The Palgrave Handbook Of The Philosophy Of Film And Motion Pictures PDF

The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures Edited by Noël Carroll Laura T. Di Summa Shawn Loht Foreword by Errol Morris The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures  Noël Carroll Laura T. Di Summa Shawn Loht Editors...

The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures Edited by Noël Carroll Laura T. Di Summa Shawn Loht Foreword by Errol Morris The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures  Noël Carroll Laura T. Di Summa Shawn Loht Editors The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures Editors Noël Carroll Laura T. Di Summa The Graduate Center William Paterson University City University of New York Wayne, NJ, USA New York, NY, USA Shawn Loht Baton Rouge Community College Baton Rouge, LA, USA ISBN 978-3-030-19600-4    ISBN 978-3-030-19601-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. 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Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: TEK IMAGE / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland  Foreword There really is no disentangling philosophy and film. Film is part of philosophy; philosophy is part of film. Most major philosophical issues are expressed in film in one way or another because film, properly conceived, is a way of thinking about the world. It’s about the relationship between our perception of the world and the world itself. It’s riddled with fundamental issues of epistemol- ogy, philosophy of language, philosophy of perception, philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, and on, and on. Let me give an example, which I use in my recent book The Ashtray: one of my favorite John Ford movies, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). Looked at from one perspective, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is an extended essay on reference, meaning and the coherence versus the correspon- dence theories of truth. Following Horace Greeley’s injunction to “Go West, young man,” Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) takes his law school diploma and hangs out his shin- gle in Shinbone, a lawless frontier town in a life-or-death struggle with Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), gunslinger and goon of the cattle barons. In the final shoot-out, Stoddard seems to kill Valance. But when his conscience revolts against his newfound notoriety, Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) recalls for him—and we, the audience, see—that it was really Doniphon who shot Liberty Valance from the shadows across the street. We, the viewers, and a few people in the world of the film—admittedly a fictional world but a world that we can easily imagine—believe that Tom Doniphon shot Liberty Valance. But everyone else believes that Ransom Stoddard shot Liberty Valance. We know that one view is true and one view is false. That is, one view is true and one view is false in the world of the film. And, make no mistake, films endlessly conjure with fictive worlds which are meant to be seen as real worlds in the sense that we are asked to think about what people believe in them and how they act on their beliefs. It’s at the very end of the film where these issues come directly into play. Ransom Stoddard and his wife Hallie (Vera Miles) are returning to Washington v vi FOREWORD from Shinbone on the train; the conductor explains to both of them that he will do all in his power to ensure that they make all their connections and arrive in Washington on time. He adds as a rejoinder, “Nothing is too good for the man who shot Liberty Valance.” He says this while looking at James Stewart (Ransom Stoddard). Who is the conductor referring to? Is he referring to Ransom Stoddard or is he referring to Tom Doniphon? The conductor in the world of the film clearly thinks that he’s referring to Ransom Stoddard. But is he? On the one hand, his description uniquely identifies Doniphon; on the other, his intention is to pick out Stoddard. This has become a sticky wicket in the world of language philosophy—end- less debates between people who feel that proper names are sticky labels and people who think that proper names are disguised definite descriptions (and, to be honest, a whole lot of complicated examples in between). But the point is that it’s just this kind of ambiguity in language that gives John Ford’s epic an additional oom-pah-pah. Because we’re thrown back on the ambiguities, the ironies, the uncertainties of the film. And in considering them, they multiply before our eyes. Is Tom Doniphon good or bad? He’s good because he allowed Ransom Stoddard to go on and serve his country and attain statehood for his unnamed western state. He’s bad because he committed a cold-blooded mur- der. A murder no matter how you look at it—possibly justifiable homicide, not according to the law, but by some higher moral principle if there is one. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance also has much to teach us about ideas of truth and heroism. After all, what can be more heroic than giving up everything for the woman you love and losing that woman in the process, as does Doniphon? What does such a movie have to do with philosophy? There’s a simple answer to that: EVERYTHING. It’s like one of those pictures you’re given and asked, how many animals can you identify in this image? How many philo- sophical issues can you identify in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance? My guess is hundreds. Instead of trying to expound them, I would like to offer another example: Carol Reed’s The Fallen Idol (1948). Consider how our picture of the world is changed by adding and subtracting information. In The Fallen Idol, the young protagonist Phillipe (Bobby Henrey) has one version of reality, the police have another. And a man’s life hangs in the balance. Movies are particularly good at this—at providing versions that call atten- tion to what is real and what is imagined. In that sense, they are ultimately epistemic. (I could be, perhaps, charged with indulging in that same kind of device in The Thin Blue Line.) The Fallen Idol is an especially nuanced film in this respect. The different perspectives it presents challenge an audience to confront both the mystery of what happened and its role as investigator and interpreter of that mystery. Near the middle of the film, Phillipe, a diplomat’s son in the care of his embassy’s staff, finds himself in the middle of a domestic crisis. He is roused by a quarrel between his father’s butler, Baines (Ralph Richardson), and Mrs. Baines (Sonia Dresdel). Philippe spies the couple arguing at the top of the  FOREWORD vii embassy’s grand staircase. He runs out to the fire escape and down a level to get a better view as the fight intensifies and gets physical. Just when it looks like Baines is about to throw his wife down the stairs, Phillipe goes down another level, anticipating her fall. He can’t see that the fight de-escalates as he does. Baines calmly walks off while his wife, who is trying to confront Baines’s mis- tress, runs to a nearby window and begins to pound on it. The bottom of the window tilts inward from the force of her blows at the top, knocking Mrs. Baines off her feet and down the stairs. It is at this point that Philippe arrives on the next level of the fire escape and has his expectations confirmed when he sees Mrs. Baines’s body tumbling down the last few stairs. As the camera follows Phillipe down the fire escape, we can peer into the building through windows spaced widely apart. We see that Phillipe does not have an unobstructed view of what is going on inside the building. We know, then, that we cannot trust his version of events. But can we trust our own? Phillipe’s perspective is an almost perfect metaphor for film itself. For the now old-fashioned idea of the persistence of vision. A strip of 35-mm film has 16 images every foot and is projected at a film speed of 24 images a second—24 images separated by strips of black. How neatly this matches Phillipe’s warped perception as he runs down the fire escape: the dark, blank wall of the embassy exterior and the images that he sees through the windows. Ultimately, there is no separating philosophy from film or film from philoso- phy. They’re interwoven with each other. I could name a few more themes, but it’s clearly a partial, incomplete list. Images and reality. The motivation of char- acters that are partially real and partially make-believe. Documentary (of all stripes and descriptions) and drama. Epistemology, ontology, and everything else you could imagine. The question isn’t whether there is philosophy in film. The question should be: how could it be otherwise? FilmmakerErrol Morris New York, NY, USA  Contents Part I The Medium in Film and Motion Pictures   1 1 Film Ontology: Extension, Criteria and Candidates  3 Frank Boardman 2 Medium Specificity 29 Noël Carroll 3 The Moving Image 49 Nick Wiltsher and Aaron Meskin 4 The Art of Cinematography 71 Patrick Keating Part II The Structure of Film and Motion Pictures  95 5 Silly Questions and Arguments for the Implicit, Cinematic Narrator 97 Angela Curran 6 Narrative and the Moving Image119 Patrick Keating 7 On Rhythm in Film Editing143 Karen Pearlman 8 Animation165 David Davies ix x Contents 9 Sound in Film189 Paloma Atencia-Linares 10 What Is a Screenplay?215 Ted Nannicelli Part III Approaches and Schools 235 11 Analytic Philosophy of Film: (Contrasted with Continental Film Theory)237 Richard Eldridge 12 When the Twain Shall Meet: On the Divide Between Analytic and Continental Film Philosophy259 John Ó Maoilearca 13 The Phenomenological Movement in Context of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures285 Shawn Loht 14 Ideology and Experience: The Legacy of Critical Theory315 Espen Hammer 15 Stanley Cavell: What Becomes of People on Film?335 Paul Guyer 16 Film Art from the Analytic Perspective357 Deborah Knight 17 Cognitive Theory of the Moving Image381 Carl Plantinga 18 Aesthetic Criticism409 Andrew Klevan 19 Poststructuralism and Film441 Robert Sinnerbrink  Contents  xi Part IV Philosophy Through Film 467 20 Thoughtful Films, Thoughtful Fictions: The Philosophical Terrain Between Illustrations and Thought Experiments469 E. M. Dadlez 21 Contemporary Philosophical Filmmaking491 Thomas E. Wartenberg 22 Filmosophy/Film as Philosophy513 Robert Sinnerbrink Part V Auteur Theory, the Avant-Garde and New Filmmakers 541 23 The Auteur Theory in the Age of the Mini-Series543 Douglas Lackey 24 The Question of Poetic Cinema551 Tom Gunning 25 Avant-Garde Films as Philosophy573 Malcolm Turvey Part VI Documentary 601 26 Show and Tell: The Identification of Documentary Film603 Vitor Moura 27 The Autobiographical Documentary627 Laura T. Di Summa Part VII Movies and Society 651 28 Feminist Philosophy of Film653 Zoë Cunliffe xii Contents 29 Race in Film677 Lewis R. Gordon 30 How Do We Look So Far? Notes Toward a Queer-Film Philosophy699 David A. Gerstner 31 Film, Art, and Pornography721 Jacob M. Held 32 Propaganda and the Moving Image757 Sheryl Tuttle Ross Part VIII Movies and the Arts 781 33 Film and Fine Art: Automatism, Automata and “The Myth of Total Cinema” in The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann783 Kristin Boyce 34 The Sonic Art of Film and the Sonic Arts in Film801 John Dyck 35 Adaptation, Translation, and Philosophical Investigation in Adaptation823 Garry L. Hagberg Part IX Emotions and Psychology 843 36 Imagination and Film845 Jonathan Gilmore 37 Empathy and Sympathy: Two Contemporary Models of Character Engagement865 Daniel Jerónimo Tobón 38 Affect and Motion Pictures893 Jesse Prinz 39 Psychoanalysis and the Philosophy of Film923 Nickolas Pappas  Contents  xiii Part X Alternative Media 947 40 The Television Medium949 Ted Nannicelli 41 Videogames and Film971 Jon Robson and Aaron Meskin 42 Virtual Reality as an Emerging Art Medium and Its Immersive Affordances995 Gal Raz Index1015  Notes on Contributors Paloma Atencia-Linares is a research associate at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She did her PhD in Philosophy at University College London (UCL), was a lecturer at the University of Kent, UK, for two years and worked for six years as a sound designer for TV and films. Frank Boardman is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Worcester State University. He has worked predominantly in the philosophy of art, with excur- sions into logic, ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. In the philosophy of film, he has so far been primarily concerned with film ontology, the rhetorical and cognitive values of film, and the nature and criticism of concert films. Kristin Boyce is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and a faculty fellow at the Shackouls Honors College, Mississippi State University. She received a doctor- ate in Philosophy from the University of Chicago in 2010. