Author Archive for: ‘Daniel Ross’
Feelings are Facts: A Life
Yvonne Rainer, Feelings are Facts: A Life. MIT Press, 2006. ISBN: 0 262 18251 3 US$37.95 (hb) 504pp (Review copy supplied by MIT Press) Feelings are Facts gives all the usual indications of simply being an autobiography – in this case of choreographer-cum-filmmaker Yvonne Rainer – but that is not quite what it is, and for a couple of reasons. First …
Read MorePhilosophy the Day After Tomorrow
Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow. Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard University Press, 2005. ISBN: 0 674 01704 8 (hb) 328pp US$27.95 (Review copy supplied by Harvard University Press) This collection of interwoven essays guides the reader through the thoughts of Stanley Cavell since his retirement from regular teaching. The reader unfamiliar with his earlier work is fortunate …
Read MoreTechnics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise, Bernard Stiegler
Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise Stanford University Press, 2010 ISBN: 9 780 804761 680 US$27.95 (pb) 280pp (Review copy supplied by Stanford University Press) Some thirty thousand or so years ago, prehistoric human beings painted and drew on the walls of what is now known as the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave, located in the …
Read MoreThree Philosophical Filmmakers: Hitchcock, Welles, Renoir
Irving Singer, Three Philosophical Filmmakers: Hitchcock, Welles, Renoir. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: The MIT Press, 2004. ISBN: 0 262 19501 1279 pp US$32.95 (hb) (Review copy supplied by MIT Press) Edmund Husserl famously devoted several pages to the description of the act of perceiving a blank page. Recollection of this is sufficient to indicate the difficulty of applying phenomenological …
Read MoreFilm After Film: Or, What Became of 21st-Century Cinema?
J. Hoberman, Film After Film: Or, What Became of 21st-Century Cinema? Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2012 ISBN-13: 978-1844677511 US$34.95 (hb) 304pp Review copy supplied by Verso Long-time (but now former) Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman opens his investigation of cinema in the twenty-first century with two quotations: one is a 1999 prediction by Bruce Goldstein that in fifteen years all movies …
Read More10
Geoff Andrew, 10. London: BFI Publishing, 2005. ISBN: 1 844 57069 X 88pp £9.99 (pb) (Review copy supplied by BFI publications) Few films seem as wholeheartedly concerned with “America”, in the sense of ruminating on the singular character of the American condition, psyche, and way of life, as Martin Scorsese’s Taxi driver (US 1976). What that film depicts, more than anything else, …
Read MoreIngmar Bergman, Cinematic Philosopher: Reflections on His Creativity
Irving Singer, Ingmar Bergman, Cinematic Philosopher: Reflections on His Creativity. MIT Press, 2007 ISBN-13: 978-0-262-19563-8 US$24.95 (hb) 240pp Irving Singer, Cinematic Mythmaking: Philosophy in Film. MIT Press, 2008 ISBN-13: 978-0-262-19589-8 US$24.95 (hb) 256pp (Review copies supplied by MIT Press) Could it be that “philosopher of film” is a persona on the way to becoming obsolete? This would perhaps be surprising, …
Read MoreMoving Images of the Anthropocene: Rethinking Cinema Beyond Anthropology
Introduction: On Cinematic and Anthropocenic Dreams How to think about cinema in a way that truly takes the measure of what this celluloidal gathering of collectable and projectable light has been for a world transformed by the power unleashed by the unrestrained combustion of solid, liquid and gaseous residues of extinct life, and of what it has yet to be …
Read MoreProfanations
Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (Translated by Jeff Fort). New York: Zone Books, 2007. ISBN-13: 978-1-890951-82-5 US$25.95 (hb) 100pp (Review copy supplied by MIT Press) Philosophy adopts the task, usually as the task par excellence, of seeking the meaning of virtue – that is, it asks how judgment is possible, given the finitude of foresight. Human beings face this problem from the moment consciousness …
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