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Department of Philosophy

PART TWO MODULES

Philosophy and Film


Course leader: James Luchte

Module code: 2PHIL1120 (level 5) / 3PHIL1120 [level 6]

This module is designed to discover film and cinema not only as a medium for philosophical reflection, analysis and communication, but also as a 'form of life' or "socio-cultural formation". We will be looking at cinema from these various perspectives not only to allow films to communicate to us (and to others), but also to understand "who" is doing the communicating.

The basic thematic of Philosophy and Film are those films which either disclose the hidden or suppressed dimensions of our cultural and political economic existence (historicity), or, those which show us the world in a radically different light, and for the first time. The latter films are disclosive as they reveal to us hitherto excluded possibilities of philosophical disclosure and action.

This course neither pretends to be a course in film theory, nor to simply use film as a means of exercising a range of a priori analytic techniques. Instead, in may be better to characterise this course as a phenomenology or hermeneutics of film by which philosophicial topics are distilled out from amidst the context of film, considered both as an artform and as a social formation (cinema). In this way, film may be regarded as a filmic discourse by which one may come to philosophical understanding and awareness "through film".

The module will be equally divided between lectures, film presentations, reading and writing.

After introductory lectures on the philosophical aesthetics and ontology of film, and upon the historical topography of cinema, the course will embark upon a pathway of philosophical topics which will be explored through film and philosophical reflection.

The structure of each contact session will be arranged around introductory remarks, a film (or in some cases two) and a discussion.

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