Botz-Bornstein, Thorsten. "Philosophy of Film: Continental Perspectives." INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY May 12, 2011.

This article introduces the most important perspectives on film (movies) from the continental philosophical perspective. “Continental” is not used as a geographical term, but as an abstract concept referring to nineteenth and twentieth century European philosophical traditions exemplified by German idealism, phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, structuralism, post-structuralism, French feminism, and the Frankfurt School. The continental-friendly philosophy of film that has emerged in Anglophone countries since the 1980s also is taken into account in this article.

If one considers only contributions by well known philosophers, the philosophical output on film might appear relatively meager. Books that deal with the philosophy of film are equally rare. If, however, one considers the scholarly contributions from the entire field of humanities, specifically in the form of film aesthetics and film theory, the body of reflections on film inspired by philosophical ideas (in the most general sense) is impressive. Most of these works are linked to the European philosophical tradition of philosophy of film, which developed from the 1920s onward. Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was the first philosopher to show interest in film, though his influence on continental philosophy of film remained minor – though not inexistent – before the publication of Gilles Deleuze’s two volumes on cinema (1983 and 1985). In the 1980s, two French philosophers, Jean-Louis Schefer and Gilles Deleuze, decided to devote their attention to film studies. These studies began a continuous line of European philosophical works on film that stretched through to today’s writings by Jacques Rancière and Slavoj Žižek. In the English-speaking world, philosophical concepts entered the discourse on film at around the same time. Stanley Cavell’s work The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (1971) was a notable precursor of this tendency. In 1988, Noel Carroll published a critique of contemporary film theory (Mystifying Movies) which he criticized as being overly determined by Psycho-Semiotic Marxist paradigms. In the same year he published Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory that examined pre-semiotic theorists like Bazin and Arnheim in an analytical fashion.

Both representatives of the analytical and the continental tradition see thinkers that were active before the analytical-continental divide (for example, Münsterberg, Kracauer) as being central to their film studies; however, the interpretations of such thinkers differ considerably in both traditions.
A significant amount of continental work developed around the British journal Screen, which was very influential in the 1970s and has laid many of the foundations of Lacanian and neo-Marxist film theory.

Analytical philosophy of film has profited greatly from its rich tradition of analytical aesthetics. A significant part of this philosophy has attempted to push its studies in the direction of evidence-based scientific models. Continental thought has typically been inspired by the softer fields of humanities and has displayed a solid amount of political engagement. In the former Soviet Union, a complex discourse on the semiotics of film, inspired by a Russian formalist heritage that has a natural affinity with film, has made numerous philosophical statements. . . .

Visit: http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=1700945566886988248.

Morgan, Michael L. Review of Sam B. Girgus, LEVINAS AND THE CINEMA OF REDEMPTION. NDPR (February 2011).

Girgus, Sam B.  Levinas and the Cinema of Redemption: Time, Ethics, and the Feminine.  New ork: Columbia UP, 2010.

The question that I kept before me as I was reading this book and preparing to write this review is whether philosophers can learn anything valuable from it. After all, it is a book written by someone who has published extensively on film, it treats various Hollywood and European films that are classics and certainly worthy of attention, and it purports to engage with the work of an important twentieth-century philosopher as part of its project. To be sure, one can learn something even from a book that has significant deficiencies, but what I have been asking myself is something different. It is whether a philosopher could learn anything positive from the book. Does the book say helpful and interesting things about Emmanuel Levinas? Does it show us how to explore films in the light of Levinas's philosophical work? Does it read films in a way that is philosophically novel and interesting, about film itself or about these particular films? I wish that I could answer "yes" to one or more of these questions, but I cannot. The most I can say is that in the course of reading what Girgus has to say about Levinas and the nine or so films he discusses, one is provoked to reflect upon a number of problems and issues concerning Levinas and film, and although Girgus has nothing particularly helpful to say about most of them, it is worthwhile to have them called to our attention.

