will address the role of sad passions and the problematic relation between creation and resistance, also by drawing upon Primo Levi's work on memory and on the shame of being human. Consequently, I will argue that my Spinozian-Deleuzian perspective involves an idea of cinema and art as ethically productive events since they allow a creative opposition against all those forces that mortify and enclose existence. Andrei Tarkovsky's masterpiece Andrei Rublev offers the possibility to develop this discussion; in this biopic, the life of the famous Russian painter is pervaded by problematic questions upon the nature of God, the necessity of Evil, the role of art within a world of violence and misery and, at the same time, the tension and the marvel in the discovery of the real. Following the ideas on spectatorship outlined by Deleuze and combined with Spinoza's thought, we can say that the film makes us perceive these issues through the embodiment and the engagement of the relations it describes. At the same time, the movie gives us the possibility to re-discuss these terrible questions revealing the active and productive nature of art, as different sequences (like the enigmatic prologue) demonstrate. A further aim of this article is, then, to show how this assemblage of different concepts is possible through the vivid and interactive dimension of film experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peirce once called his graphical system of logic-the Existential Graphs-the moving pictures of thought. I argue that Peirce meant that using his graphs to study the movement of thought is akin to Eadweard Muybridge's use of moving pictures to study animal motion, and I show that this analogy is highly apt for several reasons. The analogy is apt because: (1) Just as animal motion is continuous, thought is continuous; (2) Animal motion, like the movement of thought, is too swift and complex to examine directly, without aid; (3) Nevertheless, just as we can record a series of moments of animal motion with the use of a special instrument (viz., cameras and instantaneous photographs), so too we can record a series of moments of thought with the use of a special instrument (viz., the Existential Graphs), enabling us to study its structure; and (4) Through the study of these moments of thought, or of animal motion, we will improve our understanding of them and be able to settle debates about them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophers love to write about Terrence Malick. In this meta-critical essay, I examine recent philosophical evaluations of Malick’s film style – within the broader context of ‘film as philosophy’ or ‘film-philosophy’ – with the aim of laying bare the dominant motifs and values that film philosophers resort to when reflecting on the filmmaker’s pronounced stylistic hallmarks. First, I identify Malick’s widely perceived ‘contemplative style’ as a key catalyst behind philosophers’ fascination with his films and proceed to detail the diversity of stylistic devices and effects in terms of which philosophers describe it. The second movement of my analysis is to illustrate the decidedly ethical interests that accompany said configurations of Malick’s style and effects. I argue that Malick magnifies in philosophers a motive of personal transformation that is more widely at work within the project of film-philosophy. The philosophical achievements of Malick’s style, as commentators see it, always entail transformational effects on the viewer: his devices not only move us to contemplation, but potentially transform us to greater awareness, openness and connection. What are essentially value-laden interpretations of style are illustrated with reference to the three stylistic elements that feature most in philosophical writings on Malick: (1) his visual renderings of nature, (2) his uses of voice-over and (3) the ‘perspective effects’ that he is said to achieve. I conclude with some critical implications of my findings for the procedures and presuppositions underlying the project of film-philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues against the standard readings of Bazin's seminal essay "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," which are based on Charles S. Peirce's account of indexicality but for reasons distinct from recent infl uential criticism of this approach in fi lm studies. The article also moves beyond the accounts of Bazin in the analytic tradition, by building on a rare analysis that takes Bazin's notion of identity between the photographic image and the model seriously. Whereas Jonathan Friday proposes identity to be construed as psychological, the article argues that, under the dual theory of light available to Bazin at the time, identity between the photographic images and object photographed literally holds for some photographs-namely, negatives of objects which emit light. The article concludes with an explanation of why Bazin thought the identity holds for all photographs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sketches a commonplace yet neglected epistemic puzzle raised by the diversity of our fi lm-viewing practices. Because our appreciative practices allow for variability in the "instances" of cinematic works we engage, many of our experiential encounters with those works are fl awed or impoverished in a number of ways. The article outlines a number of ways in which instances of cinema can vary-including, for example, in terms of color, score, and aspect ratio. This variability of instances of cinema and, hence, the variability in our experiences of a cinematic work raise potential problems around normative questions of interpretation and evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive dissonance provides a model for understanding how we experience film texts as profound. This article looks at the ways in which filmmakers might motivate or exploit the pleasure of resolving familiar narrative dissonance to inspire emotions associated with profundity, sublimity, or transcendence. David Lynch scholarship provides a primary case study in the conflation of cognitive dissonance and transcendence, however it is contended that moral obligations to rape and trauma victims are sublimated