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) New Faculty Fellowship, a post-­doctoral fellowship from Stanford University, and a Josephine De Karmán Dissertation Fellowship. Her primary research interests are in philosophy of art, history of early analytic philosophy, and Wittgenstein. Noël Carroll is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has written over 15 books, including, most recently, Humour: A Very Short Introduction. He has also been a jour- nalist and has written five documentaries. Zoë Cunliffe is a PhD student at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. Her philosophical interests include aesthetics, social and political phi- losophy, and social epistemology. Most recently she delivered a paper, “Narrative Fiction and Epistemic Injustice,” at a meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics. When not doing philosophy, she is usually eating Asian food, binge-watching films and television, or exploring the city. xv xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Angela Curran is a visiting assistant professor at Kansas State University. She works on topics in ancient Greek philosophy, aesthetics, and philosophy of film, and is author of The Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Aristotle and the Poetics (2015). E. M. Dadlez has a PhD in Philosophy from Syracuse University and is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Central Oklahoma. Her work is mainly on the philosophy of art and literature, and on topics at the intersection (sometimes, more accurately, the collision) of aesthetics, ethics, and epis- temology. She is author of various articles on aesthetics and feminist eth- ics, as well as of What’s Hecuba to Him? Fictional Events and Actual Emotions and Mirrors to One Another: Emotion and Value in Jane Austen and David Hume. She is editor of Jane Austen’s Emma: Philosophical Perspectives. David Davies is Professor of Philosophy at McGill University. He is author of Art as Performance (2004), Aesthetics and Literature (2007), and Philosophy of the Performing Arts (2011). He is also editor of The Thin Red Line (2008) and co-editor of Blade Runner (2015), both in the Routledge series Philosophers on Film. He has published widely on philosophical issues in the metaphysics and epistemology of art; issues relating more specifically to film, photography, per- formance, music, literature, visual art, and dance; and issues in general meta- physics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language. Laura T. Di Summa is an assistant professor at William Paterson University. She received her PhD from the City University of New York’s Graduate Center in 2014, where she worked with Prof. Noël Carroll. She has written and pre- sented papers on autobiography and its developments, philosophy of motion pictures, everyday aesthetics, and issues related to the cognitive analysis of visual arts. She has been the Managing Editor of The Philosophical Forum since 2010. John Dyck is a PhD candidate at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, finishing his dissertation on aesthetic value. He also writes on philoso- phy of music. Richard Eldridge is Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor of Philosophy at Swarthmore College. He has held visiting appointments in Bremen, Erfurt, and Freiburg (Germany); Essex (UK); Sydney (Australia); and Stanford and Brooklyn (US). He has written widely on aesthetics, the philosophies of literature and film, German Idealism and Romanticism, and the philosophy of language, including, most recently, Images of History: Kant, Benjamin, Freedom and the Human Subject (2016) and Werner Herzog: Filmmaker and Philosopher (2019). David A. Gerstner is Professor of Cinema Studies in the Department of Media Culture at the City University of New York’s (CUNY) College of Staten Island. He also serves as a member of the doctoral faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center. His books include: Christophe Honoré: A Critical Introduction  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xvii (with Julien Nahmias, 2015), Queer Pollen: White Seduction, Black Male Homosexuality, and the Cinematic (2011, Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2012), Manly Arts: Masculinity and Nation in Early American Cinema (2006), and The Routledge International Encyclopedia of Queer Culture (editor, 2006— New York Public Library “Best of Reference,” 2007). His co-edited works include Media Authorship (with Cynthia Chris) and Authorship and Film (with Janet Staiger). He is editor of the book series Queer Screens. Jonathan Gilmore is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York, the Graduate Center and Baruch College. He is author of Apt Imaginings: Feelings for Fictions and Other Creatures of the Mind. Lewis R. Gordon is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut (UCONN)-Storrs, Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies, and Honorary Professor in the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University in South Africa. His books are Fear of Black Consciousness and his collection of essays 论哲学、去殖民化与种族 (“On Philosophy, Decolonization, and Race”), trans. Li Beilei. Tom Gunning is Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media at the University of Chicago, and author of D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film, The Films of Fritz Lang; Allegories of Vision and Modernity, and over 150 articles. Paul Guyer is Jonathan Nelson Professor of Humanities and Philosophy at Brown University and Florence R.C. Murray Professor in the Humanities emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his AB and PhD from Harvard under the supervision of Stanley Cavell. He is author of ten books on Kant, including Kant’s aesthetics, and of A History of Modern Aesthetics in three volumes (2014). He was General Co-Editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, and in that series was co-­editor and co-translator of the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of the Power of Judgment and editor and co-translator of Kant’s Notes and Fragments. With Ted Cohen and Hilary Putnam, he edited Pursuits of Reason, a volume of essays on the work of Stanley Cavell (1993). He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Garry L. Hagberg is James H. Ottaway Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at Bard College, and has also held a Chair in the School of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. Author of numerous papers at the intersection of aesthetics and the philosophy of language, his books include Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge and Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory; his most recent book is Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness. He is editor of Art and Ethical Criticism and Fictional Characters, Real Problems: The Search for Ethical Content in Literature as well as of his most recent edited volume, Wittgenstein on Aesthetic Understanding. Co-editor of xviii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature and editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature, Hagberg is presently writing a new book on the contribution literary experience makes to the formation of self and sensi- bility, Living in Words: Literature, Autobiographical Language, and the Composition of Selfhood, and editing a volume Stanley Cavell on Aesthetic Understanding. Espen Hammer is Professor of Philosophy at Temple University. He is author of, among other books, Stanley Cavell: Skepticism, Subjectivity, and the Ordinary (2002), Adorno and the Political (2005), Philosophy and Temporality from Kant to Critical Theory (2013), and Adorno’s Modernism: Art, Experience, and Catastrophe (2015). He is editor of German Idealism: Contemporary Perspectives (2007), Theodor W. Adorno II: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers (2015), and Kafka’s The Trial: Philosophical Perspectives (2018). He is also a co-editor with Peter E. Gordon and Max Pensky of The Blackwell Companion to Adorno (forthcoming) and a co-editor with Axel Honneth and Peter E. Gordon of The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School (2018). Jacob M. Held is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the University of Central Arkansas (UCA) Core (General Education) at the UCA in Conway, Arkansas. His philosophical work focuses on political and legal theory, pornography, and popular culture and philosophy. His most recent works include The Philosophy of Sex (7th edition), edited with Raja Halwani, Alan Soble, and Sarah Hoffman (2017), Stephen King and Philosophy (2016) and Wonder Woman and Philosophy (2017). Dr. Held focuses primarily on scholarly work that is accessible to and engages a broad audience. Outside of the academy his work has been featured in venues such as The Huffington Post, The Guardian, and PhilosophyTalk. Patrick Keating is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Trinity University, where he teaches courses in film studies and video pro- duction. He is author of Hollywood Lighting from the Silent Era to Film Noir (2010) and editor of Cinematography (2014). His most recent book is The Dynamic Frame: Camera Movement in Classical Hollywood (forthcoming in 2019), for which he was named an Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Andrew Klevan is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the Oxford University. He is author of Aesthetic Evaluation and Film (2018), Barbara Stanwyck (2013), Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation (2005), and Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film (2000). He is also co-editor of The Language and Style of Film Criticism (2011). Deborah Knight teaches philosophy at Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada. Her early academic career in film studies was cut short because she supported analytic film theory in the days of dogmatic poststructuralism. She  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xix has written on filmmakers including Hitchcock, Eastwood, and Nolan and on film genres including the Western, science fiction, detective fiction, and horror. She has written about the structure of film narratives, emotional engagement with fictional characters, sentimentality, and ethical criticism. Forthcoming work will allow her to revisit Blade Runner as well as her skepticism about the claim that certain feature-length fiction films are philosophical thought experiments. Douglas Lackey is Professor of Philosophy at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, where he has taught courses on film theory and the history of film. He is interested in connections between perception theory and film, and action theory and dance aesthetics. Shawn Loht has written on phenomenology, the philosophy of film, and ancient Greek philosophy. His recent publications include the monograph Phenomenology of Film: A Heideggerian Account of the Film Experience (2017). He has taught in the philosophy departments at Tulane University, Mercer University, and Pennsylvania State University. Aaron Meskin is Professor of Philosophical Aesthetics at the University of Georgia. He works on a variety of issues in aesthetics, the philosophy of food, and philosophical psychology. He has authored numerous journal articles and chapters and co-edited five books, including The Routledge Companion to Comics (2016), Aesthetics and the Science of Mind (2014), and The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach (2012). Vitor Moura is an assistant professor at the Universidade do Minho, Portugal, where he presently teaches a number of courses, ranging from logic to aesthetics of architecture. