In this article, I undertake a close reading of Isabel Rocamora's 2015 film installation Faith, which shows, on three separate screens, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim men simultaneously performing their morning prayers in three distinct, historically significant sites in the Judean desert. Setting the cinematic and installation properties of the work into dialogue with a number of philosophers (Levinas, Derrida, Cavell), film theorists (Bazin, Deleuze, Chion), and art theorists (Fried, Elkins), I argue that it adopts a postsecular approach to religious pluralism. (...) That is, without being a religious artwork, Faith nevertheless deconstructs the conventional liberal secular approach of universalist neutrality towards inter-religious relations and instead configures the relations between the human figures in the work according to an alterity that requires not cognitive certainty but inter-human faith. The work is thereby consistent with Derrida's notion that tout autre est tout autre (every other is wholly other). (shrink)

Maurice Pialat (1925–2003) in his Libération article “Éloge de Poussin” (1987) tells us that cinema has made no progress since the Lumière brothers’ first projected images. Provocatively, he informs his readers that only painting has progressed and, as such, remains the far more innovative art form. For all the pointed remarks directed with some force towards French film critics and filmmakers, Pialat’s short notes in Libé offer us something more. It is one of the few opportunities to consider the auteur’s (...) critical and aesthetic approaches to filmmaking. While Pialat emphasises the failure of critics and filmmakers to elevate cinema to the level of art, the article more saliently invites us to analyse Pialat’s understanding of cinematic practice as an intricate enfolding of painterly and cinematic concepts. In this article I contend that, through a reading of the theoretical dimensions Pialat introduces in his “elegy” to the Classicist painter Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), along with an analysis of a selection of the director’s films, we not only discover Pialat’s film-philosophy; moreover, we discover new ways to study Pialat’s acute rendering of fraught manhood. Significantly, I argue, Pialat’s wrestling with masculinity (fatherhood, sexual desire, boyhood, and so on) reveals itself through a key element critical to Poussin’s aesthetic palette: the colour blue. (shrink)

While experiencing natural beauty is a key appeal of the cinema and other moving-image media, academic film scholarship has rarely paid attention to it. In this article I will use the widespread motif of the gently rustling wind as a pars pro toto to make some general remarks about the experience of natural beauty in film. I will first note the firm place of the motif of the rustling wind in film theoretical debates from the late 19th century until today. (...) Then, I will propose three modes of how viewers can experience this beautiful motif in film. In the following section I will discuss how film's mediation modifies the experience of natural beauty. And in a final step I will explore the reciprocal relation between nature and film, and how one can enhance the appreciation of the other. Ultimately, I follow two – mutually imbricated – goals. On the one hand, I aim to (re)connect the film theoretical discourse about the wind in the trees to natural beauty. On the other hand, I use the motif of the gently rustling wind to say something more general about the aesthetic experience of natural beauty in film. (shrink)

In Chloé Zhao's 2020 film Nomadland, Fern's commitment to eschewing a geolocalizable “home” uproots her from conventional patterns of domesticity and transforms her into an inhabitant of planet earth as a whole, enabling a new way of thinking about identity, environment, and the nature of human freedom. The kind of freedom that Fern's narrative evokes stands in deliberate contrast to the masculinized, heroic style of freedom that American films have done so much to promulgate. In contrast to this conventional representation (...) of freedom, new materialist criticism has examined the many ways that human agency emerges from within a dense web of interconnections that bind together human beings with one another, with other life forms, with inanimate matter, and with the cosmic expanses of time and space. Nomadland can be understood as a film that picks up the iconography of conventional American cinematic freedom in order to redirect this iconography into a new materialist worldview. (shrink)

