From its beginning, film set forth a new scene for ethical and moral engagement. Formore than a century, film’s frame and image have opened fresh space for enactingethical and moral conflicts and dilemmas. To scholars and critics such as André Bazin, itbecame apparent that in film matters of aesthetics influence ethical and moral questions. As Dudley Andrew says: ‘In cinema, aesthetic issues leadimmediately to moral ones’ .Today, the connection between aesthetic and ethical issues in film acquires newmeaning from the relationship (...) between time and ethics as described so differently byGilles Deleuze, Paul Ricoeur, and Emmanuel Levinas. While only Deleuze directlyaddresses and discusses cinema, the work of all three on the relationship of time andethics to a variety of issues – movement, space, otherness, identity, selfhood, andnarrative – also pertains to and informs the interaction between aesthetic and ethicalissues in film. Indeed, Deleuze and Ricoeur contrive compelling theories, concepts, andoperations concerning time, movement and narrative that facilitate film’s participation inethical discourse. From a Levinasian perspective, their work provides tools and meansfor relating film and Levinasian ethical language to each other. Individually andcollectively, Deleuze, Ricoeur, and Levinas seek a discordant and disruptive temporalorder for re-engaging ethical and moral exigencies and investing new ideas and freshimagination in a revivified ethical debate. In this debate, aesthetic issues and ethicalissues in film continue the process of mutual regeneration. (shrink)

Love is not stronger than death. In Death and Time Levinasreminds us that, contrary to how it is often quoted or remembered, The Song of Solomonsays that love is as strong as death not stronger than it . Love doesnot conquer death, it does not give to loss a sense which makes it bearable. And yetLevinas goes on to describe the claim that love is stronger than death as a ‘privilegedformula’ , suggesting that even if it is nottrue it is (...) worth saying and believing all the same. He refers to deliberately paradoxicalformulations by Vladimir Jankélévitch according to which love, thought, freedom andGod are all stronger than death, whilst death is also stronger than all of them . So Levinas suggests that love isstronger than death, death is stronger than love, and each is as strong as the other.There is no triumph of one over the other. Against Heidegger, Levinas insists that thedeath which concerns me is not my own so much as that of the beloved other. The deathof the beloved makes of me a guilty survivor, bereft of the possibility of dialogue with thedeceased. But even as I am torn apart in grief, death does not conquer love any morethan love conquers death. Death is not pure nothingness; something persists. Love is as strong as death. (shrink)