Bordwell scrutinizes the theories of style launched by various film historians and celebrates a century of cinema. The author examines the contributions of many directors and shows how film scholars have explained stylistic continuity and change.

If narrating—the feeling of stories, fictional or otherwise—is an inherent possibility of motion pictures , then Kracauer's distinction between the realist and formative tendencies must be questioned and, in effect, the two must be synthesized. Wasn't the practical problem for the earliest films how to construct a formative sequence of events within an absolutely real-looking visual context? Wasn't the paradox of film narrative the combination of an obviously unreal sequence of events with an obviously real visual and social setting? (...) And isn't that paradox the most intriguing and complex problem of narrative film today, when the visual and social setting have become increasingly real-seeming? And doesn't this paradox have something to do with the fact that narrative film today seems richer and more important than it did a decade ago, at a time when various admirers of both cinéma vérité and cinéma pur had announced the death of fictional filmed narrative? Kracauer's realist aesthetic, concentrating exclusively on the photographic surfaces of things in the material world , overlooks this paradox altogether. It overlooks the fact—extremely relevant to the cinema—that the term "realist" means one thing in its common application to a painting or photograph and quite another thing in its equally common application to a novel or play. A realistic visual image is one that is said to "look like," "resemble," "reproduce," "iconically represent" the surfaces of the visual world. We see—or think we see—in a painting what we see—or think we see—in the real world.1 But a realistic story is one that is said to chronicle "credibly," "probably," and "believably" the way we think people feel, think, or act, the way things happen, and the reasons they happen, all of which are consistent with the reader-audience-society's beliefs about psychology, motivation, and probability. The standard of one sense of realism is primarily visual while the standard of the other is primarily psychological. One might see the early films groping, then, toward a synthesis of the visual realism of late-nineteenth-century painting/photography with the psychological realism of late-nineteenth-century novel/drama. · 1. This equivocation deliberately avoids the question of whether there is anything actually real about what one sees in a painting or photograph. The fact is that a very large number of viewers operate in this assumption because they think there is something real about what they see, despite the theoretical imprecision of their holding such a belief. Gerald Mast is the author of, among other works, A Short History of the Movies, The Comic Mind: Comedy and the Movies, and Film/Cinema/Movie: A Theory of Experience. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "What Isn't Cinema?," appeared in the Winter 1974 issue. (shrink)

The history of microcinematography is explored here as an example of the possible historiographical directions for work on science and film in the twentieth century. Topics discussed include investigations of the role of time in experiment, and the constant interplay between static and dynamic modes of imaging in scientific research; the role of films as depictions of both the objects of science and the process of scientific looking itself; and the possibility for telling a social history of (...) science through investigation of the production and reception of cinema. (shrink)

In the fall of 1957 the University of California Press expanded Arnheim’s 1933 book _Film_ by four essays and brought that landmark work back into print as _Film as Art._ Now nearly fifty years after that re-edition, the book continues to occupy an important place in the literature of film. Arnheim’s method, provocative in this age of technological wizardry, was to focus on the way art in film was derived from that medium’s early limitations: no sound, no color, (...) no three-dimensional depth. (shrink)

The major essays of the distinguished and prolific Australian-born film critic Adrian Martin have long been difficult to access, so this anthology, which collects highlights of his work in one volume, will be welcomed throughout film studies. Martin offers in-depth analysis of many genres of films while providing a broad understanding of the history of cinema and the history of film criticism and culture. These vibrant, highly personal essays, written between 1982 and 2016, balance breadth (...) across cinema theory with almost encyclopedic detail, ranging between aesthetics, cinephilia, film genre, criticism, philosophy, and cultural politics. Mysteries of Cinema circumscribes a special cultural period that began with the dream of critique as a form of poetic writing, and today arrives at collaborative experiments in audiovisual essays. Throughout these essays, Martin pursues a particular vision of what cinema has been, what it is, and what it still could be. (shrink)

Since cinema has entered the digital era, its very nature has come under renewed scrutiny. Countering the "death of cinema" debate, Film History as Media Archaeology​ presents a robust argument for cinema's current status as a new epistemological object of interest to philosophers, while also examining the presence of moving images in museum and art spaces as a challenge for art history. The study is the fruit of twenty years of research and writing at the interface of (...) film history, media theory, and media archaeology by one of the acknowledged pioneers of new film history and media archaeology. It joins the efforts of other media scholars to locate cinema's historical emergence and subsequent transformations within the broader field of media change and interaction as we experience them today. (shrink)