In the course of the book's seven chapters Girgus discusses: Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and It's a Wonderful Life (1946); John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940); John Huston's The Misfits (1961); Robert Rossen's The Hustler (1961); Edward Zwick's Glory (1989); Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988); Federico Felini's La Dolce Vita (1959); and Michelangelo Antonioni's L'avventura (1960). He also briefly comments on Michael Curtiz's Casablanca (1942), Rossen's Body and Soul (1947), and Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949). He organizes his discussions of the films according to themes he finds in Levinas. For example, he uses the Capra films to show how the redemptive element in these films can be articulated using Levinas's notion of transcendence and responsibility to the other person, and he uses Levinas's notion of the face in order to clarify how to understand particular facial shots of Henry Fonda, Marilyn Monroe, Paul Newman, and Denzel Washington. His treatment of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, La Dolce Vita, and L'avventura attempts to use Levinas in order to clarify what the films tell us about art, ethics, love, sexuality, and gender. His most detailed and most comprehensive commentaries on the films are the last three, the European films. Girgus's basic project, then, is to identify and clarify themes in Levinas's philosophy in certain American films and to show how these themes are represented in European films that are also examples of what Girgus calls a "cinema of redemption." . . .

Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22891.

Cfp: Film-Philosophy Conference 2011, Liverpool John Moores University, July 6-8, 2011.

Film-philosophy continues to grow as an important discipline within the fields of both Film Studies and Philosophy. We invite researchers in this area to submit proposals for the 2011 Film-Philosophy Conference to be held in Liverpool, UK.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

Professor Gregory Currie (University of Nottingham)
Dr. David Martin-Jones (University of St Andrews)
Dr. Lucy Bolton (Queen Mary, University of London)
Dr. Havi Carel and Dr. Greg Tuck (University of the West of England and editors of the book New Takes in Film-Philosophy)

We are open to any topics on the subject but would particularly welcome papers in the following areas:

- Film and phenomenology
- The ontology of fiction in film
- Fictionalism and film
- Significant auteurs
- New approaches to film and philosophy
- Considerations of individual films
- The debate between continental and analytic philosophy in relation to film
- Films about philosophy or philosophers
- Animals on film
- Science and film-philosophy
- The methodology of film-philosophy
- Philosophy of film adaptation
- Film-philosophy and computer games
- Cognitivism
- Film style
- Genre
- Media convergence
- Philosophy and film economics

Abstracts should be 200 - 300 words long and papers, including clips - which we strongly encourage - should not exceed 25 minutes. We accept panel submissions with a maximum of three speakers and a length of 90 minutes.

Deadline for proposals: 18 March 2011

Both individual and panel proposals must be submitted through the conference website (no initial cost involved): http://www.film-philosophy.com/conference/index.php/conf/2011/about/submissions.

Doherty, Thomas. "The Death of Film Criticism." CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION February 28, 2010.

"It sucks," decrees an Internet movie critic, sharing the most common aesthetic reaction in contemporary film criticism. In the viral salon of bloggers and chat-roomers, the finely tuned turns of phrase crafted by an earlier generation of sharp-eyed cinema scribes have been winnowed to a curt kiss-off. In cyberspace everyone can hear you scream. Just log on, vent, and hit send. The transfer of film criticism from its print-based platforms (newspapers, magazines, and academic journals) to ectoplasmic Web-page billboards has rocked the lit-crit screen trade. Whether from the world of journalism (where the pink slips are landing with hurricane force) or academe (which itself is experiencing the worst job market since the Middle Ages), serious writers on film feel under siege, underappreciated, and underemployed. The ballast of traditional credentials—whereby film critics earned their bones through university degrees or years at metropolitan dailies—has been thrown overboard by the judgment calls of anonymous upstarts without portfolio but very much with a DSL hotline to Hollywood's prime moviegoing demographic. In film criticism, the blogosphere is the true sphere of influence. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/article/The-Death-of-Film-Criticism/64352/.

"Film-Philosophy III," Third Annual Conference of the FILM-PHILOSOPHY Journal, University of Warwick, July 15-17, 2010.

