Issue 38 – Cinematic Thinking

The seven papers included in this special issue of Screening the Past were presented at a workshop on ‘cinematic thinking’ held at the University of New South Wales in Sydney,…

The philosophy of film remains to be formulated. Jean Epstein, “The Senses 1 b)” (1921) With the demise of ‘grand theory’ in the 1990s, film studies in recent decades has…

[1] Introduction In 1908, by announcing the arrival of a new ‘Art’, Ricciotto Canudo introduced into early French film theory the paradigmatic problems of nineteenth century aesthetics. Together these problems…

Introduction Eisenstein’s experiments with intellectual montage – the use of montage techniques to do intellectual work – might seem like no more than an episode in the history of Soviet…

Introduction When Sergei Eisenstein died on the 11th of February 1948, a post-mortem examination was conducted to establish the cause of death. His body was subjected to a dissection and…

‘We do not see and hear the universal; only for the spirit is it present.’ (Das Allgemeine also hört man nicht und sieht man nicht, sondern dasselbe ist nur für…

Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film can be regarded as the first broad philosophical examination of cinema, indeed the first philosophy of film that attempts…

My purpose in this paper is to argue that scholars have for the most part been mistaken with regard to Christian Metz’s arguments in ‘The Imaginary Signifier’[1] . Commentators seem…

Damian Cox, Bond University dcox@bond.edu.au Plato and Eisenstein on the Significance of Montage Plato invented the idea of the cinema in The Republic, not when he imagined moving shadows projected…