Thinking the Moving Image, the Moving Image Thinking

October 28, 2020 Posted by Webmaster under Volume 28, Number 3, May 2018

David Maruzzella (bio)
DePaul University

A review of Herzogenrath, Bernd, editor. Film as Philosophy. Minnesota UP, 2017.

As its title suggests, Film as Philosophy seeks to recast the relationship between philosophy and film. Against the once-dominant psychoanalytic and semiotic theories of film, the fifteen essays in this edited volume attempt to displace the traditional hierarchy implicit in the philosophy of film in the wake of major figures such as Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze. Just as Engels famously urged that philosophical materialism be revised and revitalized in the wake of scientific discoveries, Herzogenrath writes in the introduction that “a new medium makes us think differently” and that thought can no longer be “said to be taking place within the confines of our skull, only” (vii). The profound transformations in thought provoked by cinema are the occasion for the essays in Film as Philosophy, all of which seek to answer the question “Is there something like cinematic thought, thinking-with-images?” (viii). The essays all elaborate and substantiate the claim that film is indeed capable of thought or thinking, and therefore of contributing to philosophical problematics in a distinctively cinematic way. Such a position was originally suggested by Stephen Mulhall, whose 2002 book On Film is quoted in the volume’s introduction:

I do not look at these films [the Alien quartet] as handy or popular illustrations of views and arguments properly developed by philosophers; I see them rather as themselves reflecting on and evaluating such views and arguments, as thinking seriously and systematically about them in just the ways that philosophers do. (4)

Whereas an earlier collection edited by Murray Smith and Thomas E. Wartenberg, Thinking through Cinema: Film as Philosophy (2006), critically engages Mulhall’s notion of film as philosophy, Herzogenrath’s volume begins with and seems to presuppose film’s philosophical power. Each essay explores some aspect of this claim, either by reading individual films or by introducing the works of the major figures who have theorized the unparalleled philosophical capacity of the seventh art.

Though Herzogerath’s introduction to the volume is inspired by Deleuze, this hypothesis of film as philosophy, as distinct from the traditional philosophy of film approach, belongs both to analytic and to continental circles. Readers familiar with recent continental philosophy will recognize the elimination of the preposition “of” as the defining feature of Alain Badiou’s project of inaesthetics (treated by Alex Ling in his chapter on Badiou), which explicitly rejects being understood as yet another philosophy of art, and seeks instead to unravel the truths set to work in diverse aesthetic practices. Readers immersed in cognitivist and analytic debates in the philosophy of film will recognize the title’s explicit reference to the aforementioned debates of the early 2000s in large part sparked by Mulhall’s book as well as Paisley Livingston’s essay “Theses on Cinema as Philosophy.” And yet this shift in film theory is, in some sense, an attempt to eliminate the need for film theory as such, or at least any film theory or philosophy that establishes a hierarchal relationship between the two disciplines. Indeed, it is a question of pluralizing philosophy, of bringing film and philosophy together

into a productive dialogue without assigning the role of a dominant and all-encompassing referee to one of these disciplines. Rather, it is about relating the diverse entry points. … toward each other in a fertile manner in order to establish, ultimately, a media philosophy that puts the status, the role, and the function of the medium—here, film—into a new perspective: no longer are the representational techniques of the medium at the center of inquiry but rather its ability to ‘think’ and to assume an active role in the process of thought. (xii-xiv)

Film as Philosophy can also be seen as a kind of primer on fifteen important contemporary film theorists. However, the book’s organization tends to be a bit confusing as it both features essays by scholars about leading theorists like Rancière, Badiou, Deleuze, and Cavell, as well as texts that are seemingly “primary sources” written by film-philosophers such as Carroll and Smith where their own positions and previous work are summarized. Some of the essays give helpful introductions to lesser-known figures such as Hugo Münsterberg, Béla Balázs, Jean Epstein, and Raymonde Carrasco, while others shed new light on classic figures like André Bazin and Sergei Eisenstein. Other contributions feel more like traditional philosophy of film essays—Herzogenrath’s chapter interprets David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) as an instance of Deleuze’s notion of the Time-Image, and John Ó Maoilearca offers a Bergsonian reading of Lars von Trier’s The Five Obstructions (2003)—while some feel out of place, as in the chapter on Artaud’s scattered writings, which ultimately condemn film in a quasi-Platonic manner as “hijacking perception” (82).