This article probes the ways in which returning to Palestine is imagined in Razan AlSalah’s two video works Your Father Was Born 100 Years Old, and So Was the Nakba (2018) and Canada Park (2020). In foregrounding the refusal of configurations substantiated by state concessions and normalisation treaties, the article treats loss as central to the manifold rehearsals of return. In AlSalah’s work, loss is understood not as becoming less, but rather as a proposition for becoming otherwise. Here, the practice (...) of loss is explored through the glitch as both a conceptual framework espousing opacity and a pragmatic tool engaging pixel breaks. Rather than reducing the glitch to a mere erroneous aesthetic, the article underscores the active capacity in encountering a glitch or deliberately engendering it by exploring the tensions between colonial imageries reproduced in digital maps, and, in contrast, montage as AlSalah’s tool for intervention. Finally, the article serves as a theoretical experimentation with what I call “dialectical poethics,” which reads the filmic return through loss as an attempt to go against linearity, intelligibility, and finality, yet insists on a materialist grounding of the glitch as a method that is historically situated rather than always-already emancipatory. (shrink)

Agnieszka Holland’s Spoor (Pokot, 2017), an adaptation of Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead (2009), tells the story of an old woman, Janina Duszejko (Agnieszka Mandat), who advocates for animal rights and uses every measure to fight the local hunting culture. Due to the centrality of the relationship between human beings and the world of nature, Holland’s film refers to the recent debates aimed at de-centralizing the human subject. This article will argue, however, that (...) despite its attempt to alter the human–animal relationship, Spoor conveys anthropocentric perspectives and as such it does not participate in the “non-human turn.” Instead, the film can be linked to the “emotional turn” taking precedence in the humanities during the last two decades, in that it expresses the director’s affective response to the political realities of contemporary Poland, especially its unshaken patriarchal power, which subordinates the social margins. (shrink)

Brady Corbet's Vox Lux (2018) depicts school shooting survivor Celeste's transformation into a singing superstar, connecting the trauma of a terrorist attack to the phenomenon of musical celebrity. In so doing, the film narrativises the relationship between the pop singer and neoliberal resilience discourse that has been explored by music philosopher Robin James. Mobilising Jacques Rancière's definition of political art, this article suggests that, rather than endorsing the resilience that it depicts, the film formally critiques the neoliberal function of pop (...) stardom by disrupting the pleasurable affect associated with pop music and celebrity. Whilst Raffey Cassidy's performance of the soundtrack was praised in many reviews, the performance of Natalie Portman (playing the older Celeste) was criticised for its inauthentic delivery. Far from being a weakness of the film, my reading suggests that it is in the formal discord between the pleasurably resilient affect of the music and Portman's laboured performance that the film's political-philosophical critique of neoliberal resilience discourse comes to the fore. Taking an interdisciplinary approach grounded in the perspectives of political philosophy, girlhood studies, and celebrity studies, this article proposes that Vox Lux interrogates the neoliberal function of celebrity through a formal disruption of the pleasurable affect associated with the resilient pop star's musical performance. (shrink)

To the French critics who originally labelled certain films noir it seemed that a class of Hollywood products had gone darker during the war years – as though a dark filter had been placed over the lens. Films were not designed or marketed as noir, and retrospectively noir's status as a genre is still unsettled. Yet there is widespread interest today in experiencing diverse films as noir, and even in using a Noir Filter in Instagram and video games. Pursuing the (...) filter clue, the noir experience can be thought of as subjection to a dark filtering of narrative. Image filtering styles can help to resolve not only the puzzle of noir's quasi-genre status but also an issue of general interest in aesthetic experience. The use of image filters makes a distinctively powerful contribution to the experience of a work or genre, or to the cultural dominance of an aesthetic regime, due to the unobtrusive formative role it plays in the economy of experience. (shrink)

Béla Tarr's last feature film The Turin Horse (2011) begins with a prologue that narrates Friedrich Nietzsche's mental breakdown in Turin in 1889, which was allegedly prompted by his witnessing a cab driver brutally whipping his horse. Nietzsche's name is not mentioned again in the film, and the viewer is left wondering what connection, if any, exists between the Nietzsche story and the film's narrative. Scholars often refer to one or another aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy when analysing Tarr's film. Yet, (...) to date, no comprehensive study has been devoted to exploring the connection between The Turin Horse and Nietzsche's philosophy. This article seeks to fill this gap in the literature. The first section examines the connection between the prologue and the film. In the second section, attention is given to the most evident connection between Tarr's film and Nietzsche's philosophy, namely the use of circularity and repetition in The Turin Horse and Nietzsche's idea of the eternal recurrence of the same. The third section interprets the neighbour's monologue in light of Nietzsche's death of God. Finally, the fourth section is devoted to nihilism. (shrink)