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-­Madison in 2006. His research projects address the issue of intentionalism in aesthetic interpretation, and perception and aesthetic experience. He is also a member of the Executive Committee of the European Society for Aesthetics. Ted Nannicelli teaches at the School of Communication and Arts, The University of Queensland. He is author of A Philosophy of the Screenplay (2013), Appreciating the Art of Television (2017), and Artistic Creation and Ethical Criticism (forthcoming). John Ó Maoilearca is Professor of Film at Kingston School of Art, Kingston University, London. He has also taught philosophy and film theory at the University of Sunderland, England, and the University of Dundee, Scotland. He has published ten books, including (as author) Bergson and Philosophy (2000), Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline (2006), Philosophy and the Moving Image: Refractions of Reality (2010), and (as editor) Bergson and the Art of Immanence (2013) and The Bloomsbury Companion to Continental Philosophy (2013). His last book was All Thoughts Are Equal: Laruelle and Nonhuman Philosophy (2015). xx NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Nickolas Pappas is Executive Officer and Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. He is author of several books, including the Guidebook to Plato’s Republic (now in its third edition) and most recently The Philosopher’s New Clothes: The Theaetetus, the Academy, and Philosophy’s Turn against Fashion. His numerous shorter pieces cover topics in ancient philosophy and aesthetics. Karen Pearlman is a senior lecturer at Macquarie University (Sydney) and author of Cutting Rhythms, Intuitive Film Editing (2016). Her creative prac- tice research film Woman with an Editing Bench (2016) won the Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM) Award for Best Short Fiction and the Australian Screen Editors Guild (ASE) Award for Best Editing in a Short Film along with six other film festival prizes. Other publications from Karen’s ongoing research into editing, cognition and feminist film histo- ries include “Editing and Cognition Beyond Continuity” in Projections, The Journal of Movies and Mind (2017), “Documentary Editing and Distributed Cognition” in A Cognitive Approach to Documentary (Palgrave Macmillan 2018), co-editing a special issue of the journal Apparatus titled “Women at the Editing Table: Revising Soviet Film History of the 1920s and 30s” (2018), and the essay film After the Facts (2018), which has screened at many international film festivals, won “Best Editing” in Open Content at the ASE awards 2018, and has been accepted for publication in [in]Transition in 2019. Carl Plantinga is Professor of Film and Media at Calvin College and former president of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image. He is author of Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement (2018), Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience (2009), and Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film (1997). Plantinga also co-edited The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (with Paisley Livingston) and Passionate Views: Film, Cognition and Emotion (with Greg M. Smith). Jesse Prinz is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and was Einstein Visiting Fellow at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain. Prinz is interested in how the mind works and how philosophical accounts of the mental can be informed by findings from psychology, the neurosciences, anthropology, and related fields. His research interests include emotion, consciousness, cultural cog- nition, concepts, perception, moral psychology, and aesthetics. Much of his work is a continuation of the classical empiricist tradition, which emphasizes the role of perceptual experience and socialization in ground- ing our cognitive capacities. Prinz is author of over 100 articles, and sev- eral books, including: Furnishing the Mind, Gut Reactions, The Emotional Construction of Morals, The Conscious Brain, and Beyond Human Nature. Two other books, Works of Wonder and The Moral Self, are forthcoming, and a book on social construction is in progress.  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xxi Gal Raz is a visiting lecturer at the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television and the Sagol School of Neuroscience, and a researcher at the Sagol Institute for Brain Functions, Tel-Aviv Sourasky Medical Center. His fields of research include brain network dynamics, neuroscience of empathy, cine- matic empathy, neuoroaesthetics of motion pictures, audiovisual brain computer interfaces, and virtual and augmented reality. Jon Robson is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham. He has written extensively in a range of areas within aesthetics (especially on the epistemology of aesthetic judgments). Outside of aesthetics, he works in a range of other philosophical sub-disciplines, including epistemology, ethics, metaphys- ics, and the philosophy of religion. He is co-editor of Aesthetics and the Sciences of Mind (2014) and The Aesthetics of Videogames (2018) as well as co-author of A Critical Introduction to the Metaphysics of Time (2016). Sheryl Tuttle Ross is Full Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. She researches at the intersection of art, politics and morality. She has written extensively about propaganda, developing the Epistemic Merit Model and its application to a variety of artworks, media and social circumstances. She is currently expanding her research focus to include political humor and aesthetic akrasia. Robert Sinnerbrink is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Macquarie University, Australia. He is author of Understanding Hegelianism (2007), New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images (2011), Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience through Film (2016), and Terrence Malick: Filmmaker and Philosopher (2019). He is also on the editorial boards of the journals Film and Philosophy, Film-Philosophy, and Projections: The Journal of Movies and Mind. Daniel Jerónimo Tobón teaches at the Universidad de Antioquia, Colombia, and is a doctoral candidate at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. He has written on aesthetics, contemporary Colombian art and film, art and memory, and emotions. Malcolm Turvey is Sol Gittleman Professor in the Department of Art and Art History and Director of the Film and Media Studies Program at Tufts University. He is also an editor of the journal October. He is author of Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition (2008) and The Filming of Modern Life: European Avant-Garde Film of the 1920s (2011), and co-editor of Wittgenstein, Theory, and the Arts (2001). His Play Time: Jacques Tati and Comedic Modernism will be published by Columbia University Press in 2019. Thomas E. Wartenberg is a senior research fellow in Philosophy at Mount Holyoke College. His main areas of focus are aesthetics, the philosophy of film, and philosophy for children. Among his publications are Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy, Unlikely Couples: Movie Romance as Social Criticism, Existentialism: A Beginner’s Guide, and Mel Bochner: Illustrating Philosophy. xxii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS He has edited or co-edited four volumes on philosophy and film, most recently Fight Club (Philosophers on Film). He is Film Editor for Philosophy Now. Nick Wiltsher is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellow at the University of Antwerp’s Centre for Philosophical Psychology. He has previously been employed at Auburn University (AL, US), the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Porto Alegre, Brazil), and the University of Leeds (UK). He works on imagination in the philosophy of mind and on a number of topics in aesthetics.  List of Tables Table 7.1 Table form distillation of the three questions being asked and the ideas being proposed in response to each 148 Table 7.2 Table form distillation of the three operations, or tools, editors deploy and each of their three suboperations 157 xxiii  Introduction At present, we are in the midst of a heyday in the philosophy of film, or, more accurately, the philosophy of the moving image or motion picture, whose prac- tice comprises not only film, but television, video, video games, digital imag- ing, virtual reality, and technologies yet to come and which are delivered by a comparable array of platforms. Never before have so many philosophers, from such a wide variety of theoretical traditions, taken this measure of professional interest in the movies. These interests, moreover, range across the philosophi- cal division of labor, raising metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political, and, of course, aesthetical questions with respect to cinema. In this anthology, we have attempted to provide a wide sampling of the many issues from a diverse range of schools that are philosophically interrogating the moving image today. Philosophers such as Hugo Munsterberg and György Lukacs took an early interest in film, commenting upon it even before 1920. Moreover, writers who were often classified as film theorists—such as Béla Balász, Rudolf Arnheim, André Bazin, and V.F. Perkins—were, even when not card-carrying philoso- phers, nevertheless philosophically informed, and they pursued the philosophi- cal investigation of film in the process of enfranchising film as an art form and establishing what they identified as its constitutive norms. In the English-speaking world, from the standpoint of professional philoso- phy, the publication in 1971 of Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film was a seminal event. Here was a book-length treatise on film by a member of Harvard University’s philosophy department, arguably one of the most distinguished philosophy departments in the Anglo-American world, whose faculty at the time included many giants of twentieth-century philosophy (such as W.V.O. Quine and John Rawls). Cavell’s work provided both inspiration and legitimatization to younger philosophers who grew up movie-mad and aspired to unite their love of film with their love of philosophy. All the authors in this volume belong to the generations who, if they have not followed Cavell’s lead, have benefitted from the opportunity he made possible, if only institutionally. They have gone where philosophers have never gone xxv xxvi Introduction before and recorded in depth the sophistication of the contemporary philo- sophical conversation focused on the moving image. Perhaps needless to say, this anthology has not covered every imaginable subject in the expanding area of the philosophy of cinema, a moving target, if there ever was one. But we, the editors, have attempted to canvas