According to conceptual metaphor theory, there are two basic metaphorical models for conceptualising time in terms of space: the ego-moving model maps our movement through space onto our imagined movement through time, while the time-moving model represents time as an entity moving through spatial locations, the ego being just a passive observer. The aim of this article is to investigate how time is conceptualized in film where ego, movement, time and space also play basic roles. I compare the two linguistic (...) models to Gilles Deleuze’s conceptualization of filmic time: the movement-image and the time-image. While the movement-image and the moving-ego metaphor directly map spatial structures onto the domain of time, the time-image and the moving-time metaphor correlate only in their basic structures and involve different levels of conceptual integrations and conversions. Due to film techniques such as a mobile camera, montage and image manipulation, the time-image seems to transcend the constraints of natural perception and maps onto mental rather than external space, thus giving rise to a new reverse metaphor where space acquires characteristics of the time domain. (shrink)

El interés de la filosofía por el cine ha sido siempre escaso teniendo en cuenta la enorme repercusión estética y cultural de esta forma de expresión. Además, los enfoques filosóficos que se acercaron al fenómeno cinematográfico y que construyeron las bases de la teoría del cine en la primera mitad del siglo XX, fueron desplazados en la década de los sesenta, por la semiótica primero y por la narratología después. No obstante, en los últimos años empieza a generalizarse un acceso (...) normalizado de la filosofía académica a la teoría del cine. (shrink)

The claim is frequently made that, as cities become loaded up with information and communications technology and a resultant profusion of data, so they are becoming sentient. But what might this mean? This paper offers some insights into this claim by, first of all, reworking the notion of the social as a spatial complex of ‘outstincts’. That makes it possible, secondly, to reconsider what a city which is aware of itself might look like, both by examining what kinds of technological (...) practices are becoming commonplace and by considering the particular case of spatial awareness. In turn, this leads to a third rumination on how cities might become aware as different kinds of sprite, channelling outstincts in spatially variable ways. Whatever the case, it is clear that new technical-artistic interventions are required if these sprites are not to become simply servants of the security–entertainment complex. Some of these interventions are examined in the fourth part of the paper. (shrink)

Film critics and theorists often refer to the ‘worlds’ that films create, present, or embody,e.g. the world of Eraserhead or the world in Fanny and Alexander. Like the world of a novel or painting, the world of a film in thisprevalent use of the term denotes its represented content or setting, or whatever formaland thematic aspects distinguish it from other films in a pronounced and oftenimmediately recognisable way. Yet there is much more to be said in philosophical termsabout films as, (...) or as containing, worlds. This paper will argue that pursuing this subjectentails a needed re-evaluation of multi-faceted issues that are of concern to bothcontemporary film theorists and philosophers of film, including the relation betweencinematic representation and expression, reflexivity, the nature of film style andauthorship, and cinema’s relation to, and direct interaction with, other art forms. (shrink)

What potential can be found in the work of Deleuze and Guattari for critical legal scholarship? The authors argue that their work can be deployed to re-think ‘critique’ by directly addressing the place and role of the ‘critic’. It is argued that the continued commitment to a stance of ‘resistance’ in CLS is underpinned by never-ending dualisms which, if not confronted and replaced, can only make CLS ever more redundant. The authors ask: ‘what is critique beyond the dualism of power (...) and resistance, of state and nomad?’ This question arises from a belief that critique is still capable of being effective, but only if there is the courage to experiment, and to think creatively. In this sense, the ‘exhaustion’ of critique is framed as an opportunity to re-think and re-engage with the politics of law. The paper diagrams, through image and film, a critical thought: the potential of the artisan. Film is utilised not as representation, nor as illustration, but as a thinking mind in its own right, through which questions relating to the state, political action, and creative thinking can be framed. Such a re-framing is essential, it is argued, for an engagement with the emergence of societies of control. (shrink)

I here explore the educational potential of cinema and TV-series through the eyes of the French philosopher Alain Badiou. To illustrate, I read the Norwegian web-based TV-series Skam, which reached out to millions of Nordic teens by a broad distribution, easy access and speaking a language young people could relate to. The series portrays the many faces and ambiguities of shame and shaming embedded in Nordic youth culture. In bringing the question of the pedagogy of cinema and TV-series to the (...) forefront, I here read Skam on three analytical levels. First, to explore the TV-series capability to captivate the viewers through a doubling of the real. Second, to examine Badiou’s idea of cinema as an ontological art, revolving around the question of the relationship between being and appearing. Third, I read Skam analytically, to consider Badiou’s claim that cinema is a democratic emblem. In sum, what may be the series’ potential for shaping the viewers’ ethical–political awareness? (shrink)

