Category Archive for: ‘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, Australia, in December 2012. This workshop was the second of three organised as part of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project undertaken by Lisa Trahair, Robert Sinnerbrink and Gregory Flaxman …

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 taken a notably ‘historicist turn’. At the same time, there has been renewed interest in the relationship between film and philosophy, leading to the emergence of ‘film-philosophy’ as a distinctive …

[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 form an intermeshed group of assumptions, integrating notions such as autonomy, authenticity, and alterity into an ‘aesthetic ideology of modernity’ (Cornelia Klinger). With the development of the modern system of …

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 montage. However, they have a greater significance than this, especially in the context of contemporary interest in the nature of cinematic thinking. Examining the philosophical nature of intellectual montage as …

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 his brain was exposed, measured and photographed. The photographs of Eisenstein’s brain were kept by his friend of thirty years, neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, who would show them to his students …

‘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 dem Geist.’(Hegel, Enzy §21, Zusatz) Introduction In 1947 the Italian Communist Party (PCI), at the time under the leadership of Palmiro Togliatti, approached Luchino Visconti with the idea of filming …

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 to account for its specific ontology, its role both as a form of art and a form of entertainment and, I want to argue here, as a mode of thinking. …

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 automatically to assume that, by designating the cinema signifier ‘imaginary’, Metz is thereby being critical of that imaginariness. Against such claims, I instead argue that if the cinema signifier is …

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 onto a cave wall, but when he imagined spectators as prisoners chained so that they cannot swivel their heads from side to side. This is the archetypical instance of the …