topics at greater length than previous volumes in this genre, and we have encouraged our authors to attempt original philosophizing in their contributions. In this regard, we hope that this volume will not only track past and recent achieve- ments in the philosophy of the moving image but also pave the way for the future. Noël Carroll  PART I The Medium in Film and Motion Pictures  CHAPTER 1 Film Ontology: Extension, Criteria and Candidates Frank Boardman Our concern in this chapter is with a set of issues central to the ontology of film. “Ontology” traditionally refers to the branch of philosophy that deals with questions about the being and nature of things. We can safely assume that films exist or even less controversially that there are some films. So, our first question in the ontology of film need not be “are there films?” but rather “what is film?” An even clearer statement of our primary question may be “what sort of thing is film?” Armed with an answer to that question, we could wade more confidently into secondary issues regarding films’ constitutive parts or the conditions under which they persist through time. But alas, while we have no shortage of available theo- ries about the nature of film, there is nothing like consensus around any one of them. This has not been an entirely unfavorable condition, however. A good number of critical insights and useful observations about film have emerged out of philosophers’ debates, arguments and disagreements over film ontology. Another sort of disagreement, though, has been less beneficial. These are disagreements over the question itself, which largely emerge from two sources. First, we don’t enjoy antecedent agreement on the class of things that are films (the extension of “film”). And we can’t expect to agree on what makes things films if we don’t first agree on which things are films. Second, we don’t yet agree on what we’re asking. That is to say, we don’t agree on criteria for an adequate answer. So, instead of offering or defending a particular theory of film ontology in this chapter, I’d like to discuss the proper extension of “film” and propose a set F. Boardman (*) Worcester State University, Worcester, MA, USA © The Author(s) 2019 3 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_1 4 F. BOARDMAN of criteria for selecting an ontological theory of it. I’ll then consider some ­current and likely candidate theories using those criteria. By way of conclusion, I’ll offer some suggestions for ways the discussion might move forward. Determining the Extension of “Film” We should notice right away that there is no natural or privileged use of “film” or set of films independent of some particular theoretical or conversational interest. A frustrated aficionado of celluloid and acetate film might be inter- ested in the nature of the set of objects that ranges from Louis Le Prince’s experiments to those few hold-out 35-mm theaters scattered around the world. But most of us do not think that the history of film ended with the swift tri- umph of digital projection in this decade. The films that dominate the cultural landscape are still being made, distributed, seen, discussed and written about, even if there is no longer any film involved. The “film” in this sense relies on Le Prince’s and Edison’s technologies, but doesn’t emerge until others use that technology to say and tell. And it is not entirely clear when that activity starts. Are the Lumiere brothers’ early pro- jected films the start of this history or does it wait on the first narrative film (which may also have been theirs)? We can’t just be interested in narrative films per se, lest we exclude whole swaths of genuine films more likely to be seen at the gallery than the multiplex. But then again, it is not merely the technology of moving images in which we’re interested. Whatever films are, they don’t include security camera foot- age or Skype conversations. We should think of ourselves as primarily investi- gating an art form. This is not because we should assume from the outset that there is an ontological difference between last night’s security footage and Rear Window, but because only the art film (understanding that term as widely as is reasonably possible) provides us with a special investigative interest.1 The cultural, aesthetic and historical interests we take in Hitchcock’s masterpiece2 motivate questions about its nature. And because we take similar interests in other films, we should not assume that Rear Window is ontologically sui generis. Just as it is the art form status of films that arouses our interest in its ontol- ogy, the ontology of film has figured prominently in the establishment of film as an art. As moving pictures matured from curiosity to art form, the live-­ action narrative film naturally invited comparisons to two close cousins. Focusing on the technology and means of display, the film is kin to photogra- phy. It is in fact photography itself, multiplied, put in motion and coupled (eventually) with sound. Focusing instead on their content, films are in the family of theater and continue the ancient history of drama and comedy. 1 For a slightly different (and stronger) take on the discontinuity between the technical and artistic natures of film, see Jacques Rancière, Film Fables, Emiliano Battista, trans. (Oxford: Berg 2001) 11–12. 2 Yes it is.  1 FILM ONTOLOGY: EXTENSION, CRITERIA AND CANDIDATES 5 This situation presented something of a dilemma for the early advocate of films’ art status. On the one hand, the art status of photography was itself in question. On the other, if films are artworks in the theatrical tradition, then the artwork in question may just be the actions filmed rather than the film itself. Thus, the price for resting the possibility of films’ art status on similarity with another art form is that it makes room for a skeptic to claim that film is no distinct form, but rather a mode of presentation for the form to which it’s compared. This central problem is still with us, even if the art status of (some) photog- raphy is more of a given today. If film can be an art form, it must be a kind of thing that is (a) capable of being art and (b) different in some significant and relevant way from existing art forms. Given their proximity, the pressing chal- lenge for (b) is to distinguish film from photography and theater, though we want to be able to distinguish it from painting, poetry and music as well.3 We have good reason, then, to want an ontology of film as an art form. And, in fact, it is difficult to see what other compelling reason we could have for wanting an ontology of film. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by thinking that the ontology of art is just more interesting than the ontology of security or communication technology. Even so, there does not necessarily need to be an ontological difference between the film and the security footage in order for there to be a difference in their art status, unless there is an ontological difference between art and nonart (but that would be another matter). There is, after all, at least a prima facie distinction to be made between ontological and art-status questions. In the present context, the former ask “what makes this thing a film and not something else?” While the latter ask, “what makes this film a work of art and not something that is not a work of art?” There are two reasons, though, to confine the extension of “film” in ques- tion to filmic works of art and exclude security camera footage, home movies, Skype conversations and the like. The first follows from the kind of interests we just discussed. It is captured in what David Davies calls the ‘pragmatic con- straint’ on the ontology of art: Artworks must be entities that can bear the sorts of properties rightly ascribed to what are termed “works” in our reflective critical and appreciative practice; that are individuated in the way such “works” are or would be individuated, and that have the modal properties that are reasonably ascribed to “works,” in that practice.4 3 I should note that there is no universal agreement on the need to distinguish film from other arts. Alain Badiou, for instance, thinks that “cinema is nothing but editing” and that otherwise it is the “plus-one of the arts” taking from music, stage, literature and even painting without contrib- uting anything essentially artistic of its own. Alain Badiou, Cinema, Susan Spitzer, Trans. (Cambridge: Polity, 2017) 97; 89. 4 David Davies, Art as Performance (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 18. 6 F. BOARDMAN This “methodological principle guiding philosophical inquiry,” Davies notices, is at least implicitly at work in many and otherwise various ontologies of art.5 Sherri Irvin later makes explicit use of the same criterion, (rightfully) preferring to call it the “critical practice constraint.”6 Applying the critical practice constraint to film suggests an ontological dif- ference between (for instance) security camera footage and live-action narrative films. It is inappropriate to criticize security footage for its aesthetic or other- wise formal faults. Regardless of how films are properly individuated, the ques- tion of individuation does not arise for security footage. Footage has duration, not individuality. And the same film could have different endings. If some duration of security footage has a different ending (and “ending” is not even the right word here), it is a different bit of footage. The second reason becomes apparent when we consider the difference between actual security camera footage and security-camera-footage-like shots in a film. Certain shots in The Wire (2002–2008) or The Bourne Identity (2002), for instance, let you know that a character is being filmed by providing the perspective of the security camera filming. The entire movie Look (2007) is shot from such perspectives. But in these instances, the shots themselves estab- lish the existence of a fictional and unseen security camera. Actual security cameras require the existence of an actual unseen security camera. These are not merely ways of seeing the film and the footage. Something is fundamen- tally different about the two. One camera is fictional and the other actual. Surely, the difference between the fictional and the actual is ontological. This is not to say, however, that the ontological difference between security camera footage (and the like) and film as we mean to discover it must track the fiction/non-fiction divide. There are, after all, plenty of non-fiction films, both documentaries (in the traditional sense of “documentary,” we’ll consider another in a little bit) and nonnarrative (what are often and sometimes pejora- tively called “experimental”) films. We could imagine, in fact, actual security footage being repurposed as such a film. But then it would have been trans- formed (or “transfigured” in Arthur Danto’s parlance).7 And that transforma- tion is a transformation in the kind of thing that it is. It will go from a mere recording to something with a point, a meaning. It will go from having only duration to an individual identity. Its modal properties will change. It will become subject to aesthetic evaluation. It will, in short, become a new kind of thing. So, only those moving images8 that might be reasonably thought of as art- works are films in the sense under consideration. But there is still some work to be done to say which artworks are members of that class. The first couple of Davies, Art as Performance, 18–19. 5 Sherri Irvin, “The Ontological Diversity of Visual Artworks” in New Waves in Aesthetics, ed. 6 Kathleen Stock and Katherine Thomson-Jones (London: Macmillan, 2008), 2. 7 Arthur Danto, “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 33 (1974). 8 Or, as we’ll see a little later, potentially moving images.  