Left Center Left

One of the most frustrating classes I took my freshman year in college was a Philosophy in Film course. Part of the problem was that I wasn’t really prepared not having had any philosophy training - I’m still not really very knowledgeable in the subject. But part of it was that as a new college student I was looking for grand ideas on the one hand, and figuring out what cinema meant as its own medium on the other hand. A course in which we had loose discussions on what death or love was about seemed especially unrigorous, even to my 18-year-old mind.

I’m reminded of that course by the “philosophical films” discussion that was started by the University of Arizona’s Jason Brennan and continued by a number of blogs. The original list is a bit unsatisfactory, as it limits itself to recent, popular Hollywood films to illustrate philosophical ideas for cinematically impatient students. But even broadening the scope, we have to wonder what makes a philosophical film. On one hand, a loose interpretation would count thematic overlap between a narrative and a philosophical work, so that for instance a character’s loss of identity can be used as a springboard for philosophies making arguments about personal identity. On the other hand, certain films do seem to be referencing philosophical ideas in their thematic development. It’s possible to watch the Conformist without thinking of the Allegory of the Caves (and, secondarily, Marxist notions of ideology), but the film clearly is drawing on it.

Or is it clear? I’m still not sure how one can systematically read philosophical bent to theme, short of Godardian citation of having a character hold up a book in tableau shot. After all, themes seem obvious to me and to other readers who are ‘ideal readers’ of the text, but once you try to teach students how to talk about a film’s theme, you realize that the ideal reader may well be a fiction.

Such indetermination aside, perhaps it best to think more systematically about the conditions in which self-conscious philosophical ideas (and not merely grand themes) enter into films. First, we have the modernist-literary pole of the art film, which placed emphasis on certain literary material whose abstruseness invited philosophical reflection. The penultimate, in my mind, would be Orson Welles’ The Trial, though one could probably come up with plenty other examples. Second, and related, would be those filmmakers working out of a philosophically-oriented religious tradition, so that religious thematics draw upon a history of philosophical reflection. Bergman and Dreyer figure prominently here in the Protestant Scandanavian tradition, while Bresson would be a Catholic counterpart. Third, we have those political filmmakers drawing on Marxism, feminism or other political philosophies. Among Marxists, ‘Third Cinema’ films in particular are structured around dialectic, engagement, and historical materialism. Battle of Algiers and Hour of the Furnaces are just two of the better examples that come to mind. Feminist filmmaking has been strongest in the avant-garde (though A Question of Silence is a narrative example): Sally Potter’s Thriller, Laura Mulvey’s Riddle of the Sphinx, any Chantal Akerman film. Fourth, we have the popular genre of science fiction, which is often built around a (sometimes middlebrow) fondness of philosophical themes. Fifth, we have maverick auteurs making ponderous cult films: Terry Gilliam, David Lynch, Spike Jonez/Charlie Kauffman. Finally, we have commercial Hollywood cinema, in which screenwriters have put (or are read as having put) philosophical references into otherwise generic work: The Matrix, the Truman Show, etc.

I list these modes of philosophical thematics to get to a broader point: the means by which we perceive philosophical ideas in cinema is three fold. On one hand, there are extratextual references, to literary source material, religious traditions, or political philosophies. Then there are textual means meant to make us reflect on the significance beyond narrative thrust: slow pacing (long takes), long shots, the Brechtian distanciation techniques of the art cinema, ‘visible’ and intellectual editing. Finally, certain adept readers may do the work of reading subtext without such textual or extratextual clues. Certainly, there will be those who prefer to talk about deontology than the specifics of film, and that’s fine. But philosophical ideas don’t just enter into films, they are products of textual strategies to encourage readers to see grand ideas where normally they might not.