## 1. The Idea of a Philosophy of Film




There are two features of the philosophy of film that need to be
discussed before delving into more specific issues. The first is that
film scholars who are not professional philosophers have made many
contributions to the field. (See, for example, Chatman (1990)
and Smith (1995).) This differentiates this area from many other
philosophical disciplines. While physicists often write about the
philosophy of science, the academic discipline of the philosophy of
physics is dominated by professional philosophers. Not so in the
philosophy of film. As a result, my use of the term "philosopher
of film" will be broad, intended to include all of those
interested in theoretical issues about the cinema.




The second peculiarity is that within film studies--itself an
institutionalized area of academic study--there is a sub-field
of *film theory* that has significant overlap with the
philosophy of film even though the majority of its practitioners
operate on significantly different philosophical assumptions than
Anglo-American philosophers of film. In the balance of this entry, I
shall include both of these areas under the rubric of the philosophy
of film, although my primary emphasis is on the contributions of
Anglo-American theorists and I will occasionally distinguish this
field from film theory as practiced within the area of film
studies. One of the characteristics of philosophy as a discipline is
its questioning of its own nature and basis. The philosophy of film
shares this characteristic with the field in general. Indeed, a first
issue that the philosophy of film must address is the grounds for its
own existence. This involves not only the question of what the field
should look like, but also that of whether it has any reason to exist
at all. 




Is there any need for a separate philosophic discipline devoted to
film in addition to more empirical studies of film undertaken under
the aegis of film studies itself? Although this question has not
always received the attention it deserves from philosophers, it is
actually a pressing one, for it asks philosophers to justify their
newly found interest in film as more than an opportunistic
incorporation of a highly popular form of popular culture into their
domain.




In one sense, however, philosophers need not justify their interest in
film, for philosophical aesthetics has always had a concern not just
with art in general but with specific art forms. Beginning with
Aristotle's *Poetics*--a work devoted to explaining the
nature of Greek tragedy--philosophers have sought to explain
the specific characteristics of each significant art form of their
culture. From this point of view, there is no more reason to question
the existence of a philosophy of film than there is that of a
philosophy of music or a philosophy of painting, two fields that are
well accepted as components of aesthetics. Since film is a
significant artform in our contemporary world, philosophy might even
be judged to have a responsibility to investigate its nature.




Still, there are some reasons why it might seem problematic for there
to be a separate academic field of the philosophy of film. Because
the study of film is already institutionalized within academia in the
discipline of film studies, and because that field includes a separate
sub-field of film theory, it might seem that, unlike literature and
music, say, film is already well-served by this institutional
base. From this point of view, the philosophy of film is redundant,
occupying a space that has already been carved out by an alternative
discipline.




The problem is that the sub-field of film theory within film studies
has been dominated by a range of theoretical commitments that many
Anglo-American philosophers do not share. Many such philosophers have
therefore felt a need not just to make minor revisions in the field
and its understanding of film but rather to make a new beginning in
the study of film that does not share the problematic assumptions of
film theory itself. For this reason, as well as the earlier-cited view
of film as a legitimate topic within aesthetics, they have felt it
important to develop a philosophically informed mode of thinking about
film.




But once the philosophy of film is granted autonomy as a separate
sub-field of aesthetics, the question arises as to its form. That is,
philosophers are concerned with the issue of how the philosophy of
film should be constituted as a field of study. What role is there for
film interpretation in the field? How do studies of particular films
relate to more theoretical studies of the medium as such? And what
about philosophy *in* film, a popular mode of philosophic
thinking about film? Is there a unified model that can be employed to
characterize this newly vitalized domain of philosophic inquiry?




An increasingly popular way of thinking about the philosophy of film
is to model it on scientific theorizing. Although there is
disagreement on the precise details of such a proposal, its adherents
urge that the study of film be treated as a scientific discipline with
an appropriate relationship between theory and evidence. For some,
this means having an empirical body of film interpretations that gives
rise to wider theoretical generalizations. For others, it means
developing a set of small scale theories that attempt to explain
different aspect of films and our experience of them. The emphasis
here is on developing models or theories of various
features of films.




This idea of modeling the discipline of the philosophy of film on the
natural sciences has been prominent among *cognitive film
theorists* (Bordwell and Carroll 1996; Currie 1995). This rapidly
developing approach emphasizes viewers' conscious processing of films,
as opposed to the emphasis within traditional film theory on
unconscious processes. In general, these theorists lean towards seeing
the study of film as a scientific undertaking.




