Something Sacred to Our Culture: René Arcilla's Liberal Education

The present discussion is motivated by a broad sympathy for the educational commitments that run through René Arcilla's "Wim Wenders's Road Movie Philosophy" (2020). His framing of these commitments is imaginative, as is the invitation to Wenders' films that the book provides. It is, however, with attention to the figures of the frame and the line that I call into question some aspects of the account, especially regarding its conceptions of time and narrative, and of the relation of the photographic still to the moving image. While appreciative of Arcilla's faith in education and of the importance of film in this, I endeavour to show that a liberal education can be more broadly and more practically conceived than Arcilla is ready to suggest. I try to show how this might be done.