1 FILM ONTOLOGY: EXTENSION, CRITERIA AND CANDIDATES 7 questions involve the technology of displaying films—even (as we discussed above) when the technology that is standard is changing over time. First, is such technology necessary? For instance, if films involve moving images, then so do flip books, and we might be reluctant to admit flip books into the rele- vant class.9 But perhaps we shouldn’t be too hasty. Bill Brand’s “Masstransiscope” is a series of paintings that appear as an animation to riders of the Q train after they leave Dekalb Avenue on their way to Manhattan from Brooklyn. The moving-image effect is delivered by stationary pictures viewed from a moving train rather than moving pictures viewed from a stationary position. The same visual effect could have been carried out in the normal way, with those particu- lar pictures in motion. In fact, it is theoretically possible to set up giant slides of each frame of The Godfather (1972) separated by black pillars at just the right distance and have a train pass them all at just the right speed while piping in synchronized audio across the loudspeakers. The overall effect would be a viewing of The Godfather by other (albeit rather extraordinary) means. And The Godfather is a film. Then is the technology of film display enough to guarantee a film? Mike Hoolboom’s White Museum consists visually of half an hour of film leader (the empty film used by technicians to mark beginnings and endings) projected on a screen. Most of us would want to count this as a film, even if it is the kind that could only be made as a minimalist comment on the nature of film.10 So, once art status is established or assumed, it seems that uses of certain display technologies are sufficient for a work to be a film. But what about the images that are displayed? Most importantly, is there a useful ontological cat- egory that captures both animation and live-action films? Three considerations speak in favor of there being one, or at least our defaulting to the position that there is one in the absence of evidence to the contrary. First, there are the obvi- ous commonalities. Both involve displayed moving images typically (these days anyway) accompanied by sound. Both typically tell stories, involve acting and have a common lineage as narratives in literature and theater. Second, anima- tions and live actions occupy the same place in the cultural landscape. They are shown in the same theaters, on the same televisions and via the same websites. They’re reviewed and discussed in the same sections of newspapers. Third, if they were distinct categories, there would be a great and ever-greater number of bothersome borderline and otherwise unclear cases. There are the mixtures like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) and The Phantom Menace (1999), entirely Rotoscoped films like A Scanner Darkly (2006), and the action block- busters that leave virtually no shot untouched by visual effects. Admittedly, none of these considerations are quite definitive. It may be that the right 9 Noël Carroll, for instance, thinks these are outside the relevant class. See “Defining the Moving Image,” in Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, ed. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006) Especially 131. 10 For more on such cases and an account that puts the sufficiency of cinematic display technol- ogy front and center, see Trevor Ponech, “The Substance of Cinema,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (2006). 8 F. BOARDMAN ­ ntological account separates animation from live action. But such an account o has the dual burdens of a proof that we tend to be in error and a diagnosis for that error. Finally, while we’re on the topic of borderline cases, there may be a question about the status of mixed-media works that involve film. Carl Hancock Rux’s Mycenaean involves live acting on a stage accompanied by projected moving images. And the band Neurosis used to accompany their performances with original video projected around them. But these sorts of works shouldn’t over-­ worry us. These hybrid works are plausibly combinations of various art forms.11 It seems unlikely that they would need any special ontological account. They are, as we should expect, works whose parts belong to various categories, what- ever those categories turn out to be. Criteria for an Ontology of Film Having sketched an outline for the extension of the operative sense of “film,” we’re in a better position to provide some criteria for a good theory of film ontology. If the goal of such a theory is to answer the question “What is film?” or “What makes this thing I’m watching a film and not something else?”, then the primary condition on a successful theory is that it provides necessary condi- tions for membership in that extension that together come as close as possible to being sufficient. That is to say, we’re after a set of conditions, each one of which must be present in something if that thing is to be a film, and (if possi- ble) all of those conditions being present in something guarantees that that thing is a film. It may be that no set of conditions will be sufficient because films may share an ontology with non-films. But we should not assume this at the outset. And even if sufficiency is impossible or undesirable, we should still aim at coming as close as we can to it in order to say something interesting about the nature of film. So, we’re after properties common to everything in the class described above that help us distinguish those things from nonmembers. As should be clear from our earlier conversation, we at least want to be able to distinguish film from other art forms, especially photographs, paintings and theater. Much of the usual criteria for theory selection apply to ontologies of film in a number of interrelated ways. Such theories ought to be consistent, at least in the absence of evidence of some dastardly paradox waiting at the heart of film. They ought to be plausible as well. That is to say, we ought—ceteris paribus— to adopt the ontology that forces us to amend fewer of our present beliefs. Similarly, the best ontological theory will, again ceteris paribus, be simpler. We ought to prefer the theory that forces us to take on fewer new beliefs. Especially important in this context is that we should take on as few new ontological entity types as we reasonably can. The best theory will also produce more 11 My use of “hybrid” here is akin to Jerrold Levinson’s in “Hybrid Art Forms,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 18 (1984).  1 FILM ONTOLOGY: EXTENSION, CRITERIA AND CANDIDATES 9 ­ tility. There is more that we can do with the most preferable theory, be it u opening new lines of research, informing our appreciation of films or otherwise guiding our actions. Finally, explanatory power is as important a criterion for adjudicating between ontological theories of film as it is in other contexts. So what ought to count as data for such a theory? For starters, an ontological theory ought to shed some light on our common experience of film and our everyday discourse about films. The latter will include a wide range of practices, from the writings of professional critics to watercooler talk about recent summer blockbusters. It’s this kind of consideration that motivates the “critical practice constraint” we discussed earlier. There may, however, be something wrong with our common experience of or discourse about film, and we should be open to the possibility that the best ontology of film can show us this. But again, this places a heavy burden of proof and diagnosis on the theory that would attempt to do so. In the absence of both of these, our default demand ought to be that a theory help us explain rather than explain away our typical experiences and practices. Of special interest regarding explanatory power are two puzzles that Danto introduces in “Moving Pictures,” both of which point to crucial and funda- mental issues.12 The first, in very Danto-nian style, involves indiscernible coun- terparts: the photographic slide and the unmoving film image, projected side by side onto a screen or wall. The two are exactly the same to all appearances, and yet there is an important difference between them. Because that difference is a difference in kind or, to be a bit more dramatic, mode of being, it is incum- bent on an ontology of film to explain the difference. One way of looking at this problem is that it raises the stakes on a prior condition on an ontology of film: that it should appropriately distinguish film and photography. The second puzzle that Danto considers has—I think unfortunately— received less attention, at least as an issue in film ontology. This is the distinc- tion between what Danto calls a “screenplay” and a “documentary” film. Here, “screenplay” does not mean the textual plan for or documentation of a film, nor is “documentary” the genre designation with which we’re most familiar. Rather, they refer to two ways of viewing a film, which correspond to two ways of viewing given filmed objects. When we watch that famous scene in The Godfather, what we see is the result of the work of a camera trained on Al Pacino walking into a staged restaurant-like setting with a prop gun. When we see Al Pacino acting with a prop in his hand, we view them as motifs and The Godfather as documentary. We are literally seeing what the camera documents. Alternatively, we can see the same thing before us as Michael Corleone walking into a restaurant dining room with a gun in his hand. That is to view Pacino and the prop as models and The Godfather as screenplay. We do not yet have an ontological distinction (much less a problem) but rather two ways of seeing. The ontological issue arises when we notice that some films can only—at least 12 Arthur Danto, “Moving Pictures,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 4 (1979). 10 F. BOARDMAN without error—be viewed as documentaries, others as screenplays or documen- taries. No one in the security camera footage is a model, and it is not at all a screenplay. But there’s still no real trouble, since typically no one is acting in security footage. The really difficult questions start when we consider films of plays. When my son acts in a school play, he is a model for whatever fictional character he’s playing. And yet my recording from the third row cannot be viewed as a screenplay even though it is recording someone being a model. I can slip into viewing him as model, but what I’m viewing is him-as-model within the play that is then filmed, not in the film itself. Given the facts (a) that there is an ontological difference between the film that can be viewed as screen- play and the film that cannot and (b) that the screenplay is, among films that may count as art, more common than those that cannot, it is incumbent on an ontology of film as an art form that it account for or at least help explain this difference. Until we have done so, we have not really distinguished film from theater. Incidentally, we also risk turning the in-theater handheld camera boot- leg of a movie into its own work. Two one-time ambitions for the ontology of art are notably absent from these criteria—namely that a theory of this sort should provide a critical stan- dard or teleology for film. This is not because these things are undesirable. If further utility is a reason to prefer a theory, then, surely, we should—ceteris paribus—choose the theory that provides benefits as useful as these. This result, however, is just too unlikely to demand of a theory. The diversity of styles and purposes of good films strongly suggests that there is more than one good-­ making quality of film, whatever their ontology. It seems only a vestigial Aristotelianism would have us expect an inference to the goodness of a thing directly from its kind or type. Candidates With these criteria in hand, let’s evaluate some candidate ontologies of film. Some of these have been introduced for other purposes, though they’re all claims that either have been offered as ontologies of film or might reasonably be so offered. Realism Realism has a special place in the history of film and film theory. In its simplest form, it is the claim that what distinguishes film as an art form is its capacity to transmit, present or re-present reality as it is. André Bazin used this feature of film to distinguish it from other plastic arts.13 On his account, photography is the culmination of a centuries-long fascination with reproducing reality in the plastic arts. Film then expands photography’s capacity to capture reality by providing it with movement. Realism thus provided Bazin and his immediate 13 André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema? Vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).  