Confirmed Plenary Speakers: James Conant, Thomas Wartenberg, Sarah Cooper, Erica Carter, John Mullarkey and Richard Dyer. We welcome proposals for 30 minute papers that explore any aspect of the relationships between film, film studies and philosophy. Proposals should up to 500 words in length and be sent to film.philosophy@warwick.ac.uk by 28 February 2010. Details of conference registration, on-campus accommodation and conference dinner arrangements can be found on the conference website at www.warwick.ac.uk/go/film-philosophy. For general enquiries, please contact film.philosophy@warwick.ac.uk. For details about the journal, please go to www.film-philosophy.com.

Cfp: "Film-Philosophy III," Third Annual Conference of the FILM-PHILOSOPHY journal, University of Warwick, July 15-17, 2010.

We welcome proposals for 30 minute papers that explore any aspect of the relationships between film, film studies and philosophy. Proposals should be sent to film.philosophy@warwick.ac.uk by 28 February 2010. Conference registration will open in mid-January 2010. Details of the on-campus accommodation, conference dinner and registration fee will be provided in mid-January. Visit the website here: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/film/researchnews/filmphilosophyconference.

Mai, Joseph. Review of John Mullarkey's REFRACTIONS OF REALITY. NDPR (June 2009).

Mullarkey, John. Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Since the invention of the cinématographe at the end of the 19th century, a striking number of thinkers have taken a serious philosophical interest (sometimes exhibited as anxiety) in the ability to create and project moving photographic images. Over the years important authors such as Henri Bergson, Siegfried Kracauer, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, André Bazin, Gilles Deleuze, Stanley Cavell and others have returned to film over and over in their writings. Their investigations implicitly posed a curious set of questions that have come up more explicitly and insistently in recent film philosophy: Can films think? If so, how does film think? What are the implications of a film "mind" for philosophy? In his very original book, Refractions of Reality, John Mullarkey tackles these questions, but first approaches them through a diagnosis of the source of philosophical interest in them. For Mullarkey the persistence of such questions is symptomatic of a certain anxiety among philosophers. What he calls "film-envy" follows from the fact that both philosophy and film are concerned to describe reality (ix). The idea that film might think about reality, and in a different way than philosophy does, resounds with all the potential benefits and possible fears of the democratization of thought. A philosopher and editor of Film-Philosophy, Mullarkey brings an informed, critical view to a number of theories from both the Continental tradition (his specialization) and the Anglo-American tradition (slightly less represented here). To make his critique, he develops a Bergson-inflected theory of film viewing as an event. He alludes to this position throughout the book, but does not explicitly hash it out until the second part. It first appears within a general discussion of the relation between what we know and what exists, and Mullarkey twice quotes a substantial passage from Ian Jarvies on the seemingly insurmountable difficulties involved in making a clear demarcation between the two. To extract himself from this problem, Mullarkey asserts that film has an élan cinématique (not the most beautiful expression in the book) on the model of Bergson's élan vital. Film should be thought of as a multiplicity of social, mental, and biological processes through which viewer and film are co-created. Film for Mullarkey involves qualitative change and becoming rather than definable essences. Since Mullarkey saves much of his position for the end, my review will first provide a roadmap of how that position leads to a critique of other theories. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=16386.

7th International Conference, Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image, University of Copenhagen, June 24-27, 2009.

Hosted by Department of Media, Cognition and Communication. The Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image is an interdisciplinary organization made up of scholars interested in cognitive, philosophical, neurophysiological, and evolutionary-psychological approaches to the analysis of film and other moving-image media. To learn more or become a member, see http://www.scsmi-online.org/ University of Copenhagen hosts the 7th Conference. Previous conferences have been held in Kansas City, Pecs in Hungary, Grand Rapids in Michigan, Potsdam in Germany, Madison in Wisconsin and, in 1999, in Copenhagen. The conference features three parallel paper presentation from an international group of scholars, a keynote speech by David Bordwell and, as a special event, a screening of Lars von Trier's Antichrist. Visit the conference webpage here: http://scsmi09.mef.ku.dk/.

Buchanan, Ruth, and Rebecca Johnson. "Strange Encounters: Exploring Law and Film in the Affective Register." STUDIES IN LAW, POLITICS AND SOCIETY 46.

