Syndicate: fyi: Film-Philosophy

[d.frampton@philosophy.bbk.ac.uk]

                          F  I  L  M  -  P  H  I  L  O  S  O  P  H  Y

                                                         electronic salon

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When I first saw the cinematograph I realised it could offer something new to philosophy. The cinema provides us with an understanding of our own memory. Indeed we could almost say that cinema is a model of consciousness itself. Going to the cinema turns out to be a philosophical experience. Henri Bergson

Film-Philosophy is an email discussion forum and website founded in November 1996.

                          SALON DISCUSSION

The purpose of the salon is the informal discussion of film philosophies.
The aim of which is the creation of a discipline from a collision, from a debilitating identity crisis.
Why do we need film philosophies? What can a philosophical viewpoint breath into well-worn debates in film theory? What bred the recent surge of interest in this area? What is film philosophy? 

The salon anticipates the following areas to be within the range of its playful chat (areas to be reborn through our philosophies of film philosophy):
Film stories, actions and events that illustrate, rehearse or advance our understanding of traditional philosophical problems. The meanings of reflexive cinema. Philosophical inquiry into our emotional attraction to certain types of film drama. Film as philosophy. The place of Plato's cave in contemporary film philosophy. The ontology of the moving image: film movement, illusion, representation; the 'existence' of fictional characters; film as a continuous present; persistence of vision and the phi phenomenon. The empiricist essentialism of filmology. Cognitivist and phenomenological perspectives on the film experience. Time, memory, and space in cinema. Imagination, dreams, mental imagery, other minds and film. Characters as metaphors for truth or knowledge; screen detectives as epistemologists; the philosophical universalising of motives and actions. Film as a new metaphysics. The philosophy of future forms: interactive media, large-scale cinema, digital morphing, virtual worlds, 3D, hypermedia on the internet, CDi and CD-Rom multimedia. Cultural philosophies of the moving sound image as mass media. Filmic aesthetics. The reliability of documentary images - narrative and profilmic manipulation. The status of the moving sound image as thought and mind. Philosophers' cameos in films. The history of the linking of film and philosophy from Munsterberg to Deleuze.

                          SALON REVIEWS

Salon members are also offered the chance to review recent publications. So far there have been reviews of Stanley Cavell's Contesting Tears, Joseph Anderson's The Reality of Illusion, Allan Casebier's Film and Phenomenology, Noel Carroll's The Philosophy of Horror, Carl Plantinga's Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film, Carroll's Theorizing the Moving Image, the Iris journal's special edition on Deleuze, William Rothman's Documentary Film Classics, and Torben Grodal's Moving Pictures. Reviews are posted to the salon and published on the website.

Currently under review are the first three Film and Philosophy journal volumes, Andre Bazin's Bazin at Work, Gregory Currie's Image and Mind, Heike Klippel's Gedaechtnis und Kino, Philosophy and Film edited by Cynthia Freeland and Thomas Wartenberg, Ian Jarvie's Philosophy of the Film, Mark Taylor and Esa Saarinens' Imagologies, Timothy Murray's Like a Film, Murray Smith's Engaging Characters, Scott McQuire's Crossing the Digital Threshold, D. N. Rodowick's Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine, Timothy Murray's Drama Trauma, Jean Louis Schefer's The Enigmatic Body, Der Film bei Deleuze/le cinema selon Deleuze edited by Oliver Fahle and Lorenz Engell, the Antithesis journal's special issue on Time and Memory, Film Theory and Philosophy edited by Richard Allen and Murray Smith, the journal Vertigo, and Amy Lawrence's The Films of Peter Greenaway.

                          SALON WEBSITE

http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/film-philosophy/files

Email Salon - more info, and an archive of the discussion list.
Events & Things - including conferences and online organisations.
Film Philosophers - linking to info on writers and filmmakers.
Journals - gathering together periodicals, both online and old fashioned.
Bibliographies - concerning Deleuze, cognitivism and other areas.
Online Writings - containing the salon reviews and some interesting papers.

To join, send the message:
join film-philosophy firstname lastname
to:
mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk

If you know of a someone else who may be interested please pass this on.

For further information contact the owner at: film-philosophy-request@mailbase.ac.uk

Sincere apologies if you have received this information before (or are already a member).

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