Film Evaluation, Misc

This essay sets out reflections on happiness that, it is argued, can be drawn from the 2013 film Blue Jasmine. In doing so, it seeks to demonstrate a certain epistemic potential of sound film, specifically, in the present case, a philosophical and psychological potential. It is argued that this kind of potential resides in a filmmaker’s ability to realistically represent aspects of the world that can otherwise rarely, if ever, be experienced so reflectively.

In recent years, St. Augustine’s Press and Ignatius Press have been a fruitful hub for translating into English the works of German philosopher Josef Pieper (1904–1997). Pieper’s engagement with Plato is known in the English-speaking world through his short Divine Madness: Plato’s Case against Secular Humanism (Ignatius Press, 1995) and The Platonic Myths (St. Augustine’s Press, 2011). In 2018 St. Augustine’s Press published Dan Farrelly’s translation of Pieper’s Kümmert Euch nicht um Sokrates (1966), a German text initially composed as a (...) television play for Bavarian Radio between 1962 and 1967, and as radio plays for Studio Bern in 1966. Under the English title Don’t Worry about Socrates, Pieper’s text introduces a version, not translation, of Plato’s dialogues Gorgias, Symposium, and Phaedo. (shrink)

Science fiction has served the film industry like a dreamy stepchild. It gets only scant accolades from its master but must do heavy lifting: that is, make money. While science-fiction films often emphasize spectacle and action, they also inspire philosophical contemplation. Why? Science fiction, dating back to Shelley and Verne, came into existence speculating about humanity's social and physical worlds. Many books and articles over the past several years discuss the philosophical issues that films raise. One fairly new school of (...) thought, "posthumanism," explicitly deriving from postmodernism, with touches of critical theory, has seized on science-fiction movies as support for its theorizing. This volume and its 42 authors from film theory, science and technology studies, literary criticism, media studies, and philosophy, offer an array of posthumanist scholarship. (shrink)

У статті досліджено роль кіно у творчості Василя Герасим’юка. Простежено особливості використання кінематографічних прийомів, проаналізовано цитування кінокласики, розкрито значення постаті І. Миколайчука у текстах В. Герасим’юка. Розглянуто вплив «поетичного кіно» і особливо стрічки «Тіні забутих предків» на формування «карпатського тексту» поета.

Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox is about Mr. Fox's attempt to flourish as both a wild animal and a consumer. As such, this film raises some interesting and difficult questions about what it means to be a member of a certain kind, what is required to flourish as a member of that kind, and how consumerism either promotes or inhibits such flourishing. In this paper I use Fantastic Mr. Fox as an entry point into an examination of the relationship between (...) consumerism and human flourishing. More specifically, I use this film as a way to engage with a worry that many philosophers have expressed: namely, the worry that consumerism threatens the identity of individual consumers. I begin by bringing certain of Mr. Fox's worries into contact with an Aristotelian account of flourishing. I then press Aristotle's account further by arguing that consumerism threatens one's ability to flourish as a human being because it tends to discourage one from engaging in distinctly human activities. I then conclude by looking to Aristotle and Mr. Fox for some ways to respond to this threat. My ultimate goals are, first, to shed light on certain dangers that are associated with consumerism, and second, to indicate how people living in consumerist societies might nonetheless overcome those dangers. (shrink)

This article identifies three distinct temporal notions in Hume’s aesthetics: passing the test of time, repeated viewing of a work, and the personal aging of the critic. It applies these ideas to the evaluation and enjoyment of films. It characterizes positive, negative, and ambivalent film aging, which are associated with nostalgia, boredom, and comic amusement, respectively, and which bear on our enjoyment, not evaluation, of film. The paper discusses Allen’s Zelig, Antonioni’s La Notte, Cameron’s The Terminator, Lucas’s Star Wars, Scorsese’s (...) Taxi Driver, Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, and Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu. (shrink)

Marguerite Clark as Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1918). Charlton Heston as Ramon Miguel Vargas in Touch of Evil (1958). Mizuo Peck as Sacagawea in Night at the Museum (2006). From the early days of cinema to its classic-era through to the contemporary Hollywood age, the history of cinema is replete with films in which the racial (or ethnic) background of a principal character does not match the background of the actor or actress portraying that character. I call this actor-character (...) race-mismatching. In this paper, I mainly explore whether a coherent and plausible account can be given of race-matching in terms of purely aesthetic considerations, i.e., an account that absent moral considerations can nevertheless coherently and productively answer the following questions: can race-mismatching itself ever be an aesthetic defect of a film, and if so, under what conditions can race-mismatching be such an aesthetic defect. I claim that once we have in place a precise account of the nature of race-matching, it becomes clear that films for which race-mismatching appears to constitute an aesthetic defect are actually films with which properly engaging requires audiences to satisfy inconsistent epistemic conditions. In such cases, I claim, race mismatching constitutes an aesthetic defect for the film-fiction because—in virtue of the inconsistency underwritten by the race-mismatching—that film-fiction undermines the very uptake it prescribes. I then argue that if what’s defective about race-mismatching aesthetically is predicated on something being defective about race-mismatching epistemically, then if there is nothing in principle defective about race-mismatching epistemically, then so too for mismatching aesthetically (and so too for mismatching morally). From this I conclude that reasons stemming only from race-matching/mismatching itself lack the normative force sufficient to warrant the claim that film-fictions ought not race-mismatch. (shrink)

Stoic themes in Ridley Scott's Gladiator.