Despite its stated intentions, Film as Philosophy is still divided by and structured around the debates that Mulhall’s book sparked in the early 2000s. Not all of the contributions take the necessary theoretical and rhetorical steps required to affirm the philosophical power of film, and in fact, many seem to deny it, whether implicitly or explicitly. Others fall back into more traditional readings of films as illustrations of philosophical theories without seeming to let the film itself to do the thinking.i To let film do philosophy—or at least to affirm its philosophical capacity—is certainly no easy task. Indeed, as Arthur Danto and more recently Robert Sinnerbrink have argued, the very task of philosophizing seems to necessarily presuppose the “philosophical disenfranchisement of art.”ii What then is the relationship of the philosophical text or the act of producing philosophical discourse to film? Is the philosophical predicated on the disenfranchisement of art, the image, and representation? In exploring the chapters that make up Film as Philosophy, it will be clear that these antinomies and antagonisms fundamentally structure philosophy’s relationship with its artistic others, and that film’s philosophical potential is still not completely evident when elaborated within the discourse of philosophy.

I want to pay particular attention in what follows to the book’s final three chapters as they best encapsulate the conflicting tendencies that currently structure the relationship between film and philosophy.

In On Film, Mulhall provocatively announces that the Alien and Mission Impossible films do not merely illustrate pre-existing philosophical theories, but rather think in the same way as philosophers.iii Noël Carroll’s chapter on “Movie-Made Philosophy” begins by taking up Mulhall’s distinction: on the one hand, the illustrative approach argues that films illustrate philosophical theories that exist prior to and independently of the film; on the other hand, Carroll’s “movie-made philosophy” captures the possibility of film itself doing the philosophizing or philosophizing through the image. Carroll’s chapter affirms that there are at least “some cases of movie-made philosophy” (268), against the skeptical arguments forwarded elsewhere by Paisley Livingston, Murray Smith, and Bruce Russell. In his “Theses on Cinema as Philosophy,” Livingston claims that for a film to be considered philosophical it must not simply parrot or illustrate pre-existing philosophical ideas, but rather the film must make a novel philosophical contribution, and that furthermore it must do so using exclusively cinematic means (i.e. non-linguistic means such as montage or technical-artistic means exclusive to film and the cinematic apparatus). Carroll renames these two components of the so-called “Bold Thesis” the “results condition” and the “means condition” (270). Yet, as Carroll shows, these two requirements or conditions lead to a self-defeating paradox wherein a film is expected to produce an original philosophical argument precisely without making an argument in the classical philosophical senseiv, and sets an unrealistic expectation for philosophical texts: very rarely do philosophers do more than elaborate pre-existing theories, introduce subtle counter-arguments, or propose provocative thought experiments in a pre-existing discursive context. Not to mention that the conception of argument presupposed here excludes important philosophers like Nietzsche or Wittgenstein, who do not necessarily put forth traditional arguments. For Carroll, if we eliminate the unrealistically high expectations artificially imposed by the skeptics, we can easily say that a film like Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) makes an original interpretative and cinematic addition to the Marxist theory of alienated labor, that experimental films such as Gehr’s Serene Velocity (1970) pose ontological questions about the nature of film, and that a film like Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000) makes visible the phenomenological construction of temporality in human experience. Additionally, many films can be considered philosophical insofar as they can be interpreted as social criticism: Chantal Akerman’s masterpiece Jeanne Dielman: 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) criticizes the alienation of the suburban housewife and her condemnation to domesticity (and explores the themes of sex work and feminine desire), implicitly staging a dialogue with Italian feminism and operaismo; Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) criticizes the casual racism of the white liberal and opens onto important themes and discussions in critical race theory (see Flory). By expanding the definition of what counts as philosophical, Carroll opens the door to the very real possibility that film might indeed produce philosophy beyond mere illustration, yet he nonetheless concludes by insisting that only rarely do films achieve the status of the philosophical (283).

In the context of this volume, Wartenberg’s chapter on Michael Haneke’s 2012 film Amour leans towards the skepticism that he typically criticizes (see his “Beyond Mere Illustration: How Film Can Be Philosophy”). The premise of Haneke’s film is simple: an elderly married couple face their finitude and mortality head-on as Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) suddenly falls ill, leaving her to the care of her husband Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant). Georges promises to never commit Anne to a nursing home or send her back to the hospital, but when her condition worsens, he is forced to employ a nurse who visits their Paris apartment. In a poignant and brutal scene, Georges, seemingly unprovoked, suffocates Anne, killing her. Wartenberg sees “…Amour as making contributions to our understanding of the ethics of the process of dying,” but he argues “that it does not present a general justification for euthanasia, as some have asserted” (288). Yet we’re never told exactly who reads the film as making a general argument in favor euthanasia. For Wartenberg then, the film is a failed counterexample unable to achieve philosophical universality—the situation depicted in Amour is too specific, too particular, to be the basis of a general ethical theory. Amour, according to Wartenberg, is best understood as a realistic look at the inevitable process of aging and death, one rarely seen as a problem that a married couple must face together. Its philosophical contribution is that it shows this oft ignored aspect of marriage in excruciating detail. Unlike Cavell’s insistence on the romantic comedy of remarriage (treated in Chapter 9), Wartenberg sees Amour as exemplary in its depiction of marriage as an “ethical institution” (289).