If film immortalises the ephemeral and presentifies the past, this is especially true of home movies, whose content is not the result of a narrative composition or an invention of fiction, but the product of fragments of reality. These three categories – fiction, documentary, and the home movie – have been analysed by Jean-Pierre Meunier and Vivian Sobchack, with an emphasis on the effect that each film mode can have on the spectator, eliciting a particular emotional and cognitive response. But (...) these authors’ models depend entirely on the spectator’s experience to identify each mode, with the home movie being limited to footage in which we can recognise our own families. Nevertheless, a stranger’s home movie can elicit an act of recognition through an intersubjectivity that arises from the footage. On this basis, this article proposes a reading of the home movie as a reliquary of memory, where content and medium intersect to give rise to the particular experience associated with this film mode. (shrink)

Shawn Loht's ground-breaking Phenomenology of Film: A Heideggerian Account of the Film Experience (2017) offers a detailed account of film experience as rooted in Martin Heidegger's existential structure of Dasein. Adapting Being and Time for a phenomenology of cinematic experience, Loht accurately describes how various existential structures of Dasein are “fostered” by the projected world of film: in Loht's account, being-in-the-world is extended in the film experience. Loht's project offers fertile ground for developing the phenomenological basis of film experience. Yet, (...) Loht anchors this account of film experience primarily in Heidegger's early philosophy; this leaves his adaptation not without challenges. First, if the structure of film experience is mapped too closely onto the notion of Dasein projecting itself into the filmworld, this theory presents the risk of taking the early Heidegger's “hands-on” approach too literally. Moreover, in its concern for Dasein's extensions into the world of film, Phenomenology of Film says little about the distinctly mediated character of filmworlds; this leaves ambiguous where the film experience effectively takes place. (shrink)

This article responds to critical views of John Rhym, Martin Rossouw, Ludo de Roo, and Annie Sandrussi on my 2017 book Phenomenology of Film: A Heideggerian Account of the Film Experience. The article also takes up positive footholds from the analyses of Chiara Quaranta and Jason Wirth. The main topics addressed include Martin Heidegger’s ontic-ontological distinction; the notion of film-as-philosophy; being-in-the-world read as being-in-the-film-world; and questions surrounding the facticity and identity of the film viewer.

In this article, I engage with Shawn Loht’s argument concerning film viewing as being-in-the-world, developed in his book Phenomenology of Film: A Heideggerian Account of the Film Experience (2017), focusing on the aesthetics of mood with particular attention to boredom. I elaborate on a phenomenological ontology of the film experience and its perceptual “rules” which hinge on aesthetic choices: what kind of world does the film open up for the viewer? Loht’s account of viewing Dasein enables us to deepen phenomenological (...) approaches regarding the relationship between (cinematic) moods and (filmic) understanding, and through his engagement with Mitsein, to expand on film spectatorship conceived as a relation with a shared film world. I look at how Heideggerian boredom can elicit spectatorial experiences and disclosure of meaning, as well as allowing characters’ being in the film world. A broader engagement with cinematic moods is also conducive to exploring limits and potentialities of a possible Heideggerian film-philosophy. To illustrate some of these points, I discuss Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (2021), wherein boredom is consistently awakened through aesthetic strategies of dead-time, silence, slowness and repetition. In the film, the mood of boredom, but also that of love and grief as world-disclosing moods which produce a radical change in our being-in-the-world, is a way to establish a sense of our embeddedness, orient our understanding and disclose our finitude and solitude. (shrink)