in the process. Alternative moral dissonances across a range of different cinematic modes are subsequently addressed. Comparative analysis of vigilantism in American revenge and "social cleansing" films, Ken Loach's social realism, Richard Linklater's Bernie (2011), and John Sayles's Lone Star (1996) permits an exploration of variability in filmic dissonance and narrative comprehension, as well as alternative approaches to filmmaking ethics and responsibility. The article concludes with suggestions for an applied ethics extended from cognitive film theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This article argues that the explicit narrative twist that constitutes the mode of narration of twist films opens the potential for an additional implied twist that emerges in the awoken interpretive process of the viewer. Relying on Roland Barthes's notion of the 'writerly' mode of narrative, this article further argues that this mode of implied twist narration inadvertently rearranges the spectator relationship to story construction in potentially any film by bringing spectator desire into focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Film-philosophy is a growing branch of cinema scholarship, but to what degree can it be deployed in relation to the short film? Here we attempt to configure The Beach and Alain Badiou's notion of 'event' into a reciprocal relationship, and discover why 'the subject' is not who one thinks it is. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter provides a close reading of Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán's cine-essay The Pearl Button (El botón de nácar) (2015). Through the use of figurative language, alignment and speculative narratives Guzmán creates a 'multi-directional' picture of Chile's Tierra del Fuego, its indigenous population and violent history over the last three centuries. With his choice of the essay as cinematic form he seeks to hold together, in Isabelle Stengers' sense, questions that are complex and multifaceted; questions that are of archaeological, humanitarian or ethical concern and that require the input of many human and non-human voices and forces. In her booklength essay, In Catastrophic Times (2015), the Belgian philosopher encourages the sciences to approach a matter of common concern, such as anthropocenic change, via an ecology of practices. I see such ecological thinking in practice in Guzmán's cine-essayistic work, in which human-centred events acquire a larger cosmological dimension to the extent that abstract philosophical questions remain worldly, that is committed to the material and embodied realities of the earthbound. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including film philosophy, epistolary and observational forms of documentary films, and the work of filmmaker Patricio Guzman.

This article examines Bernard Stiegler's notions of cinematic consciousness and tertiary memory, developed in his philosophy of time and technology, in relation to the essay film's aesthetic and storytelling features. I begin by illustrating Stiegler's ideas in relation to cinema, consciousness, memory and technology; making use of the recent and widely acclaimed TV series reboot Westworld, I employ it as an allegory of the functionality of cinema as mnemotechnology. Furthermore, considering how the essay film questions cinema's industrialization effect through Stiegler's theorization of cinema qua tertiary memory, I look at the work of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Mysterious Object at Noon (1999) to argue how the essay film is a radical practice that stages thought in order to de-synchronize the consciousness of cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stemming from the concept of 'enunciation', here posited as an act of expression, self-depiction and reasoning, this article addresses the category of the 'self-representational metacinema', which is a self-reflexive variety of essay film as authorial discourse, and analyses the way in which Agnès Varda's The Beaches of Agnès (2008) is an opus about the world and thought processes of an artist as the artist is immersed in the world (of cinema). Firstly, by presenting herself, in her own body, as 'Agnès Varda', the director writes her identity into the film, as a first layer of filmic enunciation placed midway between reality and illusion, thus ambiguating herself as an objective person, on the one hand, and reinforcing her nature as a subjective creator (i.e. endowed with a specifically cinematic worldvision), on the other. The representation of the filmic artist at work (as ars poetica) embraces the self-portrait as a fully fledged art cinema aesthetic category. Secondly, by rethinking the world through (her) cinema, Varda adopts a phenomenological position in which the digressive nature of her cinematic writing is conveyed as a corporeal experience of being in the world, according to Vivian Sobchak with Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Varda not only interacts with the world around her but also inscribes herself in the essay film as both representation and expression, that is, matter and thought. Thirdly, the reality and illusion dichotomy, which pervades the entire film, is particularly intense in the third and final layer of enunciation, which involves mnemonic rewinding. The division of Varda's life in several coexisting stages from which the director can extract particular memories reconciles Gilles Deleuze's chronosigns, which imply a non-chronological time structure, with a more traditional Augustinian time as an arrow, a conception of a threefold present, and immortality beyond that. Ultimately, The Beaches of Agnes is a discourse on the power of the image and creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article represents the outcome of a round table organized and conducted by Giacomo Tagliani about the Lessico del cinema Italiano/Lexicon of Italian Cinema (2014-2016). This research and editorial project comprises three volumes and 21 entries that address the history of Italian cinema through an original and challenging approach, namely to detect a list of conceptual clusters able to provide new perspectives over the heritage of Italian films. In