An abrupt break in the prevailing modes of artistic expression, for many, marks the advent of modernism in the early twentieth century, but revisionary attempts to pin down a precise moment of its emergence remain disputed. History of a Shiver proffers a different approach, tracing the first inkling of modernism instead to the nineteenth century's fascination with music.As Jed Rasula deftly shows, melomania--the passion for music--gave rise to concepts like Richard Wagner's "endless melody" and the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work (...) of art, which in turn infused the arts of the fin de siècle with an aura of expectancy, challenging them to induce musical effects by their own means. With each art aspiring to produce the effects of another artistic medium, a synesthetic yearning ran like a shiver through the body of art that would emerge over the next half century. Rasula traces this pan-arts polyphony from German Romantic theory to early experiments in "visual music," encompassing such diverse phenomena as American fixation on Arcadia, early film theory, and the lure of the fourth dimension. All the while, he keeps focus on the paramount historical consequence in elevating music to a new universal aesthetic standard, arguing that Wagnerism was first among modern "isms."In surveying this momentous interplay among arts, History of a Shiver ranges from literature, music and painting to theatre, cinema, dance, photography, and civic pageantry. It retells the story of modernism by recovering not an idea, but a feeling--the hair-raising potential for each painting, literary text, or musical composition to herald an unprecedented domain of human enterprise. (shrink)

From its beginnings, some of German film's most prominent genres and directors have focused on the natural world and its transformations by humans. Heimat films, "city symphonies," mountain films, and rubble films all blend the boundary between landscape documentary and fiction film. Yet German film studies has been slow to adopt an environmental focus, concentrating (understandably) on its subject matter's political implications. This book reveals critical connections between German film, sociopolitical context, and environment, showing it to (...) have been a creative catalyst for the social and ecological transformation of the Anthropocene. The book first considers the interplay between German film and environmental history in films and discourses of Heimat. Weimar-era films such as E. A. Dupont's Die Geierwally (1921), Carl Ludwig Achaz-Duisberg's Sprengbagger 1010 (1929), and Phil Jützi's Hunger in Waldenburg (1929) document and create a forum for discussing environmental change. The book then looks at film as a visual archive of and catalyst for infrastructure development, focusing on Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927), the mountain films of Arnold Fanck, and the Berlin films Stadt der Millionen (Adolf Trotz, 1925), Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt (Walter Ruttmann, 1927), and Menschen am Sonntag (1930). Nazi-era and postwar films are also examined. By exploring German film history alongside environmental history and theory, this book provides a case study of the power of film within processes of environmental transformation. (shrink)

The soul, which dominated many intellectual debates at the beginning of the twentieth century, has virtually disappeared from the sciences and the humanities. Yet it is everywhere in popular culture-from holistic therapies and new spiritual practices to literature and film to ecological and political ideologies. Ignored by scholars, it is hiding in plain sight in a plethora of religious, psychological, environmental, and scientific movements. This book uncovers the history of the concept of the soul in twentieth-century Europe and (...) North America. Beginning in fin de siècle Germany, Kocku von Stuckrad examines a fascination spanning philosophy, the sciences, the arts, and the study of religion, as well as occultism and spiritualism, against the backdrop of the emergence of experimental psychology. He then explores how and why the United States witnessed a flowering of ideas about the soul in popular culture and spirituality in the latter half of the century. Von Stuckrad examines an astonishingly wide range of figures and movements-ranging from Ernest Renan, Martin Buber, and Carl Gustav Jung to the Esalen Institute, deep ecology, and revivals of shamanism, animism, and paganism to Rachel Carson, Ursula K. Le Guin, and the Harry Potter franchise. Revealing how the soul remains central to a culture that is only seemingly secular, this book casts new light on the place of spirituality, religion, and metaphysics in Europe and North America today. (shrink)