Is Amour making a philosophical argument that, under extreme circumstances, it is morally justifiable to kill one’s spouse? That killing can be an act of love? I would contend that Amour need not be read as an attempt to make an argument that, according to Wartenberg, it ultimately fails to make. For Wartenberg, Amour‘s “argument,” which it presents cinematically, is that euthanasia is morally justified if a person’s dignity risks being lost: “When the only way to preserve the dignity of a person with a terminal illness is to kill them, then it is morally required that one do so” (302). Wartenberg suggests that we are led to interpret Georges’s action as moral because the film gives us ample visual and cinematic evidence of Anne’s loss of dignity: she is incapable of coherent speech, and is unable to wash or feed herself. In short, “we feel humiliated, as if we were somehow less valuable as human beings for being returned to an infant-like state of total dependence on others for even our most basic bodily functions” (294). Wartenberg is no doubt correct to observe that many of the film’s most difficult scenes depict Anne’s physical and mental decline in extreme detail. And Georges does seem to do his best, despite his old age and declining health, to keep Anne’s dignity intact. Furthermore, Georges is appalled by the way the healthcare professionals he employs objectify his wife, treating her mechanically and appearing indifferent to her cries of pain. They further humiliate Anne and threaten her dignity, leading him to fire a nurse who had years of experience because she aggressively brushes Anne’s hair and speaks sarcastically of making her beautiful again for Georges. Given this context, Georges’s decision to kill Anne is, for Wartenberg, the resolution of the contradiction between his inability to care for her—the most brutal scene of the film is not Anne’s death, but Georges slapping Anne as she cannot drink water from a sippy cup—and his honoring Anne’s wishes not to be put in a nursing home or be returned to the hospital. Neither he nor anybody else can care for her properly, therefore death before her dignity is completely lost is the only solution.

Suddenly, however, Wartenberg tells us that we have to do “more than interpret the film,” that “we need to assess the validity and generalizability of its claim that George’s killing of Anne was a moral act” (301). Amour provides us with sufficient context, which in turn “justifies” Georges’s passage à l’acte. But Wartenberg concludes that if the film seeks to “legitimate” (303) Georges’s actions, then it in fact fails to do so because the situation the film presents is too narrow, rare, and extreme to logically entail the generalizability of its thesis. Amour thus attempts to legitimate the position that Georges’s choice is the moral one, but fails to make a convincing case for the morality of euthanasia in general. Wartenberg writes:

So even as Amour enlarges our sympathetic understanding of what a marriage is, what sorts of obligations it imposes on its partners, and why it makes sense to view marriage as a paradigmatic ethical relationship, it does not offer a general defense of euthanasia as an ethical practice. (304)

But why force Amour to conform to this particular way of practicing philosophy? That is, why must the film be evaluated philosophically in this way? Because otherwise we would merely be interpreting it? Wartenberg then seems to repeat precisely what Carroll critiques: both a narrowing of the definition of the philosophical, and an attempt to force a film—which is not philosophical in this narrow sense (putting forward propositional truth claims and arguments to justify them)—to meet these impossible criteria. Pace Wartenberg, it could quite easily be argued that Haneke’s film, like all of his feature films, revolves around an unexplained and unjustified act of violence: the family’s sudden decision to commit suicide in The Seventh Continent (1989), Benny’s murder of the girl in Benny’s Video (1992), the shooting at the end of 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994), the entirety of Funny Games (1997), Erika’s violent sexual fantasies in The Piano Teacher (2001), the anonymous videos and threatening drawings as well as Majid’s suicide in Caché (2005), the mysterious violence that plagues the village in The White Ribbon (2009), not to mention the brutal killing of animals in almost all of these films, including Haneke’s most recent film Happy End, which could be read as a loose sequel to Amour.v Could Georges’s decision to kill his wife not fit one of Haneke’s larger thematic concerns? Wartenberg focuses on what he takes to be the centrality of human dignity because Haneke mentions the notion in a statement he made after a screening of Amour, but couldn’t one equally cite the same Haneke who said “I hope that all of my films have at least an element of obscenity”? (Sharrett, 587). Thus by reading Amour as a failed attempt at making a cinematic argument for a universalizable ethical theory, Wartenberg is led, despite himself, to claim that Amour is in fact unphilosophical, that the philosophical is that discourse which operates at the level of universality whereas the film or work of art seems condemned to the very particularity that the philosophical brackets.