The idea that the philosophy of film should model itself upon a
scientific model has been contested from a variety of points of
view. Some philosophers, relying on the writings of pragmatists like
William James, have questioned the idea that natural science provides
a useful way to think about what philosophers are doing in their
reflections on film. Here, there is an emphasis on the particularity
of films as works of art in contrast the to the urge to move to a
general theory of film. Others, making use of later Wittgenstein as
well as the tradition of hermeneutics, also question such a natural
scientific orientation for philosophic reflections on film. This camp
sees the study of film as a humanistic discipline that is
misunderstood when it is assimilated to a natural science.




The debates about what the philosophy of film should look like are
really just being joined. This is because it is only recently that a
scientific conception of the philosophy of film has emerged as a
competitor. But despite the increasing popularity of a cognitive
approach to film, there are fundamental issues about the structure of
the philosophy of film that remain to be settled.




One fundamental issue is what mediums are to be included under the
term "film." Although "film" initially referred to the celluloid
stock on which movies were recorded, restricting the term to just
celluloid-based works would be unduly restrictive. After all, many of
the films we watch today are either recorded digitally or projected
digitally or both. Such works are clearly part of the same art form
as celluloid-based films, so the referent of the term "film" has to be
taken to include works made on both mediums.




And then is television. Although many film scholars and philosophers
of film has a disparaging view of television, the emergence of such
shows as *The Sopranos* and *The Wire* established
television as a medium for making valuable works of art. As a result,
it makes sense to include such shows under the rubric of films.




This stretching of the concept "film" to include both non-celluloid
movies and television and other related mediums has led some
philosophers of film to suggest replacing the term "film" with a
broader category, such as moving picture or moving image. So far,
such suggestions have not yet changed the way in which the field is
designated, so I retain the term "philosophy of film" throughout this
entry.


## 2. The Nature of Film




The question that dominated early philosophical inquiry into film was
whether the cinema--a term that emphasizes the institutional
structure within which films were produced, distributed, and
viewed--could be regarded as an artform. There were two reasons
why cinema did not seem worthy of the honorific designation of an
art. The first was that early contexts for the exhibition of films
included such venues as the vaudeville peep show and the circus side
show. As a popular cultural form, film seemed to have a vulgarity that
made it an unsuitable companion to theater, painting, opera, and the
other fine arts. A second problem was that film seemed to borrow too
much from other art forms. To many, early films seemed little more
than recordings of either theatrical performances or everyday
life. The rationale for the former was that they could be disseminated
to a wider audience than that which could see a live performance. But
film then only seems to be a means of access to art and not an
independent art form on its own. The latter, on the other hand, seemed
too direct a reproduction of life to qualify as art, for there seemed
little mediation by any guiding consciousness.




In order to justify the claim that film deserves to be considered an
independent art form, philosophers investigated the ontological
structure of film. The hope was to develop a conception of film that
made it clear that it differed in significant ways from the other fine
arts. For this reason, the question of film's nature was a crucial one
for theorists of film during what we might call the classic
period.




Hugo Munsterberg, the first philosopher to write a monograph
about the new art form, sought to distinguish film by means of the
technical devices that it employed in presenting its
narratives (Munsterberg 1916). Flashbacks, close-ups,
and edits are some examples of the technical means that filmmakers
employ to present their narratives that theater lacks. For
Munsterberg, the use of these devices distinguished film from the
theater as an artform.




Munsterberg went on to ask how viewers are able to understand the
role that these technical devices play in the articulation of
cinematic narratives. His answer is that these devices are all
objectifications of mental processes. A close-up, for example,
presents in visual form a correlate to the mental act of paying
attention to something. Viewers naturally understand how such
cinematic devices function because they are familiar with the workings
of their own minds and can recognize these objectified mental
functions when they see them. Although this aspect of
Munsterberg's theory links him to contemporary cognitive
philosophers of film, he does not explain how viewers know that what
they are looking at are objectified mental functions.




Munsterberg was writing during the silent era. The development
of the simultaneous sound track--the
"talkie"--changed film forever. It is not surprising
that this important innovation spawned interesting theoretical
reflections.