Abstract: This paper argues that taking seriously the embodied and affective dimensions of thought is important in relation both to the critical and transformative possibilities of Law-and-Film scholarship. In it, the authors begin the work of revealing the ways that film works to produce what Raymond Williams called the 'structures of feeling' that help to cohere contemporary legal and political institutions. In its first section, it seeks to develop a more robust vocabulary for discussing how films work on their viewers. Building on the insights of William Connolly regarding the multilayered nature of thought, it discusses how the non-cognitive registers for thinking of technique, perception and affect are brought together in film. In the second section, the paper explores how these effects might be understood through a close reading of three short scenes drawn from the films The Piano (1993), Minority Report (2002) and Dead Man (1994). In the powerful contrast of 'affect' produced by each of these scenes (the latter two containing minimal narrative content), the authors make an argument for the significance of attending not only to the (fixed) representative or ideological dimension of film, but also to its movement, its flux and possibility as energy.

Download the paper here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1341474.

Cfp: Second Annual Conference of Film and Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, University of Dundee, July 16-18, 2009.

In Association with http://www.film-philosophy.com/. Keynote Speakers: Alain Badiou (Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris) Edward Branigan (University of California, Santa Barbara) Caroline Bainbridge (Roehampton University) Martin McQuillan (University of Leeds) The last ten years has seen a burgeoning interest in the relationship between philosophy and film, both within the Continental and Analytic philosophical traditions. The steady stream of books, journals, symposia, and websites dedicated to bringing the two subjects together is a testament to this fact. It is also notable just how philosophical film theory always has been: raising philosophical questions and engaging with a variety of philosophical figures has marked its trajectory for over forty years. Building on the success of last’s year’s inaugural conference at UWE, Bristol, the second annual Film-Philosophy Conference continues in its aim to be the major international forum for scholars from both disciplines to examine all aspects of this interdiscipline, both historical and contemporary, practical and theoretical. As last year, there is no specific conference theme, and proposals are invited on any conjunction between film and philosophy. We welcome submissions that range from general and methodological observations about the two fields, to analyses of specific films, film movements, or film-makers, as well as specific philosophical concepts, movements, or philosophers. Topics include (but are not limited to): Film as philosophy Philosophy as cinematic The ontology of cinema The use of film to teach philosophy Particular philosophical approaches to film (Rancière, Deleuze, Badiou, etc.) The Epistemology of film Film affect The philosophical world-view of particular directors Subjectivity and cinema Film Theory as philosophy Aesthetics and film Political philosophy and film Historical developments in film-philosophy Genre and philosophy Philosophy and film movements (German Expressionism, Soviet Montage, Italian Neo-realism etc.) Cinema as thought experiment Morality and movies Feminist philosophy and film practice Film making as philosophical practice Methodologies for philosophical film analysis Contributions are invited for: Individual papers (20 minutes + 10 minutes for discussion) Panel topics (2-4 speakers) Please send proposals (500 word abstract) by Friday 3 April, 2009 to: Dr John Mullarkey -- email: jmullarkey@dundee.ac.uk. We prefer email submissions, but you can also post your abstract to: Dr John Mullarkey Senior Lecturer in Philosophy School of Humanities College of Arts & Social Sciences University of Dundee Nethergate Dundee DD1 4HN Scotland UK

CFP: "Emergent Encounters in Film Theory: Intersections Between Psychoanalysis and Philosophy," King’s College, London, March 21, 2009.

