Cinema S Baroque Flesh

In Cinema's Baroque Flesh, Saige Walton draws on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to argue for a distinct aesthetic category of film and a unique cinema of the senses: baroque cinema. Combining media archaeological work with art history, phenomenology, and film studies, the book offers close analyses of a range of historic baroque artworks and films, including Cach , Strange Days, the films of Buster Keaton, and many more. Walton pursues previously unexplored connections between film, the baroque, and the body, opening up new avenues of embodied film theory that can make room for structure, signification, and thought, as well as the aesthetics of sensation.

This book challenges the long-standing presumption that serious philosophical engagement with film and television must be theoretical. It demonstrates, by example, how philosophy of film and film studies can move beyond the methodological assumption that understands philosophical to mean theoretical. In seventeen specially commissioned essays, one in-depth interview, and one reprint, leading philosophers and film scholars exploit the approaches, arguments, and insights of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, Iris Murdoch, Augustine, Berys Gaut, Noël Carroll, and Ordinary Language Philosophy, in exploring, amongst others, Gravity, Lone Star, The Handmaid’s Tale, Le notti di Cabiria, Dunkirk, L'Année dernière à Marienbad, Visitors, The Night it Rained, Philadelphia Story, Shoah, Mary Magdalene, Psycho, Blue Jasmine, Three Colours: Red, War Games, and Histoire(s) du Cinéma. In so doing, this collection argues for the power of theory-free philosophy and film studies as a way to expand our humanistic understanding.

What can philosophy teach us about cinema? Can cinema transform how we understand philosophy? How should we describe the competing approaches to philosophizing on film? New Philosophies of Film answers these questions by offering a lucid introduction to the exciting developments and contentious debates within the philosophy of film. Mapping out the conceptual terrain, it examines both analytic and continental approaches to cinema and puts forward a pluralist film philosophy, grounded in practical examples from film, documentaries and television series. Now thoroughly updated to showcase the most recent developments in the field, this 2nd edition features: · New chapters on phenomenology, cinematic ethics, philosophical documentary film and television as philosophy, incorporating feminist, socio-political, ethical and ecological approaches to cinema · Contemporary case studies including Carol, Roma, Melancholia, two Derrida documentaries, and the Netflix series Black Mirror · Expanded coverage of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell, two of the most influential philosophers of film · An updated bibliography, filmography and reading lists, with links to online resources to support further study Demonstrating how the film-philosophy encounter can open up new paths for thinking, New Philosophies of Film is an essential resource for putting interdisciplinary inquiry into practice.

Highlights Merleau-Ponty’s interest in film and connects it to his aesthetic theory. In The Flesh of Images, Mauro Carbone begins with the point that Merleau-Ponty’s often misunderstood notion of “flesh” was another way to signify what he also called “Visibility.” Considering vision as creative voyance, in the visionary sense of creating as a particular presence something which, as such, had not been present before, Carbone proposes original connections between Merleau-Ponty and Paul Gauguin, and articulates his own further development of the “new idea of light” that the French philosopher was beginning to elaborate at the time of his sudden death. Carbone connects these ideas to Merleau-Ponty’s continuous interest in cinema—an interest that has been traditionally neglected or circumscribed. Focusing on Merleau-Ponty’s later writings, including unpublished course notes and documents not yet available in English, Carbone demonstrates both that Merleau-Ponty’s interest in film was sustained and philosophically crucial, and also that his thinking provides an important resource for illuminating our contemporary relationship to images, with profound implications for the future of philosophy and aesthetics. Building on his earlier work on Marcel Proust and considering ongoing developments in optical and media technologies, Carbone adds his own philosophical insight into understanding the visual today.

The Cinema of Sofia Coppola provides the first comprehensive analysis of Coppola's oeuvre that situates her work broadly in relation to contemporary artistic, social and cultural currents. Suzanne Ferriss considers the central role of fashion - in its various manifestations - to Coppola's films, exploring fashion's primacy in every cinematic dimension: in film narrative; production, costume and sound design; cinematography; marketing, distribution and auteur branding. She also explores the theme of celebrity, including Coppola's own director-star persona, and argues that Coppola's auteur status rests on an original and distinct visual style, derived from the filmmaker's complex engagement with photography and painting. Ferriss analyzes each of Coppola's six films, categorizing them in two groups: films where fashion commands attention (Marie Antoinette, The Beguiled and The Bling Ring) and those where clothing and material goods do not stand out ostentatiously, but are essential in establishing characters' identities and relationships (The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation and Somewhere). Throughout, Ferriss draws on approaches from scholarship on fashion, film, visual culture, art history, celebrity and material culture to capture the complexities of Coppola's engagement with fashion, culture and celebrity. The Cinema of Sofia Coppola is beautifully illustrated with color images from her films, as well as artworks and advertising artefacts.

Operating between film theory, media philosophy, archival practice, and audiovisual research, Jiri Anger focuses on the relationship between figuration and materiality in early films, experimental found footage cinema, and video essays. Would it be possible to do film theory from below, through the perspective of moving-image objects, of their multifarious details and facets, however marginal, unintentional, or aleatory they might be? Could we treat scratches, stains, and shakes in archival footage as speculatively and aesthetically generative features? Do these material actors have the capacity to create “weird shapes” within the figurative image that decenter, distort, and transform the existing conceptual and methodological frameworks? Building on his theoretical as well as practical experience with the recently digitized corpus of the first Czech films, created by Jan Kríženecký between 1898 and 1911, the author demonstrates how technological defects and accidents in archival films shape their aesthetic function and our understanding of the materiality of film in the digital age. The specific clashes between the figurative and material spheres are understood through the concept of a “crack-up.” This term, developed by Francis Scott Fitzgerald and theoretically reimagined by Gilles Deleuze, allows us to capture the convoluted relationship between figuration and materiality as inherent to the medium of film, containing negativity and productivity, difference and simultaneity, contingency and fate, at the same time, even within the tiniest cinematic units.

For Elena del Río, extreme cinema is not only qualitatively different from the representations of violence we encounter in popular, mainstream cinema; it also constitutes a critique of the socio-moral system that produces (in every sense of the word) such violence. Drawing inspiration from Deleuze's ethics of immanence, Spinoza's ethology of passions and Nietzsche's typology of forces, The Grace of Destruction examines the affective extremities common in much of global, contemporary cinema from the affirmative perspective of vital forces and situations-extremities such as moral/religious oppression, biopolitical violence, the pain involved in gender relations, the event of death and planetary extinction. Her analysis diverges from the current literature on extreme cinema through its selection of films, which include key international examples, and through its foregrounding of relational, affective politics over representations of sexuality and graphic violence. Detailed formal and philosophical analyses of films like The White Ribbon, Dogville, Code Unknown, Battle in Heaven, Sonatine, Fireworks, Dolls, Takeshis', Inland Empire and Melancholia are meant to move us away from the moral appraisal of violence and destruction, and to compose an ethological philosophy of cinema based on Deleuze's idea that, “when truth and judgment crumble, there remain bodies, which are... nothing but forces.”

Francois Albera is professor of film and cinema studies at UniversitT de Lausanne in Switzerland. Maria Tortajada is professor in the Department of History and Aesthetics of Film at the same university. --Book Jacket.