The well-known psychologist of art, Rudolph Arnheim, made the
surprising claim that the talkie represented a decline from the
highpoint of silent cinema. (Arnheim 1957) Relying on the idea
that, in order to be a unique artform, film had to be true to its own
specific medium, Arnheim denigrates the sound film as a mixture of two
distinct artistic media that do not constitute a satisfying whole.




For Arnheim, the silent film had achieved artistic status by focusing
on its ability to present moving bodies. Indeed, for him, the artistic
aspect of cinema consisted in its ability to present abstractions, an
ability completely lost when films began to employ simultaneous
soundtracks. Writing near the dawn of the talkie, Arnheim could only
see what we now recognize as a natural development of the artform as a
decline from a previously attained height.




Andre Bazin, though not a professional philosopher or even an
academic, countered Arnheim's assessment in a series of articles that
still exert an important influence on the field. (Bazin 1967;
1971) For Bazin, the important dichotomy is not that between the sound
and the silent film but rather between films that focus on the image
and those that emphasize reality. Although editing had emerged for
many such as Sergei Eisenstein as the distinctive aspect of film,
Bazin returns to the silent era to demonstrate the presence of an
alternative means of achieving film art, namely an interest in
allowing the camera to reveal the actual nature of the world. Relying
on a conception of film as having a realist character because of its
basis in photography, Bazin argues that the future of cinema as an
artform depends on its development of this capacity to present the
world to us "frozen in time."




In making his argument, Bazin valorizes the film style he dubs
realism, characterized by extended shots and deep focus. Jean Renoir,
Orson Welles, and the Italian neo-Realists are the filmmakers whom
Bazin sees as culminating this imagist tradition of filmmaking that
has realized the true potential of the medium.




In his pathbreaking study of what he called "classical film
theory," Noel Carroll (1988) argued that there were many illicit
presuppositions at play in the classical theorists' attempts to define
film's nature. In particular, he accused them of confusing particular
styles of filmmaking with more abstract claims about the nature of the
medium itself. His accusations seemed to spell the end of such
attempts to justify film styles by their grounding in the medium's
nature.


Recently, however, Bazin's claim about film's realism has received
new life, albeit without the extravagances of Bazin's own writing.
Kendall Walton, in an extremely influential paper (1984), argued that
film, because of its basis in photography, was a realistic medium that
allowed viewers to actually see the objects that appear on screen.
The *transparency thesis* has been the subject of a great deal
of debate among philosophers and aestheticians. Gregory Currie, for
example, rejects the transparency thesis while still defending a form
of realism. He argues that film's realism is the result of the fact
that objects depicted on screen trigger the same recognitional
capacities that are used to identify real objects. 


The discussion of the realist character of film continues to be a
topic of heated debate among philosophers of film. Most recently,
the emergence of digital technologies for
fashioning the image raise very basic questions about the plausibility
of this view.


## 3. Film and Authorship




Films are the product of many individuals working together. This is
apparent when one watches the credits at the end of any recent
Hollywood film and sees the myriad names that come scrolling by. To
coin a phrase, it takes a village to make a movie.




It might therefore seem surprising that there is a significant
tendency among film scholars to treat films as the product of a single
individual, its *auteur* or author. On this line of
interpretation, the director of the film is the creative intelligence
who shapes the entire film in a manner parallel to how we think of,
say, literary works being authored.




The idea of the director as *auteur* was first suggested by
Francois Truffaut--later to become one of the central directors
in the French New Wave. Truffaut used the term polemically to
denigrate the then dominant mode of filmmaking that emphasized the
adaptation of great works of literature to the screen. In the attempt
to valorize a different style of filmmaking, Truffaut argued that the
only films that deserved to be designated art were those in which the
director had complete control over its production by writing the
screenplay as well as actually directing the actors. Only films made
in this way deserved to be given the status of works of art.




The well-known American film scholar and reviewer, Andrew Sarris,
adopted Truffaut's theory in order to legitimate film studies as an
academic discipline. For Sarris, the *auteur* theory was a
theory of film evaluation, for it suggested to him that the works of
great directors were the only significant ones. In his somewhat
idiosyncratic use of the idea, he even argued that the flawed works of
major directors were artistically better than masterpieces made by
minor ones. A more defensible aspect of his ideas was the emphasis on
the entire *ouvre* of a director. Within film studies, the
emphasis on synoptic studies of individual directors is derived from
Sarris' version of the *auteur* theory.