Keynote Speakers: Parveen Adams (Fellow of the London Consortium) Steven Shaviro (Wayne State University) Interdisciplinary approaches to the theoretical discussion of the cinematic medium have often engaged with philosophical or psychoanalytic perspectives. While philosophy and psychoanalysis are by no means opposed schools of thought, the potential to develop new ways of understanding film remains an opportunity to be explored. In seeking out further lines of enquiry, the study of intersections between cinema/philosophy/psychoanalysis, seems most pertinent to our generation of ‘film thinking,’ to invoke Daniel Frampton’s concept of the ‘film mind.’ whose future still stands, to some extent, in the shadow of psychoanalysis. Recent philosophical models of thought offered by film theorists such as Frampton and D. N. Rodowick embrace a new ontological grasp of the cinema, but what then are the implications of this shift for psychoanalysis? The question, therefore, remains whether philosophy and psychoanalysis are indeed irreconcilable, or if the specific philosophical turn sets up boundaries that unjustly seal off the possibility of dialogue between the two methodologies. We invite proposals of 200 words for papers of 20 minutes on areas including: -Films as philosophical and/or psychoanalytical form of representation -Questions of realism and illusion, from documentary cinema to the fantasy genre -Ethical responses to, and within, cinema -The family, sociality, fraternity and sorority -Changes and developments within spectatorship -The impact of, and approaches to, new technologies -Responses and approaches to film aesthetics/film art -Corporeal subjectivity, embodiment and the senses -Temporality, memory and amnesia in the cinema -Depictions of criminality, revenge and guilt Please send abstracts by 14th November 2008 to encounters@kcl.ac.uk; Enquiries may also be sent to davina.quinlivan@kcl.ac.uk. Visit the conference homepage here: http://www.film-philosophy.com/announcements/files/4bc500ad11bded82abd928884ba760f1-74.php#unique-entry-id-74.

CFP: "Transmission: Cinema/Psychoanalysis," CRASSH, University of Cambridge, September 16-18, 2008.

The conference will focus around the theme of transmission in its exploration of relationships between cinema and psychoanalysis. This will contribute to discussions of cultural transmission relating to the CRASSH 2007-9 theme. Various possible modes of Transmission will be explored:

• The transmission of psychoanalytic discourse into film theory (re-visiting and re-assessing 1970s theory, Screen group, Metz, Mulvey etc., evaluating current relations between psychoanalysis and film theory)
• The transmission of psychoanalytic scenarios into filmmaking (e.g. Hitchcock, Lang; can we uncover what was lost in translation? what is the cultural/historical significance of such transmission?)
• Cinema as psychoanalysis: image, scene, time, speech, body, sound (how might cinema transmit psychoanalytically? Can cinema be conceived as a psychoanalytic mode of thought?)

In exploring these forms of transmission, the conference will seek to revisit the history of film theory and look forward to its future, asking whether psychoanalysis still has something to offer film theorists. In addition, the parallel histories (to use the term from the title of Janet Bergstrom's edited volume Endless Night) of cinema and psychoanalysis will be re-examined to shed new light on their past entanglement and possible future collaboration. Finally, through the investigation of scenarios and film form and their (mis)translations and mirrorings of psychoanalytic discourse and thought, approaches to film analysis will be explored.

Keynote Speakers:

• Professor Mieke Bal (University van Amsterdam)
• Professor Kaja Silverman (University of California Berkeley)

Further information is here: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/162/.

"Just Images: Ethics and the Cinematic," Department of Film and Television, Tel Aviv University & Jerusalem Centre for Ethics, June 3-6, 2008.

For the programme of the Seventh International Tel Aviv Colloquium on Cinema Studies, please visit: http://www.tau.ac.il/~cineconf/.

"Geographies of Film Theory," Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies & Screen Studies Group, University of London, June 26-28, 2008.

The symposium will trace the contexts in France, Italy and Germany between the wars in which film theory was first articulated; it will then follow the reception and reconfiguration of film theory in key, mainly non-European, cultural and political contexts. The collaboration between the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies and the Screen Studies Group has enabled an original approach to the complex intellectual and aesthetic relations between influential European cultural discourses and ‘world’ film theory. Keynote speakers:

• Francesco Casetti (Professor, Universita Cattolica, Milano)
• Mikhail Iampolski (Professor, New York University)
• Kim Soyoung (Professor, Korean National University of Arts)
• Ashish Rajadhyaksha (Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore)

Click here for the programme (PDF).

Click here here for the Registration Form (PDF).

Contact: mailto:flo.austin@sas.ac.uk

CFP: "Continuity and Innovation: Contemporary Film Form and Film Criticism," University of Reading, September 5-7, 2008.