_History of Psychology: A Cultural Perspective_ easily distinguishes itself from other texts in a number of ways. First, it examines the field within the rich intellectual and cultural context of everyday life, cross-cultural influences, and contributions from literature, art, and other disciplines. Second, it is a history of ideas, concepts, and questions, instead of dates, events, or great minds. Third, the book explores the history of applied, developmental, clinical, and cognitive psychology as well as experimental psychology. Conveyed in (...) a lively writing style, this text tells a gripping story that continues to the present day. Its current perspective allows students to connect the history of the field to the work being published in current journals. O’Boyle writes in the “historical present”, giving readers a sense of immediacy and aliveness as they journey through history. Her account uses imaginative new features, including “The Times”, which gives readers a feel for what everyday life was like during the age discussed in the chapter. Descriptions of ordinary life, as well as information about important issues influencing their lives such as wars, social movements, famines, and plagues, pique students' interest. "Stop and Think" questions, scattered throughout, enhance retention and encourage critical thinking. An ideal text for a history of psychology or history and systems of psychology course, this creative new book will also appeal to those with a general interest in the field. The Instructor’s Resource CD, written by the text author, includes class activities and demonstrations, suggestions for small group and class discussions, a list of films and videos related to the material in each chapter, and a test bank with objective and essay questions. (shrink)

This article argues that attention and distraction form a central concern of Benjamin's writings on literature. Individually and in conjunction, they underpin processes of textual production and reception, yet their relationship is fluid and subject to historical change. In this respect, Benjamin's exploration of the interplay of attention and distraction in writers such as Leskov, Baudelaire and Brecht also leads to more general reflections about the social, cultural and psychological shifts brought about by industrialization and modern mass culture. Benjamin's writings (...) on literature trace developments which he also explores in relation to film. And echoes of his ‘literary history of attention’ can also be found in both his own critical approach and his self-reflexive comments on the process of writing. (shrink)

As a technology and an art form perceived to be capable of reproducing the world, it has long been thought that the cinema has a natural affinity with reality. In this essay I consider the Realist theory of film history out forward by Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery from the perspective of Radical Constructivism. I argue that such a Realist theory cannot provide us with a viable approach to film history as it presents a flawed (...) description of the historian’s relationship to the past. Radical Constructivism offers an alternative model, which requires historians to rethink the nature of facts, the processes involved in constructing historical knowledge, and its relation to the past. Historical poetics, in the light of Radical Constructivism, is a basic model of research into cinema that uses concepts to construct theoretical statements in order to explain the nature, development, and effects of cinematic phenomena. (shrink)

Physical attractiveness has always had a large effect on personal success, social standing, and behavior. In It , Arthur Marwick observes beauty as a possessed quality as important to ones fate as intelligence, strength, wealth, education, or family. From royal mistresses and ancient queens to modern film stars and politicians, Marwick looks at the potent influence appearance has had on history and human fate.

This study aimed to elucidate the intrinsic artistic laws and aesthetic characteristics of Chinese youth films, thereby facilitating a more profound comprehension of the cultural transformations and spiritual outlook of contemporary Chinese society. By examining the evolution of Chinese youth films across different historical periods, it becomes evident that in the initial period (1930-1970), youth films predominantly depicted romantic idealization and emphasized the spiritual aspects of young people. With the advent of reform and opening up, youth films in the next (...) phase (1970-2010) began to shift their focus towards the inner world, philosophy, spirituality, and the confusion of reality experienced by young people. This shift is exemplified by films such as _Lushan Love_ and _Sunny Days_, which received widespread acclaim. When this genre entered its maturity stage (2010-2024), youth films exhibited a diversification of expressions, with a particular focus on campus love. However, they also encountered the challenge of narrative homogenization in subsequent stages, as evidenced by films such as _To Our Lasting Youth_ and _Small Times_. This study also explored the main factors affecting the development of domestic youth films through empirical analysis. The study found that box office revenue, the brand value of actors and directors, and changes in narrative style and aesthetic orientation were important factors affecting the development of domestic youth films. At the same time, social changes, technological progress and audience demand have also had a profound impact on the development of youth films. (shrink)

_Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories_ Edited by Janet Bergstrom Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999 ISBN 0-520-20747-5 (hbk); 0-520-20748-3 (pbk) 307 pp.