1 FILM ONTOLOGY: EXTENSION, CRITERIA AND CANDIDATES 11 followers with three key things: (a) an ontology of film, (b) a justification for the art status of film and (c) a critical standard for film. Regarding (b), the art status of film is achieved by establishing a place for photography and film at the end of a narrative history of art forms. For (c), Bazin thinks that because film is essentially photography, and realism is photography’s great defining achieve- ment, films are at their best when they focus on this realist project to which they’re uniquely suited. Formalism, realism’s primary rival, is (allegedly any- way) more at home in painting and other traditional plastic arts. Our focus is, of course, on (a), especially given that the art status of film is not so controver- sial, and providing a critical standard is no requirement of an ontological the- ory. It is worth noting, though, that the photographic (and especially mechanical) nature of film has in other hands been used to cast doubt on its art status.14 Read strictly as an ontological theory, Bazin’s realism is somewhat unclear. First, he makes quite a bit of the “objective” nature of photography and film as opposed to other “subjective” plastic arts like painting and sculpture.15 While it’s true that we can, as Bazin argues, under normal circumstances infer the existence of x from a photograph of x and not a painting of x, this hardly makes photography and film objective, as though consciousness is not involved in choosing, curating and editing shots. In the kinds of photographs and films we’re interested in when we consider them as art forms, such conscious involve- ment is necessary. Second, he speaks about film as a reproduction of reality rather than—as might seem more natural—a recording of it. This appears to not be a metaphor. As he says at one point: “The reality that cinema reproduces at will and organizes is the same worldly reality of which we are a part, the sensible continuum out of which the celluloid makes a mold both special and temporal. I cannot repeat a single moment of my life, but cinema can repeat any one of these moments indefinitely before my eyes.”16 Bazin seems here and elsewhere to come awfully close to suggesting that there is no important differ- ence between seeing in life and seeing on film, except that the latter has the advantage of potential repetition. But taken literally, this claim entails the absurdity that there is no important difference between the object and its image on film. It is perfectly reasonable that we might be watching Blazing Saddles on television and I say, “I see Cleavon Little there on the screen.” But if you were to then say, “where is Cleavon Little now?” I could not reasonably respond “I just told you, he’s right there on the screen.” But perhaps Bazin has in mind something more plausible, something akin to Kendall Walton’s “transparency thesis” regarding photography and film.17 On 14 Notably: Roger Scruton, “Photography and Representation,” in Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, ed. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). 15 Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 13–14. 16 André Bazin, “Death Every Afternoon,” in Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, ed. Ivone Margulies, trans. Mark A. Cohen (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 30. 17 Kendall Walton, “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism,” Critical Inquiry 11 (1994). 12 F. BOARDMAN this version of realism, photography and film are perceptual aids to seeing what we wouldn’t otherwise be able to see, much like a telescope or a convex mirror in a parking lot. Instead of allowing us to see at great distances or around cor- ners, film allows us to see what has occurred in the past. I’m thus no more committed to saying that Cleavon Little is right there on the screen than I am to pointing at the mirror when you ask where is the car that I see in it, or to the telescope when you ask where is the star that I see in it. In this respect, “trans- parency” may not be the best term. The first case of transparency we think of is the window. But when I remark on a tree I see through a window I point in the same direction when you ask, “where do you see this tree?” as I do when you ask, “where is this tree?” But when we’re in the garage and I remark on a car around the corner, I point toward the mirror when you ask, “where do you see this car?” and another direction entirely when you ask, “where is this car?” And I point to the telescope when you ask where I see a given star but not when you ask where that star is. It is true that we say things like “I see the star through the telescope” and “I see the tree through the window.” But we risk equivocation when we assume these sentences have exactly the same structure. In one sense, “seeing through” is synonymous with “seeing by means of” (as in “we see unicellular organisms only through microscopes”) and in another “seeing through” is synonymous with “seeing on the other side of without see- ing around” (as in “A person can only see through so much water”). We “see through” some things in both senses, eyeglasses, for example. Film, however, is not one of these. This complaint may not amount to much more than terminological quib- bling. What is important may instead just be that viewing a photograph or a film allows us to see real things the same way that telescopes and mirrors do, even if not quite transparently. But if it is not actual transparency, then the transparency theorist owes us an account of this particular kind of seeing real- ity. A number of detractors have objected that no adequately sufficient condi- tion has been offered for this sort of transparency.18 As a first attempt, causal production seems like a decent candidate. The actual car around the corner, plus the mechanics of reflection causes me to see what I do in the mirror. The actual star, plus the mechanics of telescopy causes me to see what I do in the telescope. And Cleavon Little himself, plus the mechanics of cameras and pro- jections, causes me to see what I do on television. But then again, an optical sensor and a description-generating program can mechanically cause a written description of an object, but we wouldn’t call that description “transparent” in any sense. So perhaps visual similarity should be added. But imagine a chess-­ obsessed society in which sensors on the boards of grandmasters transmit their moves to boards set up in living rooms across the country so that each move is 18 Gregory Currie, Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) especially 61–76; Berys Gaut, “Analytic Philosophy of Film: History, Issues, Prospects,” Analytic Philosophy 38 (1997) 147–8; Carroll, “Defining the Moving Image,” 121.  1 FILM ONTOLOGY: EXTENSION, CRITERIA AND CANDIDATES 13 replicated by automatically moving pieces on boards everywhere. We’d all sit and watch the same games played out on our own boards, which look exactly like the one on which the grandmasters are playing. But those boards would not be transparent as a result. However, even if the transparency theorist has nothing to offer in the way of rebuttal or additional conditions, it is not clear that transparency has thus been refuted. She could, for instance, posit a virtuous circle between transparency and seeing through (in that first sense of “through”). Or she could insist that transparency is a simple, irreducible concept that is (a) given in our perceptual experience of photographs and live-action film and (b) evidenced by every- day language? Then again, transparency of any sort may not provide the best account of those experiences or our discussion of them, even among realist theories. And if not, then it is not clear that anything speaks in favor of transparency. Perhaps we say that we “see” Cleavon Little in Blazing Saddles but not in the most detailed verbal description of him because recognizing Little on film is so very much like recognizing him in real life. But recognizing his description is not at all like recognizing him. The latter first involves recognizing certain shapes or sounds that look and sound nothing like Little himself. Little in life (when he was alive) and Little on film trigger the same recognition capacities. If we can recognize Little in the former circumstance, we can do so in the latter, at least under normal circumstances. But this does not mean that Blazing Saddles pres- ents Little to us, as transparency would have us believe. Perhaps, instead, it represents Little to us. And the specific way in which this pictorial representa- tion via perceptual likeness happens via moving pictures provides film with its unique ontology. This is more or less Gregory Currie’s position, and is at pres- ent the most plausible version of realism available.19 But will any version of realism provide an adequate ontology for film? Probably not, if we take seriously the requirement that such a theory explains the difference between the film and the recorded play. If what we see is the object in front of the camera, either because we see it directly or because pho- tography is transparent, then we see only Cleavon Little and never Sheriff Bart, since there is, in fact, no such sheriff. Similarly, if cinematic representation is only carried out through the recognition of perceptual likeness, it is not at all clear how we could distinguish Blazing Saddles, in which it is perfectly reason- able to see Sheriff Bart or Cleavon Little and some rehearsal footage of Blazing Saddles where it would only be appropriate to see Little. Bart and Little, after all, look an awful lot alike. Illusion If film is not essentially the presentation or representation of reality, maybe its nature is to be found rather in its unique capacity to present us with (or cause in us) the illusion of something real. There is something to be said for this view 19 Currie, Image and Mind, especially 79–112. 