notes

film-makers have often waxed philo­soph­i­cal about their art and prac­tices. it is per­haps in the nature of the medium to pro­voke ques­tions about the spe­cial sta­tus of film and its rela­tion to real­ity and lan­guage. the prob­lem of pho­tog­ra­phy and its rela­tion­ship with ‘real­ity’ and truth — it was jean-luc godard who famously said  “a pho­to­graph is the truth, and film is the truth 24 times a sec­ond”. The great cul­tural the­o­rists of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury were often obsessed with film; it is hard to imag­ine the french  nou­velle vague, for exam­ple, with­out the par­al­lel struc­tural­ist and post-structuralist devel­op­ments in the­ory. lit­tle atten­tion, how­ever, has been paid to the notion of film as phi­los­o­phy. this piece by havi carel and greg tuck, in the philosopher’s mag­a­zine seeks to explore this intrigu­ing notion.

IDEAS OF THE CENTURY: FILM AS PHILOSOPHY

Havi Carel and Greg Tuck in The Philoso­phers Magazine:

Film stud­ies schol­ars have always drawn on philo­soph­i­cal ideas. Philoso­phers, and in par­tic­u­lar those work­ing on aes­thet­ics and phi­los­o­phy of art, have been inter­ested in cin­ema for as long as it has existed. How­ever, film as phi­los­o­phy as an autonomous sub-discipline is rel­a­tively new, emerg­ing in the 80s and com­ing into its own over the past five years.

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