This is a good time for the area of philosophical inquiry after which this APA Blog Series is named (the reason for this circumlocution will soon become evident). There are more philosophers working in the area of Philosophy of Film than ever before. A number of publishing companies have dedicated series to the topic, with titles like Hitchcock and Philosophy, and there are several comparable scholarly journals, including, in the USA, Film and Philosophy.
Of course, philosophy has long been aware of film. As early as 1913, Georg Lukàcs published his “Thoughts Towards an Aesthetics of the Cinema.” In the USA, Hügo Munsterberg, a member of Harvard’s Philosophy and Psychology Department (also inhabited by the likes of William James and Josiah Royce), authored his treatise The Photoplay: A Psychological Study in 1916. Admittedly, the book was primarily psychological, but it also contains a substantial amount of aesthetic theorizing, patently derived from Kant with a heady dollop of Schopenhauer. After Munsterberg, contributions to the discussion by card-carrying philosophers in the USA do not disappear, but it thins out appreciably. However, that begins to change dramatically, by my reckoning, between the late nineteen-seventies and eighties.
Part of the story is undoubtedly economic. Philosophy departments and deans of the humanities realized that courses with titles like “Philosophy and Film” would be good for enrollment. Other departments had already recognized this. It was time for philosophy to get on board. And where courses appeared, publishers responded to their need for textbooks.
But it was not simply a matter of money. At the same time, a cadre of movie-lovers were being recruited as assistant professors. Many of them were baby-boomers whose primary experience of art was the movies, including old movies recycled on television programs with names like Million Dollar Movie (whose signature musical intro was “Tara’s Theme” from Gone with the Wind). Thus, on the supply side, there was an abundance of instructors, many of whom had no interest in aesthetics apart from movies, but who were ready, willing, and able to take charge of those burgeoning film-and-philosophy courses.
Moreover, we could do so with a good philosophical conscience. For in 1971, Stanley Cavell, occupant of named chair at Harvard, effectively enfranchised the field with his pathbreaking The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. This was followed by an expanded edition in 1979, and two years later we got his Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. With these publications, Cavell, far more than anyone else, endowed the philosophy of/and/in film with a philosophical imprimatur. Furthermore, he consolidated this feat with further books, articles, and lectures on cinema, including his 1995 APA presidential address, “Something out of the Ordinary,” which featured a discussion of a Fred Astaire dance routine from The Bandwagon.
And then we’ve lived happily ever after?
Not quite.
Because the name of the field, including the name of this blog, is not really accurate.
Film, strictly speaking, refers to a specific medium involving a transparent cellulose acetate strip coated on one side with gelatin emulsion which emulsion contains tiny silver halide crystals that are light sensitive. Film, in this sense, is photographic film.
Admittedly this is the medium in which the movies became what some have claimed to be the art of the twentieth century. But by this late date, it is not the only medium that produces motion pictures nor are films the only kinds of objects that interest so-called philosophers of film. In addition, many of us are interested in live broadcast television from the late nineteen-thirties onward, including satellite television; video, including video artworks by Nam June Paik, Adrian Piper, and Bill Viola, and video games, like Minecraft and Grand Theft Auto V; computer-generated imagery; and still evolving virtual-reality technologies.
Content generated by imaging software appeared as early as in the credits sequence in Vertigo and was increasingly used, beginning in the nineteen-seventies, in developing live-action scenes in movies like Westworld. Today CGI dominates the screen in the sort of super-hero blockbusters that issue nowadays regularly from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Nor can these examples be waived aside on the grounds that they are “recent.” TV sets became available in 1938, video art emerges in the nineteen sixties, and CGI has been with us for over four decades. Furthermore, animated cartoons were being made as early as 1907 by Émile Cohl. Cartoons were traditionally images drawn on transparent celluloid sheets that were then photographed and projected. However, although photography gave viewers access to the art of the cartoon image, it was not the object of our appreciation; the hand-drawn pictures of the Seven Dwarves, Daffy Duck, and Princess Mononoke were. That is, although photography made viewing animation possible, it did not add to its aesthetic articulation, properly so-called (NB: the same point can be made regarding the kinescopes and then videos that give us access to the live broadcast masterpieces of yesteryear, like the original Marty, Requiem for a Heavyweight, and Rod Serling’s Patterns).
So, not only is “film” presently an erroneous label for the relevant domain of philosophical study. It hasn’t been apposite since the early twentieth century, nor will it be in the future, since new, as-yet unimagined movie-media still await invention.
Perhaps a better label, as suggested by Arthur Danto, would be to call the phenomena moving pictures. That would seem to cover all the media and technologies canvassed thus far. To support his proposal, Danto asks us to contemplate two indiscernible examples—a slide of the first page of Tolstoy’s War and Peace and a film of the same page. They look exactly the same. But isn’t there an ontological difference?
Danto points out that in the case of the slide, movement is absolutely impossible—indeed unimaginable—whereas upon first viewing of the film image, it is at least reasonable to anticipate that there might be movement. That is why we call such films “moving pictures” (as categorically opposed to “still pictures”). Moreover, the concept of moving pictures would appear, with two adjustments, to cover everything mentioned above from film to computer-generated images.
First, let us call them “moving images” in order to accommodate the fact that they may be abstract images rather than pictorial representations. And let us also add the qualification that moving images are produced by a technology that makes movement possible, rather than being images that are necessarily literally moving, thereby allowing for movies made of images that in point of fact don’t appear to move at all, but could, like Hollis Frampton’s Poetic Justice.
With these qualifications, we are now ready to rechristen the field.
Call it “Philosophy and the Moving Image.”
But who cares? Doesn’t everyone already know that when we say “film,” we mean it broadly to cover everything I’ve listed? Nevertheless, conceptual engineering is in order here if we want a label that functions to circumscribe the area of our inquiry, in order to avoid error (by, for example, taking photographic film as the defining essence of our domain of exploration), but also in order to map the current terrain so as to be prepared to determine whether or not to consider incorporating unforeseen future media into our categorical bailiwick. For as philosophers as different as Rudolf Carnap, Gilles Deleuze, and Amie Thomasson have pointed out, one office of philosophy is to construct concepts that facilitate our practices.
Noël Carroll
Noël Carroll is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of The Philosophy of Motion Pictures and Philosophy and the Moving Image. He is presently completing a book on art and morality.