14 F. BOARDMAN as well. We do praise films for “sucking us in” and fault them for ruining our suspension of disbelief. And yet films do not tend to produce genuine cognitive illusions, at least in adults. That is to say, we do not believe what we see in the film is really happening before us, that the perspective of the camera is our own. If we did, we’d have to ask how we fly over cities when we see establishing shots or jump back and forth in a room without continuous movement in multi-­ camera scenes. Nor do we think the content of the film is actually happening, or we would either be inclined to do something about it or have to ask our- selves troubling questions about our omniscient impotence.20 So films do not engender propositional illusions, or false beliefs that x. The aerial establishing shot does not, for instance, produce the illusion that we are flying. But it may still produce a different, non-propositional sort of illusion. The Icaruses among us may feel liberated, while the acrophobes feel some nau- seated panic. These feelings are part of the illusion of flight without the illusion that we are flying. Similarly, “Dutch angle” shots may give us the sensation that something is not right with the world. We might call this sort of thing a “sen- sory” illusion, and it does seem perfectly natural to say that such shots provide the viewer with the sensation of flying or of unease. The problem is that while this sort of sensory illusion may be a capacity of film, it is hardly a necessary condition. The aerial shot may produce an illusory sensation of flying, but do scenes from the film adaptation of Neil Simon’s Lost In Yonkers similarly pro- duce a sensation of being present for a conversation? Is there such a thing? Even if there is and it does, it seems highly implausible that the film does so in some way that is significantly different than a stage production of the play. A somewhat different sort of perceptual illusion (which may be thought of as a subset of sensory illusions) might be thought to be far more common, if not universal, in films.21 Specifically, we might wonder if the unique essence of film is that it produces the illusion of movement. Currie argues against this “weak illusionism,” insisting that the images on the screen really do move. Images, after all, are mind-and-perception-dependent entities. The effect may be pulled off by a quick succession of still pictures, but the image itself is none- theless moving. Others—notably and I think most successfully Andrew Kania— have insisted that this movement is illusory after all.22 A film of Misty Copeland doing pirouettes appears to be an image of her moving, but some frame images include Copeland’s whole face, some just the right side of it, some just the left, and others none of it at all. How can a faceless image and a full-faced image be the same image? We say it is, so claim the illusionists, only because these differ- 20 The reader may notice a certain similarity or affinity here with suggestions in Colin Radford’s treatment of the paradox of fiction in “How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 49 (1975) 71. 21 I’m relying on Currie here for the distinction between perceptual and cognitive filmic illusions. Currie, Image and Mind, especially 28–30. 22 Andrew Kania, “The Illusion of Realism in Film,” British Journal of Aesthetics 42 (2002).  1 FILM ONTOLOGY: EXTENSION, CRITERIA AND CANDIDATES 15 ent images are united by the illusion of movement that their quick succession produces.23 There is no reason to posit continuity much less identity absent that illusion. I haven’t the slightest idea how to adjudicate between the illusionist and anti-illusionist on this point. I suspect, in fact, that they may be having a purely verbal dispute. The good news is that we don’t need to settle the issue here, as we have some other reasons to think even perceptual illusionism is inadequate as an ontology of film. For starters, plenty of other art forms are capable of producing the illusion of movement, and if we make our characterization of “art form” fine grained enough, there are some entire forms that do so. Ink-­ and-­paper optical illusions are a well-established sort of example, but there are others. Stage settings in plays, operas and ballets sometimes give the illusion of movement to stationary figures, and a note or melody being taken up by dif- ferent parts of an orchestra at different times creates the illusion that the sound is traveling in space. The illusion of movement is not necessary for film either, as Danto’s exam- ple of the motionless film indicates. And finally, the illusion of movement, even if it is a genuine feature of film, does nothing to distinguish the screenplay from the recorded play. One produces the illusion of movement if and only if the other does as well. Imagination There are ways for us to entertain an idea, claim or attitude without being aware of or under the illusion of its truth, actuality or veridicality. One of those is to imagine it. Film may be a means by which we come to imagine the events depicted. This too has at least two versions. On the first, we imagine participat- ing in the experience. Unless we imagine that we are invisible, inaudible and capable of taking on another’s perspective (which would be a lot), we imagine that we are right there in the depicted scene having the perspective of the cam- era. The same sorts of issues we identified with regard to cognitive illusions apply as well to participatory imaginations. We might be a little more lenient and forgiving, though, as we can imagine all sorts of things we can’t actually believe. We may be able to imagine ourselves flying during an establishing aerial shot, for instance, or having the capacity to move from one place to another without continuous movement during multi-camera scenes. But given a split-screen shot, are we to imagine that we’re in two places at once? Is this even possible? Also, what on earth are we imagining is happening to us when we hear a disembodied voice-over, especially when the speaker is a narrator and not a character in the film? Who is talking to us? When we hear the soundtrack, where is that music supposed to be coming from? Even if we could imagine these things without distracting questions attached, the participatory imagination theory has another problem in just the kinds of 23 Kania, “The Illusion of Realism in Film,” 253–4. 16 F. BOARDMAN shots that might seem to give it credence. If films produce imaginations, then the point-of-view (POV) shot invites us to imagine having the perceptual expe- rience of a character fictionally present to the events of the film.24 The POV shot provides a kind of first personal storytelling. But if this is the nature of film, then all shots do this. How, then, do we recognize the POV shot and distinguish it from others? We could avoid all of these issues by instead thinking that films provide for an impersonal imaginative experience. On this view, a film puts us in contact with the content of an imaginative experience without placing us in it. So, when I watch the scene in Blazing Saddles where Sheriff Bart meets the Cisco Kid, I imagine as actual the meeting I’m seeing. I’m aided in this imagination by Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder’s acting, the set, costumes and so on. But I don’t imagine being a third person inexplicably unacknowledged there in the jail cell. This is undoubtedly a more plausible account of our experience of films. Unfortunately, impersonal imagination won’t do much better as an ontol- ogy of film. Our first concern should be this: what exactly is the film object here? If it’s the imagination, we don’t experience the same films. This certainly does not conform to our everyday language and critical practices regarding films. If instead the film is an aid to the imagination, we have nothing to dis- tinguish films from other narrative art forms such as plays or novels. Either way, we’re no closer to a unique ontology. And we’re certainly no closer to explain- ing either of Danto’s puzzles. The still photograph and the motionless film both engage the imagination in the same way (if either of them do). And what- ever the difference between the screenplay and the recording of a play is, it can’t be in their capacity to aid imagination. The recording of an excellent play might spark an audience’s imagination much better than a poor screenplay. And an excellent screenplay might do better than a poor recording of a play or a recording of a poor play. Film as Dream The “dream” or “oneiric” theory of film may refer to a number of different theses. Weakly, some films are subject to the kind of Freudian psychoanalysis that is applicable to dreams, and some of the methods of such analyses are valu- able mechanisms of film interpretation in general. Ambiguously, Hollywood was once known as a “dream factory.” And confusingly, Christian Metz and Alfred Guzzetti claim that, despite some important differences between watch- ing a narrative film and dreaming: the filmic flux resembles the oneiric flux more than other productions of waking resemble it. It is received, as we have said, in a state of lessened wakefulness. Its signifier (images accompanied by sound and movement) inherently confers on it 24 Notice this presence is fictional even if the film is non-fictional. Real people don’t record their perceptual experiences.  1 FILM ONTOLOGY: EXTENSION, CRITERIA AND CANDIDATES 17 a certain affinity with the dream, for it coincides directly with one of the major features of the oneiric signifier, “imaged” expression, the consideration of repre- sentability, to use Freud’s term.25 If dreams do involve the id’s expression via the image content of dreams, this does indeed indicate a certain isomorphism between dreaming and film. But this similarity is not enough to establish the stronger claim that film experience is of a type with dream experience. After all, there are stark differences between the representational natures of dreams and films. For instance, films represent in part via the kind of complex communicative implicatures that mark everyday utterances. Cinematic conventions are so commonly and successfully used to express meaning to an audience that confounding convention can be a success- ful tool for changing the meaning of an image. A filmmaker’s anticipation of her audience’s expectations regarding these conventions guide her filmmaking decisions and the audience’s expectations of that anticipation guide their inter- pretive judgments. Film meaning and interpretation is, therefore, cooperative. Even if it is reasonable to think that the id expresses the content of dreams in order to communicate something to the ego (and “communicate” may be a stretch or at best a metaphor here), the communication is hardly cooperative. To bolster the stronger claim, Metz and Guzzetti posit the “lessened wake- fulness” of film experience, so that viewing a film takes us into something of a daydream state. By “daydream,” they must mean something more removed from waking experience than mere musing or imagining. But what then? Are there daydreams that genuinely get us closer to the dream state wherein, cru- cially, we take the image to be real? Maybe we do. I seem to have the experi- ence of daydreaming so deeply that I have to consciously re-recognize the unreality of the daydream’s content. But that does not happen with films. In the darkest theater showing the most realistic film, I only “remind” myself of its unreality when I want to shake off its emotional effects, not to settle what is real and what isn’t. What we need to consider, then, is a strong dream theory that relies on the psychological condition of film engagement rather than any dubious claims about the degree of actual “sleep” involved in our reception of films. And luck- ily we have such theories. Colin McGinn, for instance, claims that “movies arouse in the viewer the same kinds of psychological mechanisms and processes that characterize the dreaming state.”26 Like the participatory imagination theory we just discussed, the dream the- ory has a problem with the kinds of cases that might at first glance look like good homes for it. Consider “The Test Dream,” from season five of The Sopranos. The episode’s title comes from an extended dream sequence in which the viewer is taken into one of Tony Soprano’s dreams. This sequence is 25 Christian Metz and Alfred Guzzetti, “The Fiction Film and Its Spectator: A Metapsychological Study” New Literary History 8 (1976): 90. 26 Colin McGinn, The Power of Movies (New York: Vintage, 2007), 102. 