Filmmaker's Philosopher

Filmmaker's Philosopher PDF Author: DeBlasio Alyssa DeBlasio
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474444512
Category : Motion pictures
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Known as the 'Georgian Socrates' of Soviet philosophy, Merab Mamardashvili was a defining personality of the late-Soviet intelligentsia. In the 1970s and 1980s, he taught required courses in philosophy at Russia's two leading film schools, helping to educate a generation of internationally prolific directors. Exploring Mamardashvili's extensive philosophical output, as well as a range of recent Russian films, Alyssa DeBlasio reveals the intellectual affinities amongst directors of the Mamardashvili generation - including Alexander Sokurov, Andrey Zvyagintsev and Alexei Balabanov. This multidisciplinary study offers an innovative way to think about film, philosophy and the philosophical potential of the moving image.

Filmmaker's Philosopher

Filmmaker's Philosopher PDF Author: DeBlasio Alyssa DeBlasio
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474444512
Category : Motion pictures
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Known as the 'Georgian Socrates' of Soviet philosophy, Merab Mamardashvili was a defining personality of the late-Soviet intelligentsia. In the 1970s and 1980s, he taught required courses in philosophy at Russia's two leading film schools, helping to educate a generation of internationally prolific directors. Exploring Mamardashvili's extensive philosophical output, as well as a range of recent Russian films, Alyssa DeBlasio reveals the intellectual affinities amongst directors of the Mamardashvili generation - including Alexander Sokurov, Andrey Zvyagintsev and Alexei Balabanov. This multidisciplinary study offers an innovative way to think about film, philosophy and the philosophical potential of the moving image.

Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog PDF Author: Richard Eldridge
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350091685
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Werner Herzog has produced some of the most powerful, haunting, and memorable images ever captured on film. Both his fiction films and his documentaries address fundamental issues about nature, selfhood, and history in ways that engage with but also criticize and qualify the best philosophical thinking about these topics. In focusing on figures from Aguirre, Kasper Hauser, and Stroszek to Timothy Treadwell, Graham Dorrington, Dieter Dengler, and Walter Steiner, among many others, Herzog investigates the nature of human life in time and the possibilities of meaning that might be available within it. His films demonstrate the importance of the image in coming to terms with the plights of contemporary industrial and commercial culture. Eldridge unpacks and develops Herzog's achievement by bringing his work into engagement with the thinking of Freud, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, Hegel, Cavell, and Benjamin, but more importantly also by attending closely to the logic and development of the films themselves and to Herzog's own extensive writings about filmmaking.

Eric Rohmer

Eric Rohmer PDF Author: Vittorio Hösle
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474221157
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
Rohmer is one of the most popular French directors of the second half of the 20th century, one of the members of the famous Nouvelle Vague that reconstituted French cinema based on the theoretical principles articulated in the Cahiers du Cinéma – from whose editorship he was fired when the conservative Catholic opposed its turn toward politicization. Like some of his colleagues, Rohmer is extremely interested in both the history and the philosophy of film: Brother of the noted French philosopher René Scherer, he begins his career as a film critic In his films, deep moral conflicts as well as the search for one's own identity emerge from the intricacies of seemingly superficial everyday life interactions, particularly between a man and a woman. Hösle's book puts Rohmer in the context of a long French tradition of reflected eroticism, with Marivaux, Musset, Stendhal, and Jean Renoir as crucial figures, and shows how Rohmer both recognizes the inner logic of eroticism and subjects it to moral demands that he inherits from his Catholic background. For Rohmer, the tension between the two can usually only be solved by some unexpected event that can be interpreted as an equivalent of grace.

Terrence Malick

Terrence Malick PDF Author: Robert Sinnerbrink
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350063657
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Many critics have approached Terrence Malick's work from a philosophical perspective, arguing that his films express philosophy through cinema. With their remarkable images of nature, poetic voiceovers, and meditative reflections, Malick's cinema certainly invites philosophical engagement. In Terrence Malick: Filmmaker and Philosopher, Robert Sinnerbrink takes a different approach, exploring Malick's work as a case of cinematic ethics: films that evoke varieties of ethical experience, encompassing existential, metaphysical, and religious perspectives. Malick's films are not reducible to a particular moral position or philosophical doctrine; rather, they solicit ethically significant forms of experience, encompassing anxiety and doubt, wonder and awe, to questioning and acknowledgment, through aesthetic engagement and poetic reflection. Drawing on a range of thinkers and approaches from Heidegger and Cavell, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, to phenomenology and moral psychology Sinnerbrink explores how Malick's films respond to the problem of nihilism the loss of conviction or belief in prevailing forms of value and meaning and the possibility of ethical transformation through cinema: from self-transformation in our relations with others to cultural transformation via our attitudes towards towards nature and the world. Sinnerbrink shows how Malick's later films, from The Tree of Life to Voyage of Time, provide unique opportunities to explore cinematic ethics in relation to the crisis of belief, the phenomenology of love, and film's potential to invite moral transformation.

Three Philosophical Filmmakers

Three Philosophical Filmmakers PDF Author: Irving Singer
Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
ISBN: 9780262195010
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Reassesses the different visions of filmmakers Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, and Jean Renoir, drawing on their writings and movies to reveal how they became sophisticated theorists on film and its place in the human experience.