La diversité des témoignages historiques est presque infinie. Tout ce que l'homme dit ou écrit, tout ce qu'il fabrique, tout ce qu'il touche peut et doit renseigner sur lui.Marc BlochJudging from all the evidence we have, it appears that History must start again to look at aspects of the human existence in their time and must open up to the realm of imagination, of affectivity, and of mental attitudes; to put it differently, it must work from a new basis (...) of sensibility and with different questions, with novel sources and themes that permit us to learn more about what happens in the public and private spheres, about the exceptional and the common, about the real and the symbolic, about social practices and about the dominant ideology, as well as the links that connect those divergent fields. Such an approach presupposes a particular attitude toward historical evidence. (shrink)

The paper considers some intellectual roots of the contemporary multimodal analysis. The prehistory of microanalysis of social interaction includes semiotics of nonverbal communication and the anthropological study of patterns of expressive and communicative behavior as it was performed by Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead in the pioneering research on Balinese character. The Batesonian approach to interaction was influenced by cybernetic ideas—particularly the notion of feedback— which led to theoretical advances on communication in general and, particularly, in the study of family (...) interaction in a psychiatric perspective. The interdisciplinary research project that became known as “The Natural History of an Interview” was the first example of a broad interdisciplinary collaboration involving anthropologists, linguists and psychiatrists. It has brought about a detailed analysis of a filmed interaction that correlated data about talk, paralanguage, and body language (kinesics). The results of this project, as well as of the other attempts at kinesic microanalysis, allowed one to question the goals of research and the adequacy of research methods employed. However, the input from kinesics and, broader, semiotics of non-verbal communication was instrumental for including data about participants’ attention traced as gaze-direction into analysis of talk-in-interaction, as it was put in practice by Charles Goodwin. (shrink)

This essay explores philosophical questions about practical identity that emerge in David Cronenberg's films, "A History of Violence" and "Eastern Promises." I distinguish the metaphysical problems of personal identity from the practical problems and contend that the latter are of central importance to the topic of authenticity. Central scenes from both films are examined with an eye to their engagement with the issues of authenticity and self-creation.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.2 (2004) 120-124 [Access article in PDF] Pictures & Tears. a History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings, by James Elkins. London: Routledge, 2001, xiii + 272pp., $26. In "Tears, Idle Tears" from The Princess, Alfred, Lord Tennyson wonders at the tears forming in his eyes as he gazes out across the fields one fall day. The idyllic countryside, far (...) from providing solace, triggers within him a debilitating sadness, an all-encompassing melancholia, manifested by the tears originating from a deep despair; the autumn fields remind Tennyson's narrative persona of all the days that have passed by him.If Tennyson's eyes had fallen not on autumn fields but on a painting of them then the opening lines to "Tears, Idle Tears" might have served as the perfect epigraphic frame to James Elkins's important study of the tears we do and do not shed when looking at art.One of several recent books by the increasingly influential professor at Chicago's School of the Art Institute, Pictures & Tears probes that aspect of our consciousness that has the capacity [End Page 120] to move us to tears when looking at paintings.Shedding tears in front of paintings? Within contemporary culture it seems rather unlikely for someone to respond to a painting by fighting off, or giving in, to tears. Reactions to paintings in previous periods and societies were wholly different from ours, Elkins argues. Paintings not only incited the passions but were blamed for the onset of numerous, serious medical conditions. Though rare today, cases continue to be reported. The Italian psychiatrist Graziella Magherini even coined a term for it in 1989, "Stendhal syndrome," referring to the novelist whose viewing of art in Florence was accompanied by the onset of a form of nervous exhaustion.While the subtitle of Elkins's book suggests a history of crying in front of pictures, leading us to the nearly tearless present, and thus, presumably, to answers about why we no longer cry in front of paintings, A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings is somewhat misleading. In the truest sense Pictures & Tears is neither a history of crying in front of pictures nor individual histories of those who have. The book does not follow a linear historical narrative of the tears that pictures have evoked over the centuries. Rather, Elkins's chapters constitute a tableau, the accumulation of fragments, with alternating chapters exploring, first, a particular work of art and the tears it has evoked and, second, ruminations on why that might be the case.At the heart of Elkins's argument is a concern over why we no longer seem willing, or indeed able, to have emotional responses to paintings. Besides the occasional grand response to works of art, particularly those vested withsignificant religious meaning, few admit to intimate connections with paintings. Elkins wants to know why.To answer these questions, Elkins turned to colleagues as well as to people he had never met. His research for the book included letters to fellow scholars and peers, and open calls in newspapers and journals, requesting stories from anyone moved to tears on encountering a painting. He received more than four hundred responses, many of which are included in a substantial appendix. The responses themselves make for an intriguing read and from them Elkins builds a two-pronged argument: we now live in an age that is marked by "stoic intellectualism" (p. 163), yet we still have the capacity to feel an intimate connection to paintings. Art in recent years has demanded greater intellectual engagement, lessintimate involvement. There may be exhibitions that fuel fear, distrust, anger, or rage but these are alienating to the works themselves, although these feelings can certainly be as intense as the more intimate connection that Elkins equates with falling in love.What is it about viewing paintings, as opposed to film or theater, he asks, which prevents full emotional expression? Is it the accoutrements used to view gallery paintings — the exhibition catalogs... (shrink)