A negative consequence of the influence of *auterism* is the
relative neglect of other important contributors to the making of a
film. Actors, cinematographers, screenwriters, composers, and art
directors all make significant contributions to films that the
*auteur* theory underestimates. While Truffaut introduced the
term polemically to support a new style of filmmaking, subsequent
theorists have tended to ignore the context of his remarks.




As a general theory of the cinema, then, the *auteur* theory is
clearly flawed. Not all films--not even all great ones--can
be attributed to the control of the director. Actors are the clearest
examples of individuals who may have such a significant impact on the
making of a specific film that the film has to be seen as attributable
to them even more importantly than the director. Although films like
Truffaut's own may be (mostly) the product of his authoring, a Clint
Eastwood film owes a great deal of its success to that actor's
presence. It is a mistake to treat all films as if they were simply
the product of one crucial individual, the director. Still, old
habits die slowly, and films are still referenced by means of their
directors.




A more general criticism of the *auteur* theory is its emphasis
on individuals. Most of the great directors studied by film theorists
worked within well-defined institutional settings, the most famous of
which is Hollywood. To attempt to understand films without placing
them within their broader context of production has been seen as a
real shortcoming of the theory.




This sort of criticism of *auterism* has received a more
theoretical formulation within postmodernism, with its famous (or
infamous) declaration of the death of the author. What this
self-consciously rhetorical gesture asserts is that works of art,
including films, should not be seen as the product of a single
controlling intelligence, but have to seen as products of their times
and social contexts. The goal of the critic should not be to
reconstruct the intentions of the author but to display the various
different contexts that explain the production of the work as well as
its limitations.




While the general institutional context is certainly crucial for
understanding a film, the *auteur* theory does nonetheless
provide a useful focus for *some* efforts in the scholarly
study of film: an exploration of the work of individual directors. But
even here, there has been worry that the theory overemphasizes the
contribution of the director at the expense of other
people--actors, directors of photography,
screenwriters--whose contributions may be equally important to
the making of at least some films.


## 4. Emotional Engagement




Philosophic discussion of viewer involvement with films starts out
with a puzzle that has been raised about many artforms: Why should we
care what happens to fictional characters? After all, since they are
fictional, their fates shouldn't matter to us in the way that the
fates of real people do. But, of course, we do get involved in the
destinies of these imaginary beings. The question is why. Because so
many films that attract our interest are fictional, this question is
an important one for philosophers of film to answer. 




One answer, common in the film theory tradition, is that the reason
that we care about what happens to some fictional characters is
because we *identify* with them. Although or, perhaps, because
these characters are highly idealized--they are more beautiful,
brave, resourceful, etc. than any actual human being could
be--viewers identify with them, thereby also taking themselves to
be correlates of these ideal beings. But once we see the characters as
versions of ourselves, their fates matter to us, for we see ourselves
as wrapped up in their stories. In the hands of feminist theorists,
this idea was used to explain how films use their viewers' pleasures
to support a sexist society. Male viewers of film, it was held,
identify with their idealized screen counterparts and enjoy the
objectification of women through both screen images that they view
with pleasure and also narratives in which the male characters with
whom they identify come to possess the sought after female
character.




Philosophers of film have argued that identification is too crude a
tool to use to explain our emotional engagement with characters, for
there is a wide variety of attitudes that we take to the fictional
characters we see projected on the screen. (See, for example, Smith
(1995).) And even if we did identify with some characters, this would
not explain why we had any emotional reactions to characters with whom
we did not identify. Clearly, a more general account of viewer
involvement with cinematic characters and the films in which they
appear is required.




The general outline of the answer philosophers of film have provided
to the question of our emotional involvement with films is that we
care about what happens in films because films get us to imagine
things taking place, things that we do care about. Because how we
imagine things working out does affect our emotions, fiction films
have an emotional impact upon us.




There are two basic accounts that philosophers have put forward to
explain the effects that the imagination has upon us. *Simulation
theory* employs a computer analogy, saying that imagining
something involves one having one's usual emotional response to
situations and people, only the emotions are running
*off-line*. What this means is that, when I have an emotional
response like anger to an imagined situation, I feel the same emotion
that I would normally feel only I am not inclined to act on this
emotion, say, by yelling or responding in an angry way, as I would be
if the emotion was a full-fledged emotion. 