this refined version, the authors who took part in that round table, that is, Roberto De Gaetano (also editor of the volumes), Massimiliano Coviello, Luca Venzi and Francesco Zucconi, outline their involvement in the research project, their specific methodological references, their peculiar vision of the history of Italian cinema and eventually their point of view onto its current situation. This written conversation offers a broad survey of Lessico's key aspects and addresses important methodological, theoretical and critical issues, trying to establish an interdisciplinary dialogue among different fields of studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cinema of the Dardenne brothers represents a new kind of cinema, one that challenges a number of our conventional ways of thinking about the distinction between religion and secularism, belief and unbelief. Their films explore the intricacies of spiritual and ethical transformations as they are experienced within embodied, material life. These features of their cinema will be examined primarily through the lens of Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy of the imbrication of the drama of existence and the ethical intrigue of self and Other. The work of the Dardenne brothers can be understood as an attempt to express what I describe as a "faith without faith"--a recognition of the absolute centrality of belief for the development of a responsible subject but in the absence of a traditional faith in a personal deity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In proposing an ontology of motion capture, this paper identifies three modalities – capture, hold, release – to conceptualise the peculiar affordances of motion capture technology in its relationship to a performer's movement. Motion capture is unique among contemporary moving image media in its capacity to re-perform a performer's recorded movement a potentially limitless number of times, for example, as applied to innumerable different CG characters. Unlike live-action film or even rotoscoping (motion capture's closest equivalent), the movement extracted from the captured performance lives on, but only by way of the inimagable (non-visible) domain of motion data. Motion data ‘holds' movement itself in inimagable form, and ‘releases' it in the domain of the digital moving image. This tri-fold conception relates an important dimension of (Heideggerian) Being to the idea of movement as fundamental to an ontology or ‘being' of motion capture. At the same time, the proposed ontology challenges the ‘illusion of life' metaphor as the accepted definition of (motion capture) animation. The Oscar's Special Rules for the Animated Feature Film Award asserts that ‘by itself' motion capture does not qualify as an animation method. The notion that a technology could do or be anything ‘by itself' affords a conceptual leap towards Heideggerian thinking on the nature of Being as embodied in temporality, in which past, present and future are unified. In its capacity to operate outside the domain of the digital moving image, the concept of ‘movement itself' not only articulates an ontology of motion capture: motion capture itself can be understood to be brought into being by movement, thus also challenging the notion that capture technology has a parasitic relationship to a performer's originary performance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented on the works of the Hungarian-German-Jewish film theorist, dramatist, screenwriter, poet, and cultural critic, Béla Balázs. It examines the views of many Marxists on Balázs's writings as tainted with reactionary language. It offers the twoo books of Balázs on film theory that were were attacked in the German Communist press.

An anti-realist stance prevalent in philosophy of film, probably less familiar to analytical than continental philosophers, raises issues that are philosophically accessible and engaging. While this anti-realist stance can be historically situated many of its constituent ideas remain influential in contemporary milieus. A common claim of anti-realism is that realist art or cinema, in part by virtue of "reification," is inherently "non-transformative." Without rigorously refuting all manifestations of the "reification thesis," key assumptions of anti-realism associated with it are challenged in this paper. An aesthetic and a political-ideological anti-realist thesis are identified and critiqued. Kant's distinction between "aesthetic" and "mechanical art" provides a basis for defending a form of cinematic realism that vindicates its potential transformative power. The Kantian framework provides a reference point for a comparative analysis of Brecht's and Lukâcs's views on anti-realism versus realism as well as for a favorable reconsideration of André Bazin's cinematic realism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social, political and cultural complexity of post-war Hong Kong (1945-1997) produced a highly fragmented, unsystematic, and historically transient mode of critical debate on the cinema. One film scholar, however, Lam Nin-tung (林年同 Lin Niangtong, 1944-1990), tried to systematize the debate and proposed a thoughtprovoking idea: jing you [geng jau 鏡游] or mirroring-drifting. In this article, I argue that Lam's theory is best understood as an attempt to re-examine the relationship between the subject and the object in cinematic perception, a project motivated by a subjectival crisis embedded within the social, cultural and political complexity of the historical period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indigenous women have been exoticized, objectified and hypersexualized throughout the history of cinema. As more Indigenous film-makers take the camera into their own hands, they challenge these representations and disrupt existing hierarchies of power. Here I examine the work of two Indigenous women film-makers, Tracey Moffatt (Aboriginal Australian) and Tracey Deer (Mohawk), whose films speak back to historical images of Native women. Rather than exotic objects of the man's gaze, they are powerful agents of their own lives and identities. Through close readings of two films, Moffatt's Nice Coloured Girls and Deer's Club Native I argue