Thinking the Moving Image, the Moving Image Thinking: A review of Bernd Herzogenrath, Film as Philosophy

As its title suggests, Film as Philosophy seeks to recast the relationship between philosophy and film. Against the once-dominant psychoanalytic and semiotic theories of film, the fifteen essays in this edited volume attempt to displace the traditional hierarchy implicit in the philosophy of film in the wake of major figures such as Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze. Just as Engels famously urged that philosophical materialism be revised and revitalized in the wake of scientific discoveries, Herzogenrath writes in the introduction that "a new medium makes us think differently" and that thought can no longer be "said to be taking place within the confines of our skull, only" (vii). The profound transformations in thought provoked by cinema are the occasion for the essays in Film as Philosophy, all of which seek to answer the question "Is there something like cinematic thought, thinking-with-images?" (viii). The essays all elaborate and substantiate the claim that film is indeed capable of thought or thinking, and therefore of contributing to philosophical problematics in a distinctively cinematic way. Such a position was originally suggested by Stephen Mulhall, whose 2002 book On Film is quoted in the volume's introduction:

I do not look at these films [the Alien quartet] as handy or popular illustrations of views and arguments properly developed by philosophers; I see them rather as themselves reflecting on and evaluating such views and arguments, as thinking seriously and systematically about them in just the ways that philosophers do.

(4)

Whereas an earlier collection edited by Murray Smith and Thomas E. Wartenberg, Thinking through Cinema: Film as Philosophy (2006), critically engages Mulhall's notion of film as philosophy, Herzogenrath's volume begins with and seems to presuppose film's philosophical power. Each essay explores some aspect of this claim, either by reading individual films or by introducing the works of the major figures who have theorized the unparalleled philosophical capacity of the seventh art.

Though Herzogerath's introduction to the volume is inspired by Deleuze, this hypothesis of film as philosophy, as distinct from the traditional philosophy of film approach, belongs both to analytic and to continental circles. Readers familiar with recent continental philosophy will recognize the elimination of the preposition "of" as the defining feature of Alain Badiou's project of inaesthetics (treated by Alex Ling in his chapter on Badiou), which explicitly rejects being understood as yet another philosophy of art, and seeks instead to unravel the truths set to work in diverse aesthetic practices. Readers immersed in cognitivist and analytic debates in the philosophy of film will recognize the title's explicit reference to the aforementioned debates of the early 2000s in large part sparked by Mulhall's book as well as Paisley Livingston's essay "Theses on Cinema as Philosophy." And yet this shift in film theory is, in some sense, an attempt to eliminate the need for film theory as such, or at least any film theory or philosophy that establishes a hierarchal relationship between the two disciplines. Indeed, it is a question of pluralizing philosophy, of bringing film and philosophy together

into a productive dialogue without assigning the role of a dominant and all-encompassing referee to one of these disciplines. Rather, it is about relating the diverse entry points. … toward each other in a fertile manner in order to establish, ultimately, a media philosophy that puts the status, the role, and the function of the medium—here, film—into a new perspective: no longer are the representational techniques of the medium at the center of inquiry but rather its ability to 'think' and to assume an active role in the process of thought.

(xii-xiv)

Film as Philosophy can also be seen as a kind of primer on fifteen important contemporary film theorists. However, the book's organization tends to be a bit confusing as it both features essays by scholars about leading theorists like Rancière, Badiou, Deleuze, and Cavell, as well as texts that are seemingly "primary sources" written by film-philosophers such as Carroll and...