What this explains, then, is a seemingly paradoxical feature of our
film-going experience: that we seem to enjoy watching things on the
screen that we would hate seeing in real life. The most obvious
context for this is horror films, for we may enjoy seeing horrific
events and beings that we would strongly desire not to witness in real
life. The last thing I would want to see more of in real life is a
rampaging giant ape, yet I am fascinated to watch its screen
expoits. The simulation theorist says that the reason for this is
that, when we experience an emotion off-line that would be distressing
in real life, we may actually enjoy having that emotion in the safety
of the off-line situation.




One problem facing the simulation theorist is explaining what it means
for an emotion to be off-line. While this is an intriguing metaphor,
it is not clear that the simulation theorist can provide an adequate
account of how we are to cash it out.




An alternative account of our emotional response to imagined scenarios
has been dubbed the *thought theory*. The idea here is that we
can have emotional responses to mere thoughts. When I am told that a
junior colleague of mine was unjustly denied reappointment, the
thought of this injustice is sufficient to make me experience
anger. Similarly, when I imagine such a scenario in relation to
someone, the mere thought of them being treated in this way can
occasion my anger. Mere thought can bring about real emotion.




What the thought theory claims about our emotional response to films
is that our emotions are brought about by the thoughts that occur to
us as we are watching a film. When we see the dastardly villain tying
the innocent heroine to the tracks, we are both concerned and outraged
by the very thought that he is acting in this way and that she is
therefore in danger. Yet all the time we are aware that this is a
merely fictional situation, so there is no temptation to yield to a
desire to save her. We are always aware that no one is really in
danger. As a result, there is no need, says the thought theorist, for
the complexities of simulation theory in order to explain why we are
moved by the movies.




There are some problems with thought theory as well. Why should a mere
thought, as opposed to a belief, be something that occasions an
emotional response from us? If I believe that you were wronged,
that's one thing. But the thought of your being wronged is
another. Since we can't have full-fledged beliefs about the fictional
characters in films, the thought theory needs to explain why we are so
moved by their fates. (See Plantinga and Smith (1999) for more
discussion of this issue.)


## 5. Film Narration


Fiction films tell stories. Unlike literary media such as
novels, they do so with images and sound--including both
words and music. Clearly, some films have narrators. These
narrators are generally character narrators, narrators who are
characters within the fictional world of the film. They tell us
the film's stories and, supposedly, show us the images that we see.
 Sometimes, however, a voice-over narration presents us with an
apparently objective view of the situation of the characters, as if it
originated from outside of the film world. In addition, there are
fiction films, films that tell stories, in which there is no clear
agent who is doing the telling. These facts have given rise to a number
of puzzles about film narration that have been discussed by
philosophers of film. (See Chatman (1990) and Gaut (2004).)


One central issue that has been a subject of controversy among
philosophers is unreliable narration. There are films in which the
audience comes to see that the character narrator of the film has a
limited or misguided view of the film world. One example is Max
Ophuls' *Letter from an Unknown Woman* (1948), a film that has
been discussed by a number of different philosophers. The majority of
the film is a voice-over narration by Lisa Berndle, the unknown woman
of the film's title, who recites the words of the letter she sends to
her lover, Max Brand, shortly before her death. The audience comes to
see that Lisa has a distorted view of the events she narrates, most
clearly in her misestimation of the character of Brand. This raises
the question of how the audience can come to know that Lisa's view is
distorted, since what we hear and see is narrated (or shown) by her.
George Wilson (1986) has argued that unreliable narratives such as
this require the positing of an implicit narrator of the film, while
Gregory Currie (1995) has argued that an implied filmmaker suffices.
This question has become very relevant with the increased popularity
of filmmaking styles involving unreliable narration. Bryan
Singer's *The Usual Suspects* (1995) touched off a flurry of
films whose narrators were unreliable in one way or another.


A
related issue concerning narrative that has been a
focus of debate is whether all films have narrators,
including those without explicit ones. Initially, it was argued
that the idea of a narratorless narrative did not make sense, that
narration required an agent doing the narrating, who was the film's
narrator. In
cases where there were no explicit narrators, an implicit narrator
needed to be posited to make sense of how viewers gained access to the
fictional world of the film. Opponents responded that the
narrator in the sense of the agent who gave film audiences access to a
film's fictional world could be the filmmaker(s), so there was no need
to posit such a dubious entity as an implicit narrator of a film.