Update: The conference webpage may be found here: http://www.rdg.ac.uk/ftt/research/ftt-continuityandinnovation.asp. Initial Posting: March 21, 2008: Contemporary film displays both its debt to the established forms and practices of narrative cinema, and to international developments in aesthetic practice and in new technologies that subtly shift the boundaries of cinema's aural and visual field. At the same time, contemporary film criticism negotiates a shifting relationship with its own histories and present - its histories of textual analysis and film theory, and its present landscape of concerns with identity, new delivery and reception contexts, digital remediation, and soon, explored against the backdrop of a volatile socio-historical moment. This conference seeks to consider the critical challenges contemporary film form poses for us as film critics and theorists, in an approach rooted in the detail of the film text itself. In addition, the conference wishes to reflect and engage with the diversity of contemporary aesthetic choices and filmmaking practices. On the one hand, the conference will explore the continuities and innovations in contemporary film style, to move towards an account of contemporary cinema's aesthetic practice and the ways in which these formal elements shape the production of meaning. On the other hand,the conference will provide an important opportunity to explore and extend the continuities and innovations possible in contemporary film criticism. Keynote speakers include Douglas Pye and Adrian Martin. In addition, film practitioners will be discussing their work.We invite papers that attempt to meet these interpretative, analytical and critical challenges through direct engagement with contemporary films. In addition to the familiar pattern of panel discussions and plenaries, theconference will include workshops in which speakers will present frameworks for analysis of the detail of a movie, as an introduction to discussion.Titles of films to be discussed at the conference will be circulated in advance. Proposals for three kinds of presentation are invited: Close readings grounded in detailed analysis (20 minute papers). Discussion of historical, theoretical or critical issues related to the interpretation of contemporary film style (20 minute papers). Workshop introductions, designed to open up issues about a sequence (or sequences), as a prelude to extended debate (workshops will last 90 minutes). The deadline for proposals is 1st April 2008. Please send us your 200-word proposal and brief biography by email to:filmconference@reading.ac.uk. Enquiries should be directed to the conference organisers Lisa Purse and John Gibbs at the same email address.

Heckman, Davin. "Unraveling Identity: Watching the Posthuman Bildungsroman." CTHEORY.NET May 7, 2008.

I have been puzzling lately over a genre of film which is hard to situate: films which deal with forgetting and remembering, in which we ride shotgun with protagonists who are just as interested in character development as we are. While the genre itself has not been fully mapped out, potential candidates for inclusion include Abre Los Ojos (1997), Vanilla Sky (2001), Memento (2000), Minority Report (2002), The Bourne Identity (2002), Paycheck (2003), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and, most recently, A Scanner Darkly (2006). I call this genre the "Posthuman Bildungsroman." The Bildungsroman label is commonly applied to "coming of age" tales or novels of education. For reasons discussed below, this common usage is not entirely accurate, but taken in the larger context of Western Literature such usage makes sense. The traditional questions associated with Western Literature can be summarized in this way: What is a story? An account of change. What is a good story? An account of change that all people can relate to. The assumption is that in order to be sufficiently engaging, change must center on "the human." And in practice, "the human" has overwhelmingly been depicted as an individual. Outside of non-modern folk tales, children's stories, religious texts, and legends, there is little room in this essentialist construct for distributed cognition, nonhuman characters, and environmental agents. Philosophy, literature, and the self grow together/merge under the common characterization of the Bildungsroman. The result is a tradition of "good stories" about the formation of an identity that is rooted in interior personal growth. In the Posthuman Bildungsroman, the individual is present not as the expression of a coherent self, but as the central problem of the story. Rather than triumph over external obstacles through force of will, the will itself is formed through the effects of outside forces. The story remains a tale of growth and education, but the end of this process is an attempt to stabilize the subject and construct a coherent representation of the self that is consistent with the expectations of its cultural milieu (or, perhaps, the genre). . . . Read the whole article here: http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=594.

PUB: Morrey, Douglas, ed. "Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Nancy," FILM-PHILOSOPHY 12.1 (2008).