18 F. BOARDMAN remarkably successful in capturing the phenomenal quality of dreams. Tony dreams a symbolically rich semi-linear narrative in which events occur uncaused, the predictability of time and space is fleeting and people from his life assume others’ roles in a way that suggests he is dreaming amalgamations of people. Tony himself “moves” through each inappropriately connected stage of his dream unaware of the abrasiveness of their juxtaposition and unaware that he is dreaming. The sequence is surreal without being disorienting, absurd with- out being unfamiliar. The aesthetic effect is in fact exceedingly familiar. What is displayed is very much the way we remember dreams. It is, in a word, dreamlike. How, then, does this show the dream theory false? If we have an instance of film that is recognizably dreamlike, doesn’t that at least provide some anec- dotal evidence for it? In fact, it does just the opposite. What we should focus on here is not the fact that this sequence is dreamlike but rather that we are able to recognize that it is dreamlike. The sequence is recognizably dreamlike because it engages—through the use of both dramatic and cinematic tech- niques—the psychological operations characteristic of dreaming. It is remark- able only because not all—in fact very few—films do so. If all film worked on us this way as the strong dream theory imagines, it would be trivial to say that this one particular film is dreamlike. All film would be dreamlike. Compare the situation with film viewing and dreaming to two activities that more clearly involve the same psychological operations: lying and storytelling. These are not the same things and neither is one a version of the other (though they may both be versions of creative imagining). Yet it would clearly be trivial to say that a given instance of lying was storytelling-like. Of course, it was storytelling-like, just like all instances of lying. Lying and storytelling have just the kind of relation that the dream theorist imagines for film viewing and dreaming. But it is not trivial to say that this sequence from The Sopranos is dreamlike. So, it must be false that, in general, viewing films and dreaming involve the same psychological mechanisms and processes. Film as Language or Symbol System If one problem with the oneiric theory of film is its inability to adequately account for the communicative capacity of film, perhaps we should look directly to that capacity for the nature of film. Language, being our primary means of communicating, is a natural place to start. And indeed, so much has been said about the “language of film” that it has become an assumption in some quar- ters that there is such a thing. But even if there is a language of film, this does not entail that film is essentially a language. English is the language of Moby Dick, Old English the language of Beowulf and First-Order Logic the language of the proofs I should be grading right now. But no one would therefore say that Moby Dick, Beowulf or proofs on an exam are these languages. But if there is a language of film and film is not itself that language, what language is it? More to the point, it is not uncommon to read or hear that film is a specific and unique language, and that is the sort of theory in which we’re interested.  1 FILM ONTOLOGY: EXTENSION, CRITERIA AND CANDIDATES 19 In order to evaluate this theory, we’ll need to first say what a language is. A language is first and foremost a symbol system, though not all symbol systems are languages. There is an unfortunate tendency to conflate the two concepts, but it is worth keeping them distinct. A symbol system may be any set of deter- minants for the range of “stands for,” “represents” or some other relevantly similar relation. The “check engine” light in my car is part of a symbol system but not a language. The “check engine” example may suggest that a language is a communica- tive symbol system, and what’s lacking in the car notification system is com- municative intention and Grice’s “nonnatural meaning.”27 The light means that there’s a problem with the engine, but only “naturally,” as my hurting elbow means that there’s some problem in my arm. If this is right, then film may be a language after all, as we’ve discussed its communicative nature already. But languages are not only communicative and not all systems of communica- tion are languages. Performative utterances are noncommunicative uses of lan- guage. And I may point to my smiling face to communicate my happiness to you.28 A still rough but better approximation: a particular language is a set of sym- bols and rules that (a) determine when sequences of those symbols are well formed and (b) relate those sequences to meanings. The two key features here are that a language must contain a syntax and semantics, and the latter must be determined by rules of the language rather than anything like natural fit or resemblance. And on this characterization, it is pretty clear that film is not a lan- guage.29 True, there may be cinematic conventions that rely upon communica- tive symbols. Montages mean that the ratio of screen time to fictional time decreases during them—a shot of a building followed directly by an interior shot means that the depicted room is in that building, and if the camera pans away slowly from two characters who might have sex, then they had sex. But these are remarkable cases. Most meanings in film are not delivered by semantic rules or conventions. We need not and should not appeal to any convention to explain why Sheriff Bart is a person and not a horse. If Mel Brooks wanted the Sheriff to be a horse, then he would have had a horse play the part and not Cleavon Little. Maybe we could imagine a convention that would override this natural assump- tion, one where horses are customarily used to play people. But the fact that a convention could counterfactually override more natural ­depictive assumptions does not mean that those assumptions are themselves merely conventional. Film may fail to be a language and still be a symbol system, even if the “rep- resents” relation is in most cases dependent on a perceptual similarity between the representation and the represented. Whether or not this is a feature of 27 H.P. Grice, “Meaning” Philosophical Review 66 (1956). 28 Just to be clear: the smile itself may indicate that I’m happy. It’s the pointing that does the communicating. 29 Currie helpfully provides us with a fairly devastating argument against this sort of theory. Much of what I say in this section echoes that argument. Gregory Currie, “The Long Goodbye: The Imaginary Language of Film,” in in Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, ed. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). 20 F. BOARDMAN many films will ultimately depend on your preferred theory of depiction. The good news (again) is that we don’t need to decide, since depiction is not neces- sary for film in the first place. Even if it is appropriate to say that the interview of Shelby Foote in Ken Burns’ Civil War is a depiction of Shelby Foote (a rather large “if”), still there is no depiction in purely abstract films. In its favor, a linguistic or semiotic ontology of film may be capable of explaining one of Danto’s two puzzles. It may just be that the screenplay is in the language of film (whatever that turns out to be) and the recorded play is not. This may be even if the recorded play looks in many ways like a screenplay, just as the sequence “Blund parg remple dwo draguile ringe” may look like a sentence but is not. Of course, a whole lot of work would have to be done to explain how this works in the case of film, and we’ve already considered some reasons to be pessimistic about success. The theory is entirely lost, though, in providing help on the other puzzle. If the unmoving film image is in a lan- guage, then the photograph is in the same language. Film as Thought There are two different diagnoses available for the shortcomings of the last few theories. First, we might think that their proponents err in seeking a psycho- logical characterization of something that is not essentially psychological in nature. Alternatively, we could lay the fault in the theorists’ attempts to align film too closely with other, unrelated psychological faculties—an audience’s imaginative or illusory reception, on the one hand, or a filmmaker’s oneiric or linguistic capacities, on the other. If we want to avoid the latter mistake, perhaps what we need is a theory of film that assigns to it a relatively unique psychological function. We have the foundations for such a theory in Gilles Deleuze’s expansive work on cinema. Deleuze rejects purely psychoanalytic and linguistic theories of film, and yet film is for him still essentially bound to human psychology. As he says, “The great directors of the cinema may be compared, in our view, not merely with painters, architects and musicians, but also with thinkers. They think with movement-images and time-images instead of concepts.”30 Film on this view is a set of image-kinds (or, perhaps, kinds of image-making) distinguished by their role in a fairly sui generis psychological process. We cannot, therefore, characterize films and filmmaking using established categories; we can only offer analogies such as Deleuze’s suggestion that images are to filmmaking what concepts are to cognition. What is left for us to do in fleshing out a theory of this kind, then, is not to say what sort of thing the film image is, but rather to provide a taxonomy of film images. We see the beginnings of just such an attempt in Deleuze’s distinc- tion between the movement-image and the time-image. The movement-image, 30 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013) xiv.  1 FILM ONTOLOGY: EXTENSION, CRITERIA AND CANDIDATES 21 born of a number of distinctly cinematographic techniques that Deleuze elides into “framing,” is fundamentally dynamic. It is neither reducible to series of still photographs nor is it a mere illusion produced by their rapid succession. It is characteristic of films that their images have no privileged moments. Deleuze then provides kinds of movement-image categorized by what they are images of—notably perceptions, affects and actions.31 Time-images, which we gain from the montage, are likewise more than a depiction or signifier of time. As the montage relates discontinuous movement-images, it provides—or just is—a distinct form of thought about (and in) time.32 For Deleuze, these image-kinds also have historical significance. The advent of the time-image marks the break between classical and modern film. And the latter is only possible as a postwar phenomenon, just like other forms of thought—notably but not exclusively philosophy. The taxonomy of images that Deleuze provides is both insightful and useful, and it’s possible that he is not espousing a film ontology in quite the same vein as the others we’ve considered here (his intentions are not always so clear). Even so, his work is illustrative of an approach to film ontology about which we ought to have at least two concerns. First, any account that treats film as a mode of thought is going to have to contend with the facts that thoughts typi- cally belong to individuals and films are typically made by many people.33 Given a filmic image, we might wonder whose thought we’re seeing: the director’s, editor’s, cinematographer’s, camera operator’s or set designer’s? There are a couple of strategies we could employ to resolve this sort of issue, though neither are available to Deleuze. First, we might think of a film as pre- senting a collective thought in much the same way that a legislature can col- lectively enact a law or a committee can collectively issue a statement. But a necessary feature of these other cases is that the members of the bodies in question communicate and coordinate with one another to reach an agreement on the thoughts they express. This is only possible through the use of articu- lable concepts, and the