In the book’s final chapter, “Experience and Explanation in the Cinema,” Murray Smith summarizes and attempts to legitimize the cognitivist turn in film theory that he has long defended. Taking up Carroll’s earlier treatment of “the power of cinema” in his article by the same name, Smith argues that only a robust philosophical and scientific naturalism can explain “the distinctive experience it [film] creates” (308). Following Quine and Sellars, Smith’s analysis of film seeks to be continuous with the findings of the natural sciences. Naturalism entails a “substantive commitment to the study of all phenomena, including human behavior, as a part of the physically constituted, biologically evolved world, and a methodological commitment to the methods and standards of the natural sciences” (310). Smith goes on to summarize different aspects of the perceptual behavior of an audience member, arguing that the typical viewer moves from low-level perceptual experiences to more theoretical and hermeneutical processes of interpretation and analysis. Most of what goes on when we watch a film belongs to what Smith calls the “cognitive unconscious”: rapid and unintentional perceptual processes that help us experience films as meaningful and coherent. In other moments, our perceptual and cognitive predispositions explain why we often overlook or fail to see certain things on screen (315-316). A whole host of these impersonal and unconscious mechanisms structure and condition our experience: “seeing depth, seeing motion, failing to see edits and camera movement, and last, recognizing characters and attributing emotions to them. Each one of these can be illuminated and explained by considering the subpersonal mechanisms that make them possible” (317). In many ways, Smith suggests, our perceptual system fails and often misleads us. He explains that this is why so many viewers are “tricked” by a film like The Sixth Sense (1999); we unconsciously select what we see, and films often play with our capacity to catch these subtle editing tricks. Smith, following Carroll, suggests that these features are “generic,” that is, they can be found in any audience member (317). Yet on the basis of these generic features, we can also move to higher-level cognitive activities required for the interpretation and analysis of individual films.

Taking the science fiction film District 9 (2009) as his example, Smith argues that human audience members will be naturally led to recognize a kind of humanity and individuality in the film’s alien creatures. We are even able to make some sense of the alien’s emotional states through what Smith calls “situational understanding,” a process whereby we can attribute thoughts, emotions, and mental states to individuals or agents by gathering contextual information. Though humans are equipped to decipher the mental and emotional states of other humans, District 9 anthropomorphizes the alien creatures, allowing the audience to sympathize and identify with their struggles. Again, at a very low level of cognition, a typical audience member (this notion is never developed) can individuate characters, attribute states of mind and traits to these characters, and identify and respond emotionally to them. And yet human spectators are not simply immersed and enthralled by the film as the old psychoanalytic theories claimed; we are also capable of theorizing and thinking about it. Smith argues that situational cognition, joint attention, and our facial perception capacity “bridge” our lower level unconscious perceptual apparatus and lead to our higher-level abstract theorization and understanding of particular films (325). At these higher cognitive levels, we are able to take all of this information and make sense of the film, recalling our prior stock of knowledge about the social issues the film addresses (apartheid, racism, etc.). The central problem for cognitivist film theory is how to explain the uniquely human experience of film—our ability not only to process the images, but to make sense of them, to understand them—that is, to link our generic perceptual capacities to our higher-level theoretical acts:

We need a naturalistic account not only of our ability to see depth and motion on movie screens but also of our ability to investigate and theorize perception, to invent the technology of cinema, and to reflect on the nature of animal agency, personhood, and the kinds of society that humans create. (324)

Indeed, the cognitivist turn seems to be after nothing less than a cognitive theory of everything! And it is only by taking this route that we can arrive at what Smith calls (after Clifford Geertz) “thick explanations – explanations that seek to be as complete, multileveled, and unified as possible” (326). But just like Wartenberg’s essay, Smith’s contribution, at every point, shuts the door on the thesis of film as philosophy. Unwittingly reproducing a rather unsophisticated positivism, Smith denies film all philosophical power and originality. Philosophy, sutured to the natural sciences, simply summarizes and synthesizes the available scientific knowledge in an attempt to explain away our experience of the cinema as nothing but the result of neurons firing in our brain. As Carroll had already argued in his “The Power of Movies,” mainstream films are in some sense nothing other than those works of mass art best suited to the current state of the evolution of human perception and cognition, hence their widespread appeal to audiences all over the globe. The cognitivist approach is thus a better and more empirically reliable theory of the unconscious experience of film than the now tired psychoanalytic theories.vi For Smith, film clearly does not philosophize; rather, philosophers do the philosophizing, but only when they take a back seat to cognitive science. Films are simply the object of the philosophy of film, which is in turn grounded in cognitive science.