Douglas Sirk

Douglas Sirk PDF Author: Robert B. Pippin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350195693
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
It would be easy to dismiss the films of Douglas Sirk (1897-1987) as brilliant examples of mid-century melodrama with little to say to the contemporary world. Yet Robert Pippin argues that, far from being marginal pieces of sentimentality, Sirk's films are rich with irony, insight and depth. Indeed Sirk's films, often celebrated as classics of the genre, are attempts to subvert rather than conform to rules of conventional melodrama. The visual style, story and characters of films like All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind and Imitation of Life are explored to argue for Sirk as an incredibly nuanced moral thinker. Instead of imposing moralising judgements on his characters, Sirk presents them as people who do 'wrong' things often without understanding why or how, creating a complex and unsettling ethics. Pippin argues that it this moral ambiguity and ironic richness enables Sirk to produce films that grapple with important themes such as race, class and gender with real force and political urgency. Douglas Sirk: Filmmaker and Philosopher argues for a filmmaker who was a 'disruptive not restorative' auteur and one who broke the rules in the most interesting and subtle of ways.

Luchino Visconti

Luchino Visconti PDF Author: Joan Ramon Resina
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350185795
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Luchino Visconti (1906-1976) was one of Europe's most prestigious filmmakers, who rose to prominence as part of the Italian neo-realist movement, alongside contemporaries Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini. Famous for his elegant lifestyle, as friend of Jean Renoir and Coco Chanel amongst others, his vibrant technicolour dramas are also known for their decadence and stunning display of aesthetic mastery and sensory pleasure. Looking beyond this colourful façade, however, Resina explores the philosophical implications of decadence with a particular focus on three films from the late phase in Visconti's production, Damned (1969), Death in Venice (1971), and Ludwig (1972). From the incestuous relationship between decadence and power to decadence as an outcome of straining toward formal perfection, Resina uncovers the unity and philosophical cohesiveness of these films that deal with different subjects and historical periods. Reading these films and their decadence in light of the time of filming and Visconti's own sense of cultural doom, Resina further demonstrates the relevance of Visconti's philosophy today and how much they still have to say to our contemporary situation.

Ingmar Bergman, Cinematic Philosopher

Ingmar Bergman, Cinematic Philosopher PDF Author: Irving Singer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780262513234
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Known for their repeating motifs and signature tropes, the films of Ingmar Bergman also contain extensive variation and development. In these reflections on Bergman's artistry and thought, Irving Singer discerns distinctive themes in Bergman's filmmaking, from first intimations in the early work to consummate resolutions in the later movies. Singer demonstrates that while Bergman's output was not philosophy on celluloid, it attains an expressive and purely aesthetic truthfulness that can be considered philosophical in a broader sense.

Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock PDF Author: Mark William Roche
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474221335
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Hitchcock was a masterful director, popular with audiences of all ages and critically acclaimed both during and after his unusually long career. What may have been sensed by many viewers but not fully articulated until now is the extent to which his works subtly engage philosophical themes: What is evil, and how does it shield and reveal itself? Can we know what is inside the mind of another person? What is at stake when one knows the truth but cannot speak of it or cannot persuade others? How is Hitchcock's loving critique of humanity manifested in his films? Why are Hitchcock's works so often ambiguous? What is the hidden purpose and theory behind his use of humor? Hitchcock employs cinematic techniques–from camera angles and use of light to editing and sound–partly to convey suspense and drama but also to engage and advance philosophical issues, ranging from identity crises to moral ugliness. Roche unlocks Hitchcock's engagement with philosophical themes, and he does so in a way that appeals to both the novice and the seasoned philosopher, as well as enthusiastic admirers of Hitchcock's films.

Faith, Film and Philosophy

Faith, Film and Philosophy PDF Author: R. Douglas Geivett
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 0830875182
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
"Those who tell stories rule society." Plato So who today are our principal storytellers? Not philosophers, but filmmakers. For those who know both the enormous entertainment potential and the culture-shaping power of film, this book will stir mind and imagination. For great stories freight world-sized ideas, ideas worthy of contemplation and conversation. Great cinema inspires wonder. But another philosopher, Aristotle, reminds us that wonder is the true source of philosophy. So perhaps Plato or Aristotle might have a shot at ruling society, even today--if they took an interest in film. These fourteen essays consider classic and current films together with several major philosophical themes, all within the context of Christian faith: (1) the human condition, (2) the human mind and the nature of knowing, (3) the moral life, and (4) faith and religion. Citizen Kane, Big Fish and Pretty Woman contribute to an in-depth consideration of the human condition. The Truman Show, The Matrix, Being John Malkovich and It's a Wonderful Life, among others, illuminate reflection on the human mind and the nature of knowing. Looking at the moral life, contributors interact with such notable films as Pleasantville, Bowling for Columbine, Mystic River and The Silence of the Lambs. The final section pursues the theme of faith and religion traced through a number of Hong Kong martial arts films, Contact, 2001: A Space Odyssey and U2's music documentary Rattle and Hum. A veritable film festival for all those who want to nurture the wonder of philosophical inquiry and the love of Christian theology through an engagement with the big ideas on the big screen.