An important but easily forgotten moment in the history of film-philosophy is Jean Epstein's assertion that cinema, more than merely thinking, has a kind of intelligence. If it is a newfound conception of rationality that is needed for any contemporary ethical relation to the world, as thinkers from Reza Negarestani and Pete Wolfendale to feminist collective Laboria Cuboniks have espoused in their respective neo-rationalist projects, then cinema as a thinking thing must be interrogated in its relation to reason. A somatophilia (...) of purely affective and phenomenological approaches in film theory alongside micropolitical injunctions to undermine common-sense and liberate one's desire in extremity can fall limp in view of such calls for universal thinking around rationality. To understand cinema's specific form of intelligence, this article will explore Luc Besson's Lucy as an instance of how film is able to represent intelligence. Besson's film provides a site where Western cultural anxieties and assumptions around intelligence are manifested. This will allow an explication of contemporary approaches to intelligence in philosophy whilst confronting these discourses with the insidious problematics of gender and race that undergird the film. I argue that Lucy shares many of its ambitions with the emerging vectors of thought associated with the neo-rationalist perspective in its engaging with a rethinking of universal values and the Promethean possibilities of human action. Reading the film through these philosophies will help position the ethical stakes it sets up, but also to distinguish it from a trend of contemporary “posthuman” films that it finds itself in company with. While it is certainly true that posthuman themes, as well as transhumanist fantasies, seem to permeate Besson's film, this article will incorporate another neologism, taken from neo-rationalist thinkers, in order to emphasise moments that can be productive from the standpoint of a philosophical account of intelligence: “rationalist inhumanism.”. (shrink)

The prolepsis in Denis Villeneuve's Arrival emphasises the cyclical nature of the film's narrative and anchors human reproduction as a central theme. Pregnancy, the pregnant body, and the physical, experiential nature of birth, commonly heavily gendered in film, are misleading focal points in the narrative. The presence of the unborn as a subtext in the film problematises Iris Marion Young's notion of pregnant embodiment as a subjective lived-body experience. The viewer is encouraged to empathise with the complexity of birth, life, (...) and death as part of Louise's lived-body experience, but is finally confronted with the uncertainty of maternity, pregnancy and the unborn. When Barbara Duden calls the unborn foetus a “not-yet”, she describes the process by which the foetus achieves a legal status, and the precarious nature of ascribing life or personhood. The prolepsis, which punctuates the main narrative, emphasises the reversibility and irreversibility of life that does “not-yet” exist. Import... (shrink)

Quaderns de filosofia V, 1 Número complet / Número completo / Full Issue.

Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher, eds. Women Artists in the Millennium, xx + 450 pp. $40.00/£25.95 cloth. David P. Billington and David P. Billington, Jr. Po...

This article surveys influential views on the topic of film-as-philosophy, principally the positions of Bruce Russell, Thomas Wartenburg, Noël Carroll, and Stephen Mulhall. Historically, this conversation has been restricted to a somewhat conservative view initiated by Russell and defended by others, according to which the film medium is fundamentally incapable of generating positive philosophical achievement in purely cinematic fashion. One of my interests is to show how the dialogue initiated by Russell suffers from relying on overly restrictive notions of what (...) philosophy is and the ways in which it occurs. A goal of the article is to articulate the phenomenological suppositions embedded in the very concept of film-as-philosophy, particularly insofar as the concept seems to assume a phenomenological model that unites screen and viewer. I argue that the origins of the debate overlook the aspect in which films do not engage in philosophical activity completely in their own right, but that instead, this occurrence is essentially predicated upon the participative aspect of the viewer experience. In the course of summarizing each of the leading positions, I describe how the history of the debate has gradually anticipated an appreciation of the phenomenological manner in which screen and viewer co-instantiate philosophy’s occurrence through film. I defend Mulhall’s position and devote some space to drawing out the manner in which his argumentation regarding film-as-philosophy supposes a fundamental screen-viewer dynamic that is phenomenological in nature. (shrink)

Surface has become an important consideration of sensory film theory, conceived of in various forms: the screen itself as less a barrier than a permeable skin, the site of a meaningful interaction between film and audience; the image as a surface to be experienced haptically, the eye functioning as a hand that brushes across and engages with the field of vision; surfaces within the film, be they organic or fabricated, presenting a tactile appeal. Surface evokes contact and touch, the look (...) or sound it produces inviting consideration of its materiality, and perhaps even a tactile interchange. If the surface of film, across its varied associations, presents the possibility of an intersubjective contact between film and audience, this article seeks to include another body: that of the filmmaker. There are many people who contribute to the material constitution of a film and I would suggest that we might seek to appreciate its textures just as we might that of a painting. Focus on the fine... (shrink)