Interpreting The Moving Image

A collection of film essays by the well-respected critic, Noël Carroll.

Noël Carroll, a brilliant and provocative philosopher of film, has gathered in this book eighteen of his most recent essays on cinema and television—what Carroll calls “moving images.” The essays discuss topics in philosophy, film theory, and film criticism. Drawing on concepts from cognitive psychology and analytic philosophy, Carroll examines a wide range of fascinating topics. These include film attention, the emotional address of the moving image, film and racism, the nature and epistemology of documentary film, the moral status of television, the concept of film style, the foundations of film evaluation, the film theory of Siegfried Kracauer, the ideology of the professional western, and films by Sergei Eisenstein and Yvonne Rainer. Carroll also assesses the state of contemporary film theory and speculates on its prospects. The book continues many of the themes of Carroll’s earlier work Theorizing the Moving Image and develops them in new directions. A general introduction by George Wilson situates Carroll’s essays in relation to his view of moving-image studies.

A wide-ranging, eclectic collection of essays on philosophy and the moving image by a pre-eminent philosopher of art This volume presents a selection of philosopher Noël Carroll's essays-several of which appear in print here for the first time-at the intersection of philosophy, film, and television. The volume begins with broad, foundational issues-what the moving image is, the nature of the medium of film and how we should evaluate it-engaging critically with the most essential problems and puzzles in the field. Carroll then moves to more focused issues in the philosophy of film and television. He reflects on whether ethical defects in fictional characters such as Tony Soprano have an impact on artistic excellence; the role of films in political debates (using the examples of Star Trek and Planet of the Apes); the question of whether film can do philosophy in its own way; and philosophical themes in avant-garde cinema. His analysis touches on a broad range of areas in philosophy including metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, and aesthetics. The book then concludes with philosophical re-assessments of key figures in the philosophy of the moving image-Sergei Eisenstein, Arthur Danto, Bela Balasz, and Stanley Cavell. A wide-ranging and eclectic collection of work by a major figure in aesthetics and the philosophy of film and television, this volume will appeal to scholars, students, and cinephiles alike.

Noël Carroll is one of the most prolific, widely-cited and distinguished philosophers of art, but how, specifically, has cinema impacted his thought? This book, one of the first in the acclaimed 'Film Thinks' series, argues that Carroll's background in both cinema and philosophy has been crucial to his overall theory of aesthetics. Often a controversial figure within film studies, as someone who has assertively contested the psychoanalytic, semiotic and Marxist cornerstones of the field, his allegiance to alternative philosophical traditions has similarly polarised his readership. Mario Slugan proposes that Carroll's defence of the notions of truth and objectivity provides a welcome antidote to 'anything goes' attitudes and postmodern scepticism towards art and popular culture, including film. Carroll's thinking has loosened the grip of continental philosophers on cinema studies - from Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan - by turning to cognitive and analytical approaches. Slugan goes further to reveal that Carroll's methods of evaluation and interpretation in fact, usefully bridge gaps between these `opposing' sides, to look at artworks anew. Throughout, Slugan revisits and enriches Carroll's definitions of popular art, mass art, horror, humour and other topics and concludes by tracing their origins to this important thinker's relationship with the medium of cinema.

In Mapping the Moving Image, Pasi Valiaho offers a compelling study of how the medium of film came to shape our experience and thinking of the world and ourselves. By locating the moving image in new ways of seeing and saying as manifest in the arts, science and philosophy at the turn of the twentieth century, the book redefines the cinema as one of the most important anthropological processes of modernity. Moving beyond the typical understanding of cinema based on optical and linguistic models, Mapping the Moving Image takes the notion of rhythm as its cue in conceptualizing the medium's morphogenetic potentialities to generate affectivity, behaviour, and logics of sense. It provides a clear picture of how the forms of early film, while mobilizing bodily gestures and demanding intimate, affective engagement from the viewer, emerged in relation to bio-political investments in the body. The book also charts from a fresh perspective how the new gestural dynamics and visuality of the moving image fed into our thinking of time, memory and the unconscious.

Vision and movement seem to have shifted center stage in modes of experience in the last century: as a result of their joint effect, slow contemplative gazes at static images seem to be increasingly displaced by distracted "vernacular" ways of seeing. Looking out of the window of a speeding car, receiving photographs of Earth from outer space, watching the flickering images of the TV screen, scrolling through a text, zooming in on a location in Google Earth, or sending images via mobile phones or webcams - all these are unique visual experiences that were impossible before various inventions in the 20th century originated completely new kinds of movement. The double meaning of "moving images" is meant to signal the specificality of motion to these imagi(ni)ngs and, at the same time, to express the emotional power of those visual images which are able to transcend the constant stream of images in contemporary perception. (Series: Kultur und Technik. Schriftenreihe des Internationalen Zentrums fur Kultur- und Technikforschung der Universitat Stuttgart - Vol. 20)