Elizabeth Butterfield - The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:2 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.2 340-341 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Elizabeth Butterfield Georgia Southern University Lawrence D. Kritzman, editor. The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Pp.xxv + 787. Cloth, $85.00. This unique collection of short articles surveying twentieth-century French thought sets itself apart from other reference (...) works in several ways. First, it portrays French thought in a holistic, multidisciplinary fashion in which philosophy is coextensive with historiography, psychoanalysis, film, literature, economics, and the social sciences. Second, the collection brings together.. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary essay looks at the use of popular history for the critical understanding of the reconstruction of crime and patriarchal hierarchy. By way of reviewing the recent movie The Limehouse Golem, it illustrates the significance of theoretically engaging with a period crime fiction movie. It is argued that this assessment is less relevant in terms of producing historical understanding. Rather historical fiction reveals instead our own contemporary cultural fixations.

Abstract This paper proposes a new phenomenological approach to social history by clarifying, critiquing and developing key insights from Husserl’s late work. First, it clarifies how Husserl began to refute phenomenology’s so-called solipsism and ahistoricality by advancing a concept of history that integrates subjective, intersubjective and communal organizations of experience. This concept, his “history of presence”, can be called a “temporal mode of oriented constitution”. Its value is to show how a single recursive series of determinations organizes (...) a diverse set of epistemic norms, personal memories, and intersubjective apperceptions. As we analyze each moment of this series, the history of presence emerges as highly relevant to social inquiry, inasmuch as it highlights the roles of intersubjective awareness and shared “world-time”. Second, however, the paper shows that Husserl grounded his history, not in this self-other-world triad, but in metaphysical foundations. By falling back on an atemporal principle of identity, Husserl’s thirst for Cartesian certainty obscured some of his insights. To develop these, the paper concludes with a new look at Les maîtres fous, a famous and controversial ethnographic film by Jean Rouch. Much of Rouch’s film echoes Husserl’s own problems, but Rouch’s use of montage replaces metaphysics with rhythm, identity with alterity, hegemony with mimicry, harmonious perception with dissonant yet generative apperception. Thus, Rouch dramatizes Husserl’s relevance to the phenomenology of social history. This paper’s internal critique and cross-cultural juxtaposition of Husserl’s late work portrays such relevance more accurately than Derrida’s uncharitable “metaphysics of presence” critique. (shrink)

This article analyses the production and reception of the natural history film seriesSecrets of Nature(1919–33) and its sequelSecrets of Life(1934–47), exploring what these films reveal about the role of cinema in public discourses about science and nature in interwar Britain. The first part of the article introduces theSecretsusing an ‘intermedial’ approach, linking the kinds of natural history that they displayed to contemporary trends in interwar popular science, from print publications to zoos. It examines how scientific knowledge was (...) communicated in the series, especially the appeal to everyday experience as a vehicle to engage mass audiences with scientific subjects. The second part examines theSecretsseries through the lens of knowledge co-production, detailing how a range of different figures, including academic scientists, nature photographers, producers and teachers, became entangled in making the films. Recovering the term ‘ciné-biology’, it argues thatSecretsdeveloped a unique style of filmmaking that generated cultural space for the life sciences in British popular culture. The third part analyses two interwar cinema experiments to explore how audiences, imagined and real, shaped the kinds of natural knowledge characterized by theSecretsfilms. (shrink)

In 1978, just before his return to the international stage, the world’s most renowned art-film director Jean-Luc Godard improvised a series of fourteen one-hour talks at Concordia University in Montreal. These talks, part of a projected video history of cinema, were published in French in 1980. In this definitive English-language volume, translator Timothy Barnard has worked from the original footage to carefully revise and correct the faulty French transcription. The result is the most extensive and revealing account of (...) Godard’s own work, his methods, and his critical opinions. Never has Godard been as loquacious, lucid, and disarmingly frank as he is here. This volume, by the wittiest and most idiosyncratic genius cinema has known and available for the first time in English, is certain to become one of the great classics of film literature. Distributed exclusively worldwide, excluding Canada, by Rutgers University Press for caboose books, Montreal. (shrink)