For the contents, visit: http://www.film-philosophy.com/.

"Reality or Fiction?," Sapientia University, Cluj, Romania, September 26-28, 2008.

Ever since the appearance of film certain theorists hailed in the moving image its ability to document reality, while others have been talking about the power of the movies to create a perfect illusion of reality. The history of the moving image itself is said to be rooted in the contrasting poetics of the Lumière brothers’ portrayal of everyday life and Méliès’s most escapist travels in fantasy. The debate was kept alive, from opposite directions, by the first avant-gardists who undertook to dismantle the filmic illusion and later by the neorealists and their theorist, André Bazin, who asserted the realist ontology of the image as a norm. Nowadays the question of “reality and fiction” has gained actuality by the ever multiplying media forms of the moving image. Classical movie theatre experience has been replaced by a cinema based on new digital technologies from Dolby stereo sound to computer graphics in order to provide an overwhelming audiovisual experience which engulfs its viewers. Television, with its own genres specially linked to reality, has become part of our everyday life, home video or interactive 3D computer games, or even mobile phones have become media for our daily consumption of moving images. In the meantime the theoretical debate about the double-sided effect of the movies was given further twists by new methodologies in ecological and cognitive film theory as well as cultural theories and visual anthropology. New modes of filmmaking appeared which were dubbed as docu-fiction or fictional documentary, elements of reality and elements of fiction were brought together either by re-editing ‘found’ footage or by integrating genuinely or seemingly documentary images within a fictional framework. Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005) may exemplify the first, and Béla Tarr’s early works as well as his Satantango (1994) the second tendency. The present conference aims to provide a platform for a basically interdisciplinary approach to the relationship of reality and fiction in moving images. The purpose is to bring together film theorists in various disciplines, historians of film and visual media and visual anthropologist as well as filmmakers who grapple with a similar problem of integrating reality and fiction. Visit the conference homepage here: http://kv.sapientia.ro:80/nfmk/eng/.

CFP: "Teaching Philosophy Through Film (and Vice-Versa)," FILM AND PHILOSOPHY 13 (2008).

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Pedagogical techniques for teaching philosophy through film;
• What does it mean to approach a film philosophically?
• Discussions of particular films that illustrate metaphysical, epistemological or ethical issues in ways that are pedagogically useful;
• Are some films just inherently philosophical (and hence good learning tools for teaching philosophy)?
• What is gained (and/or lost) from showing films in philosophy classes (are we watering them down by using films)?
• What unique contributions to film appreciation and evaluation can philosophy make?

Submissions should be from 2,500 to 7,500 words, following the Chicago Manual of Style, using endnotes that contain the relevant bibliographic information (please no separate bibliography or reference list). Please send your article in WORD format to Managing Editor Daniel Shaw at dshaw@lhup.edu(website: www.lhup.edu/dshaw).

Deadline: June 30, 2008.

Lambert, Gregg. "Review of Eyal Peretz's BECOMING VISIONARY: BRIAN DE PALMA'S CINEMATIC EDUCATION OF THE SENSES." NDPR March 11, 2008.

The key argument of Eyal Peretz's Becoming Visionary is given by the book's subtitle and by one of its leading epigraphs. The subtitle is Brian De Palma's Cinematic Education of the Senses. The epigraph in question is taken from Plato's Republic, Book VII: "Education takes for granted that sight is there from the beginning but that it isn't turned the right way or looking where it ought to look, and thus seeks to redirect it appropriately." It is in the re-education of the senses that cinema and philosophy can be said to share a common or related task. Both the philosopher and the director assume that seeing is there as a condition of their enterprise, even though for philosophy seeing is sometimes reduced to an image of common sense or opinion. Each seeks to intervene in this field defined by common perceptions and, in some sense, to wage war with the clichés of vision and thought. The philosopher brings his or her concepts to the battle. As Peretz shows, the director has one weapon in his or her arsenal: the frame. Certainly the frame enacts the definition of education above: given sight, employing the frame to direct or to redirect vision. . . . Read the rest of the review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=12603.