Between Carroll, Wartenberg, and Smith, a whole set of contradictions, tensions, and conflicts arises. Even in Film as Philosophy, the contributors clearly do not share a common understanding of this turn of phrase that supposedly unites them all. Rather than uniformity, we see a constantly shifting set of positions that appear around this on-going attempt to eliminate the hierarchy wherein cinema remains an object for philosophy. Carroll, whose 1985 “The Power of Movies” is invoked by Smith (the arch-cognitivist in the volume), appears in this context to have the most robust conception of film as philosophy, while Wartenberg and Smith uncritically reproduce classical philosophical claims and positions, all the while believing themselves to be defending the philosophical power of film. The power dynamic between philosophy and film, if not between philosophy and the non-philosophical, clearly cannot be resolved in one fell swoop and is no doubt a debate still underway. Nothing less than the transformation of philosophy is at stake, but it will require the arduous philosophical re-enfranchisement of art, or perhaps its philosophical self-empowerment.

Footnotes

i. On this point, Wartenberg’s article “Beyond Mere Illustration: How Film Can Be Philosophy” provides some resources for avoiding the charge that a film is not truly philosophical if it merely illustrates a pre-existing theory.

ii. See Arthur Danto’s The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art and Robert Sinnerbrink’s essay “Disenfranchising Film? On the Cognitivist Turn in Film Theory.”

iii. Mulhall’s claim is not unlike Cavell’s almost scandalous reading of It Happened One Night (1934) alongside Kant and Hume in Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cavell’s thought is treated by Elisabeth Bronfen in her contribution to Film as Philosophy.

iv. As Smith and Wartenberg write in the introduction to their edited volume, Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy, “If the purportedly distinctive contribution to philosophy made by a film can be paraphrased, then it is not unique; if it cannot be, then how could it be a contribution to the discursive discipline of philosophy?” (3) In other words, the film cannot make its philosophical argument in language nor be susceptible to being paraphrased in language after the fact since this would mean the contribution was linguistic and not exclusively cinematic. But Livingston worries that if the argument is not linguistic, than doubt arises as to whether it truly exists.

v. H. Peter Steeves’s “The Doubling of Death in the Films of Michael Haneke.” It would be worth investigating the relationship between Amour and Haneke’s latest film, Happy End, which does draw a loose connection to Amour. At one point the Georges character in Happy End tells his granddaughter that he was once led to make a decision that resulted in him killing his sickly wife, but that he does not regret it. This wouldn’t necessarily contradict my reading of Amour; in fact, Georges’s character in Happy End encapsulates, in particular his final actions, quite nicely the inexplicable violence in all of Haneke’s work, as does the granddaughter.

vi. And indeed this was the original intention of the famous volume Post-Theory, which sought to replace psychoanalytic film theory with cognitive theory on the grounds that only the latter is scientific.

Works Cited

  • Carroll, Noël. “The Power of Movies.” Daedalus, vol. 114, no. 4, Fall 1985, pp. 79-103. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20025011.
  • —, and David Bordwell, editors. Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. U of Wisconsin P, 1996.
  • Cavell, Stanley. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Harvard UP, 1984.
  • Danto, Arthur. The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. Columbia UP, 1986.
  • Flory, Dan. “Spike Lee and the Sympathetic Racist.” Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy, edited by Murray Smith and Thomas E. Wartenberg, Blackwell Publishing, 2006, pp. 67-80.
  • Livingston, Paisley. “Theses on Cinema as Philosophy.” Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy, edited by Murray Smith and Thomas E. Wartenberg. Blackwell Publishing, 2006, pp. 11-18.
  • Mulhall, Stephen. On Film. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2008.
  • Sharrett, Christopher. “The World That is Known: An Interview with Michael Haneke.” A Companion to Michael Haneke, edited by Roy Grundmann. Blackwell Publishing, 2010, pp. 580-90.
  • Smith, Murray and Wartenberg, Thomas E. “Introduction.” Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy. Edited by Murray Smith and Thomas E. Wartenberg. Blackwell Publishing, 2006, pp. 1-9.
  • Steeves, H. Peter. Beautiful, Bright, and Blinding: Phenomenological Aesthetics and the Life of Art. State U of New York P, 2017.
  • Wartenberg, Thomas E. “Beyond Mere Illustration: How Film Can Be Philosophy.” Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy. Edited by Murray Smith and Thomas E. Wartenberg. Blackwell Publishing, 2006, pp. 19-32.