Category Archive for: ‘Issue 41 – DOSSIER: Emotions, History, and Philosophy in Cinema’

This Special Dossier for Screening the Past grew out of an event organised at the University of Western Australia and the Australian Research Council Centre for the History of Emotions (ARC CHE: CE110001011) in December 2015. A core aspiration of ARC CHE is to take an interdisciplinary humanities-based approach to an understanding of the long history of individual and communal …

Abstract: This essay explores the concept of historical mood as it is captured in narrative film, and considers its value for film studies and philosophy of film. Drawing on phenomenological and cognitivist approaches, I explore the idea of historical mood in movies, examining how it becomes manifest in different kinds of films: those which articulate explicit historical forms of sensibility …

Abstract This essay investigates some ways in which affect is deployed in historical cinema to produce distinctive experiences of temporality. It argues that the experience of watching historical film is irreducibly and originarily asynchronous, and that affect – including emotion and mood – produces a circuit of attachment between the present time of viewing and the represented past. I contrast …

Abstract: Analysing the 2015 Justin Kurzel film Macbeth, this essay develops a critical frame from phenomenology and romantic hermeneutics to illuminate the affective experience of viewing films set in the Middle Ages, exploring in particular the diffuse emotional registers that it calls medievalist moods. It argues that the historical moods evoked in and by films such as Macbeth are central …

Abstract: Critics of Youssef Chahine’s 1997 film Destiny assume that its message is that ideas will always trump censorship. Such responses, however, neglect to ask why Chahine chose to make this film a musical of sorts and to what extent the coupling of philosophy with song and dance might work to contest oppressive state and religious power. Song and dance …

Abstract: In Michelangelo Antonio’s L’Eclisse (1962), Cold War Rome is conceived of as a sequence of controlling frames from which the camera seeks liberation. In the opening sequence a reversed picture frame vies with an electric fan in a modernist flat to convey the grueling endgame of a long-term love affair in terms of the conflict between traditional and contemporary …

Abstract: Moral beauty is at the heart of the Dardenne brothers’ cinema. Its revelation is a structuring principle of their cinema. The unsentimental production of moral beauty is among their most important achievements. In this paper, I develop an argument for this set of claims and I offer an analysis of the concept of moral beauty using the films of …

Abstract: The essay analyses Margarethe von Trotta’s 2012 biopic Hannah Arendt which focuses on Arendt’s attendance at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 as a reporter for the New Yorker, culminating in her controversial depiction of Eichmann as a functionary who epitomised the “banality of evil” in our times. The film has been derided by some as hagiography because …

Abstract: This article concentrates on the formal and aesthetic aspects of Pawel Pawlikowski’s 2013 film Ida in the context of an increasingly visible interest in the history of Polish-Jewish relations in Poland, and with the loss of its Jewish communities in the Holocaust. The film encourages us to pose certain questions: how can something that is no longer present be …