There is, however, an even deeper problem in regard to film narration
over what has been called the "Imagined Seeing Thesis"
(Wilson 1997). According to this Thesis, viewers of mainstream
fiction films imagine themselves to be looking into the world of the
story and seeing segments of the narrative action from a series of
definite visual perspectives. In its traditional version, viewers are
taken to imagine the movie screen as a kind of window that allows them
to watch the unfolding of the story on the "other side."
However, it is hard for this view to account for what is being
imagined when, for example, the camera moves, or there is an edit to a
shot that incorporates a different perspective on a scene, etc. As a
result, an alternative view has been suggested, namely that viewers
imagine themselves to be seeing motion picture images that have been
photographically derived, in some indeterminate way, from within the
fictional world itself. But this position runs into problems, since
it is normally part of the film's fiction that no camera was present
in the fictional space of the narrative. The resulting debate is over
whether to reject as incoherent the Imagined Seeing Thesis or whether
it is possible to develop an acceptable version of this Thesis.
Philosophers remain sharply divided on this fundamental issue.


The
topic of film narration thus continues to be a subject of intense
philosophical
discussion and investigation. Various attempts to explain its
nature remain hotly debated. As new and more complex styles of
film narration become popular, it is likely that the subject of film
narration will continue to receive attention from philosophers and
aestheticians.


## 6. Film and Society




The best way to understand the innovations made by philosophers in our
understanding of how films relate to society is to look at the view
that was dominant in film theory some years ago. According to that
view, popular narrative films--especially those produced by
"Hollywood," a term that referred to the entertainment
industry located in Hollywood, California, but also included popular
narrative films produced on a similar model--inevitably
supported social oppression by denying, in one way or another, its
existence. Such films were taken to present nothing but fairytales
that used the realistic character of the medium to present those
imaginary stories as if they were accurate pictures of reality. In
this way, the actual character of the social domination assumed by
such a view to be rampant in contemporary society was obscured in
favor of a rosy picture of the realities of human social
existence.




As part of their argument, these film theorists have gone beyond
examining individual films themselves and have argued that the very
structure of the narrative film functions to assist in the maintenance
of social domination. From this point of view, an overcoming of
narrativity itself is required for films to be genuinely
progressive.




In opposition to such a negative view of film's relationship to
society, philosophers of film have argued that popular films need not
support social domination but can even give expression to socially
critical attitudes. In making this argument, they have corrected film
theory's tendency to make broad generalizations about the relationship
between film and society that are not grounded in careful analysis of
individual films. They have instead concentrated upon presenting detailed
interpretations of films that show how their narratives present
critical takes on various social practices and institutions. Class,
race, gender, and sexuality are among the different social arenas in
which philosophers of film have seen films make socially conscious,
critical interventions in public debates.




One interesting example of films that develop political stances that
are not merely supportive of existing modes of social domination are
those that involve interracial couples. So Stanley Kramer's 1967 film,
*Guess Who's Coming to Dinner*, investigates the plausibility
of racial integration as a solution to the problems of anti-black
racism in America through its portrayal of the problems facing an
interracial couple. Nearly 25 years later, Spike Lee's *Jungle
Fever* argues against the earlier film's political agenda, once
again using an interracial couple that encounters racism. Only this
time, the film asserts that the intransigent racism of White Americans
undermines integration as a panacea to the ills of this racist society
(Wartenberg 1999). And many other films employ this narrative figure
to investigate other aspects of racism and possibilities for its
overcoming.




Similarly, philosophers have looked outside of Hollywood to the films
of progressive filmmakers like John Sayles to illustrate their belief
that narrative films can make sophisticated political statements. A
film like *Matewan* is shown to involve a sophisticated
investigation of the relationship between class and race as sites of
social domination.




In general, then, we can say that philosophers have resisted a
monolithic condemnation of films as socially regressive and explored
the different means that filmmakers have used to present critical
perspectives on areas of social concern. While they have not ignored
the ways in which standard Hollywood narratives undermine critical
social awareness, they have shown that narrative film is an important
vehicle for communal reflection on important social issues of the
day.