that their work exemplifies a unique Indigenous aesthetic. Rooted in Fourth Cinema, this genre highlights such issues as performativity, motherhood and Indigenous women's embodied experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Ma-ori film-maker Barry Barclay used the term 'Fourth Cinema' to describe indigenous cinema, a philosophy based on his own practice as a director. He sought to privilege the indigenous gaze and the indigenous audience by centralizing te ao Ma-ori or the Ma-ori world-view in principle and in practice. However, much has changed in the world of film-making since Barclay developed his theory. The range of storytelling by Ma-ori on large and small screens has increased exponentially, and Ma-ori films such as Boy (Waititi, 2010) and Mt Zion (Kahi, 2013) have reached the top of the domestic box office, implying a wide Ma-ori and non- Ma-ori audience within the settler-centric culture of New Zealand. This article reviews and contextualizes Barclay's philosophy. It then uses his central concepts to examine the feature Mt Zion, exploring aspects of the film's text, production and distribution, to establish what conclusions can be drawn regarding the relevance of Barclay's thinking to the practice of a new generation of Ma-ori film-makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article approaches to a reconstruction of the problem of art in Jacques Rancière's philosophy. For this, it reveals how inside of their defense of an aesthetic regime in the contemporary world, it is found a critique of metaphysical thought. To show how the cinematographic images dismantle metaphysics (especially those produced by modern cinema), as a feature of this regime, the films of Hungarian director Bela Tarr are analyzed. Thus, the key concepts of aesthetic thinking of Rancière are shown, in contrast to its own reading of film, which occupies a special place in his work, to the extent that his pictures defy any representative perspective that is evidenced in the cinematographic work analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the star theory in cinema, which contributes the success of a movie to a specific character in it. It discusses how the studies by Mark Vieira on actress Greta Garbo, Catherine Constable on actress Marlene Dietrich, and Susan Hayward on actress Simone Signoret. It looks at the role of star theory in actor's cinematic output which represents philosophical issues as with the French actress Carole Bouquet.

This article examines the relationship between animation and an idea of cinema as it has evolved in the postwar period, particularly under the influence of the writing of Andre Bazin. Through close readings of Alain Resnais's films, as well as their critical reception, the article highlights the great importance of animation, comics, and other ephemeral graphic images to an earlier generation of French critics and filmmakers. Recovering this importance will help us navigate the confusing media landscape we inhabit today and build continuities across apparently distinct aesthetic and historical practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of ‘New French Extremity’, Michael Haneke’s films are critically received as brutal and violent.Amour(2012) addresses political and ethical questions of the treatment of the dying within the aesthetics of intimate and provocative cinema. In this article, the author explores the provocative nature ofAmourin contact with philosophical questions of death and care. He theorises death using Jean-Luc Nancy’s work on cinema, the body and ethics. Understanding death as a Nancean ‘blind spot’ – a coming to presence that unfolds and intensifies existential finitude – allows the author to centrally position the knowledge of Anne’s death in this expositional realm beyond representation. With the help of Nancy’s work, he fleshes out the evidence of Anne’s death as an intensified shared experience through the film, and analyses her corporeal ‘expeausition’. He positionsAmourontologically as a Nancean ‘transimmanent’ vehicle bringing the embodied immanence of carnal spectatorship and the transcendence of the topic of death in contact. In this reading, the film as ‘exscription’ of Anne’s body, as access proper to her body and skin, enables a sense of ‘being-with’ the images and touches upon ethics, death and the cinematic medium itself. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There is a traditional debate in analytic aesthetics that surrounds the classification of film as Art. While much philosophy devoted to considering film has now moved beyond this debate and accepts film as a mass art, a subcategory of Art proper, it is worth reconsidering the criticism of film pre-Deleuze. Much of the criticism of film as pseudo-art is expressed in moral terms. Adorno, for example, critiques film as ‘mass-cult’, mass-produced culture which presents a ‘flattened’ version of reality. Adorno worries about the passivity encouraged in viewers. Films are narrative artworks, received by an audience in a context, making the focus on the reception of the work important. The dialogue held between Adorno and Walter Benjamin post-Second World War is interesting because, between them, they consider both the possible positive emancipatory and negative politicization effects of film as a mass produced and distributed storytelling medium. Reading Adorno alongside Benjamin is a way to highlight the role of the critical thinker who receives the film. Arguing that the critical thinker is a valuable citizen, this paper focuses on the value of critical thinking in the reception of cinematic artworks. It achieves this by reconsidering Adorno and Benjamin’s theories of mass art. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article examines how the openings of two film adaptations of the novel "Mildred Pierce" by James M. Cain took advantage of the ambiguity of the novel as hardcore melodrama to set forth the director's adaptation strategies. It discusses how director Michael Curtiz exploits the subversive vein of film noir to undermine the representation of the bourgeois social order. It also shows how Todd Haynes' version got rid of the novel's emotional overflow to depict an empowering model of femininity.