A new orthodoxy suggests that André Bazin's work had little influence in anglophone countries until decades after his death. This article cites a wide range of evidence, mainly from British publications, in order to challenge this view. Starting with the critics who were associated with the ground-breaking magazine Movie in the early 1960s, it notes also Bazin's early impact in America via the magazine Film Quarterly and the high-profile critic Andrew Sarris. Moreover, Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey, two of (...) the most prominent British theorists commonly associated with an anti-Bazinian ‘Screen Theory’ of the 1970s, are shown to have been both continuously respectful of, and influenced by, Bazin's work. In short, it is argued that Bazin's influence on anglophone film culture has been continuous and formative rather than sporadic. (shrink)

The meeting of film and history sits at a position where it becomes hard to distinguish their interdependent dynamics. Accordingly, how do film and history connect, work with or work against each other? What is the significance of film for constructing histories of the people whose past, identity and culture were denied for long years? Where does this bring or drive film towards becoming a medium through which precarious politics on diverse people are revealed, (...) documented and archived? Leaning on these, in this article, I will interrogate the position of transnational Kurdish cinema produced in Turkey for transforming the precarious political realms into a creative force that exposes different Kurdish histories, memories and temporalities. To do this I will make use of the interviews I conducted with Kurdish filmmakers in Turkey between 2010 and 2016, including Hüseyin Karabey, Mizgin Müjde Arslan, and Zeynel Doğan, and their films which reveal the tensions they inherit from their ancestors. (shrink)

In contemporary film theory, body and mind have been central to explorations of film form, representation, and spectatorship. While the soul may seem to have no place here, the history of film theory and its legacy to the present suggest otherwise. From the origins of film theory - from Hugo Münsterberg through French Impressionism to writings of the Weimar Republic - to the mid-twentieth century work of Henri Agel and Amédée Ayfre and Henri Agel, as (...) well as Edgar Morin, the soul emerges as a multi-faceted, if contested, concept. By revisiting such key moments in the history of film theory, and tracing the survival of this concept through to a range of cutting-edge debates today, from the work of Vivian Sobchack to Jean-Luc Nancy, Gilles Deleuze to Torben Grodal, The Soul of Film Theory tells the heretofore tacit tale of the relation between cinema and the soul, from classical to contemporary times, in dialogue with philosophy, religion, and science. (shrink)

The invention of film technologies in France at the end of the 19th century inspired neurologists and associated professionals to engage with this new medium to demonstrate their theories of the brain, the nervous system, and the mind. Beginning with the origins of cinema in Paris, this article explores how film technologies were used at La Salpêtrière, and beyond, to visualise internal mental processes, and to support the burgeoning sciences of the mind. This film-making became increasingly sophisticated (...) by the late 1910s and early 1920s, creating innovative ways to present psychological experiences on film. This article focuses on films produced by Albert Londe, Vincenzo Neri, Gheorghe Marinescu, and Jean Comandon. It argues that these polymaths created new filming techniques that built complexity into the visual articulation of psychological concepts. Their films were essential to shaping early debates in neurology, psychology, and the observational sciences during this critical period in the establishment of the modern sciences of the self. (shrink)

_Celebrating 1895: The Centenary of Cinema_ Edited by John Fullerton Sydney: John Libbey, 1998 ISBN 1-86462-015-3 288 pp.

Thirteen original essays examine the conceptual history of evil in the west: from ancient Hebrew literature and Greek drama to Darwinism and Holocaust theory. Thirteen reflections contextualize the philosophical developments by looking at evil through the eyes of animals, poets, mystics, witches, librettists, film directors, and tech executives.

Even though philosophy of film is a relatively small and relatively young philosophical subfield, I argue that it is well worth a dedicated undergraduate course. I outline such a course below, with reference to particular anthologies of readings and a corresponding list of central topics. I recommend adopting a broad conception of film, to include moving image works in a range of formats and technological media, as well as an inclusive approach to philosophizing about film, one that (...) draws on the history of film theory, both the analytic and the continental philosophical traditions, critical race theory, and feminist theory. The aim of a philosophy of film course is to hone students’ philosophical skills in the service of a deeper appreciation of the art of moving images. (shrink)