Cinematic Thinking: Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Each essay in Cinematic Thinking is organized around an interpretation of a postwar filmmaker and the philosophical issues his or her work raises. The filmmakers covered are Alfred Hitchcock, Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Altman, Carlos Saura, Glauber Rocha, Margarethe von Trotta, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, and Claire Denis. As the authors collected here are philosophers, rather than film critics, the volume approaches its subjects with a different set of interests and commitments from the bulk of works in film theory. Memory, judgment, subjectivity, terrorism, feminism, desire, race relations, experience, the work of mourning, and utopia are among the questions discussed in relation to some of the most significant films of the last fifty years. This collection analyzes the theoretical and political contexts in which the films were made and examines their reception down to the present day.

Author: James Phillips
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 04/16/2008
Pages: 204
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.64lbs
Size: 8.86h x 6.10w x 0.45d
ISBN: 9780804758017

Review Citation(s):
Reference and Research Bk News 08/01/2008 pg. 297

About the Author
James Phillips is an Australian Research Council Fellow in the School of Philosophy and History at the University of New South Wales. He is the author of Heidegger's Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry (Stanford, 2005) and The Equivocation of Reason: Kleist Reading Kant (Stanford, 2007).