## 7. Film as Philosophy




Ever since Plato banished poets from his ideal city in *The
Republic*, hostility towards the arts has been endemic to
philosophy. To a large extent, this is because philosophy and the
various artforms were perceived to be competing sources of knowledge
and belief. Philosophers concerned to maintain the exclusivity of
their claim to truth have dismissed the arts as poor pretenders to the
title of purveyors of truth.




Philosophers of film have generally opposed this view, seeing film as
a source of knowledge and, even, as potential contributor to
philosophy itself. This view was forcefully articulated by Stanley
Cavell, whose interest in the philosophy of film helped spark the
field's development. For Cavell, philosophy is inherently concerned
with skepticism and the different ways that it can be overcome. In his
many books and articles, Cavell has argued that film shares this
concern with philosophy and can even provide philosophic insights of
its own (Cavell 1981; 1996; 2004).



Until recently, there have been few adherents to the idea that films
can make a philosophical contribution. (But see Kupfer (1999) and
Freeland (2000) for counterinstances.) In part, this is because
Cavell's
linking of film to skepticism seems inadequately grounded, while his
account of skepticism as a live option for contemporary philosophy is
based on a highly idiosyncratic reading of the history of modern
philosophy. Nonetheless, Cavell's interpretations of individual films'
encounter with skepticism are highly suggestive and have influenced
many philosophers and film scholars with the seriousness with which
they take film. (For one example, see Mulhall (2001).)


Now, however, there is an ongoing debate about the philosophical
capacity of film. In opposition to views like that of Cavell, a
number of philosophers have argued that films can have at most a
heuristic or pedagogic function in relation to philosophy. Others
have asserted that there are clear limits to what films can accomplish
philosophically. Both of these types of views regard the narrative
character of fiction films as disqualifying them from genuinely being
or doing philosophy.


Opponents to this point of view have pointed to a number of
different ways in which films can do philosophy. Foremost among these
is the thought experiment. Thought experiments involve imaginary
scenarios in which readers are asked to imagine what things would be
like if such-and-such were the case. Those who think that films can
actually do philosophy point out that fiction films can function as
philosophical thought experiments and thus qualify as philosophical
(See Wartenberg 2007). Many films have been suggested as candidates
for doing philosophy, including the Wachowski Brothers' 1999
hit *The Matrix*, a film that has engendered more philosophical
discussion than any other film, *Memento* (2000),
and *Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind* (2004). 


Philosophers have also begun to pay attention to a strand of
avant-garde filmmaking known as *structural* films. These
films are analogues to minimalism in the other arts and thus give rise
to the question of whether they are not actual experiments that seek
to show necessary criteria for something being a film. If this view
is accepted, then these films--examples include *The
Flicker* (1995) and *Serene Velocity* (1970)--could be
seen as making a contribution to philosophy by identifying such
putative necessary features of films. This view, while adopted by
Noel Carroll (See Carroll and Choi 2006; Thomas Wartenberg
2007), has also been criticized on similar grounds to those used to
deny the philosophical potential of fiction films, namely that films
cannot actually do the "hard work" of philosophy.


Philosophers working in the Continental tradition have advocated a
more sweeping account of film's contribution to philosophy. Indeed,
the term "film-philosophy" has been introduced to refer to the
allegedly new form of philosophizing that takes place on film. (See
Sinnerbrink 2011 for a discussion of this idea.)


Whatever position one takes
on the possibility of "cinematic philosophy," it is clear that the
philosophical relevance of film has been recognized by philosophers.
 Even those who deny that films can actually do philosophy have to
acknowledge that films provide audiences with access to philosophical
questions and issues. Indeed, the success of the book series
entitled "Philosophy and X," where one can substitute any film or
television show for X, indicates that films are bringing philosophical
issues to the attention of wide audiences. There can be no doubt
that this is a healthy development for philosophy itself.


## 8. Conclusions and Prognosis



The philosophy of film has become a significant area for philosophical and
aesthetic research. Philosophers have concentrated both on aesthetic
issues about film as an artistic medium -- the philosophy of film
-- and questions about the philosophical content of films -- films
as philosophy. The sophistication and quantity of contributions in
both of these areas continue to increase, as more philosophers have taken
film seriously as a subject for philosophical investigation.


As film and its related digital media continue to expand in their
influence upon the lives of human beings, the philosophy of film can
be expected to become an even more vital area for philosophic
investigation. In the coming years, we can look forward to new and
innovative contributions to this exciting area of philosophical
research.