This article argues that the strengths and problems of Shawn Loht's Phenomenology of Film: A Heideggerian Account of the Film Experience (2017) are rooted in its method, which derives from a specific interpretation of Heidegger's existential analytic and from the critical strategy implemented by Heidegger – and thus later adopted by his readers and applied to various disciplinary domains – in his polemical engagement with the history of philosophy. Central to this method is what I refer to as the ontic-ontological (...) schema, and the article maps out the ways in which it operates in Loht's book: how it shapes his critical intervention into film studies and his claims about film ontology and spectatorship. My argument is that the ontic-ontological schema, while allowing the author to make interesting inroads into debates in film-philosophy, nonetheless undermines the coherence and efficacy of his claims about the cinematic experience as well as his attempts to mobilize these claims in the analysis of specific films. That is, Loht's disciplinary application of the ontic-ontological schema makes for a compelling discursive polemic, but it also exposes a crucial conceptual incompatibility in the work's configuration of and navigation between ontology, aesthetics, and criticism. (shrink)

This response article addresses the conception of “film as philosophy” developed by Shawn Loht in his book Phenomenology of Film: A Heideggerian Account of the Film Experience (2017), with specific attention to the relevance and implications of Loht's approach for the broader debate beyond a strictly Heideggerian film-philosophy. The article proceeds in three distinct takes. The first take examines Loht's later-Heideggerian inspirations, arguing that although these more fundamental notions of philosophy open significant possibilities for film as philosophy, they nevertheless run (...) the risk of being too embracive, as well as too elusive, to make a distinctive contribution to the debate. For its second take, the article resets its initial point of departure by considering how the earlier Heidegger of Being and Time cues in Loht's approach a special – albeit, ultimately, untenable – investment in cinematic reflexivity, with the stylistic hallmarks of Terrence Malick serving as a test case. In its final take, the article concludes by venturing a possible solution to the questions raised in the first two takes. Here it is proposed that, in contrast to Loht's general interest in cinematographic devices, the voiceover holds a far more sustainable promise of reflexivity, while at the same time giving more prominence to the viewer's acts of listening – which is what a quintessentially Heideggerian film phenomenology surely asks for. (shrink)

In response to Shawn Loht’s 2017 project delineating a Heideggerian phenomenology of film, Phenomenology of Film: A Heideggerian Account of the Film Experience, I examine how productive Loht’s Dasein-centric account of the film viewer might be for considering diverse film-viewer experiences. Starting from Loht’s premise that the film–viewer relation is the constitutive ground of filmic disclosure, I raise two concerns regarding Heidegger’s account of Dasein that might obscure an account of the diversity of film viewers and associated heterogeneity of filmic (...) disclosure: Dasein’s lack of concreteness with respect to lived experience, and Heidegger’s neglect of embodiment and bodily difference. I firstly argue that Dasein’s lack of concreteness is productive for theorising the diversity of film viewers by discussing the concept of Dasein through formal indication, a Heideggerian notion that Loht draws upon in order to account for filmic disclosure. I then examine a key objection, that Heidegger’s neglect of embodiment limits the productivity of a Dasein-centric account of film viewers for theorising diversity. I refer to Katharina Lindner’s interpretation of Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the-world in a queer phenomenology of film, set out in “Questions of Embodied Difference: Film and Queer Phenomenology” (2012), to suggest a pathway for how Dasein’s being-in-the-world might offer an account of film viewing that takes into consideration the embodiment of diverse viewers. (shrink)

This is a philosophical rumination on Shawn Loht’s important extension of “film as philosophy” into a Heideggerian phenomenological account of the philosophical response that cinema can engender. After considering the importance of these kinds of approaches, I turn to Loht’s phenomenological engagement with Terrence Malick’s early masterpiece, Days of Heaven (1978). After sympathetically reviewing his “interpretation”, I expand upon its delineation of “earth and world” to include the “fallenness” of the world as well as the possibility of a metanōetic awakening (...) to the vocation of “mud doctor”, that is, to heal the rift between earth and world, a rift made more exigent by world war, economic exploitation, and the ecological catastrophe of the Anthropocene. (shrink)