Introduction: New Reasons to Establish A Philosophy of Film

Abstract

During the last few decades, film has increasingly become an issue of philosophical reflection from an ontological and epistemological perspective and the claim “doing philosophy through film” has raised extensive discussion about its meaning. This book aims to reassess, over 100 years after the invention of film, the question “What is film?” as a philosophical interrogation emphasizing an intrinsic relation between philosophy and film. The mechanical reproduction of reality is one of the very philosophical questions raised by the emergence of film at the end of the XIXth Century, inquiring into the ontological nature of both reality and film. Yet the nature of this audio-photographic and moving reproduction of reality constitutes an ontological puzzle, which has widely been disregarded as a main line of enquiry with direct consequences for philosophy. Regarding this background, we have selected the best essays from our Lisbon Conference on Philosophy and Film: Thinking Reality and Time through Film (2014). What they all have in common is the attempt to create new aspects and approaches of how philosophy relates to film. Whether by philosophizing through concrete examples of films or whether looking at film’s ontological reliance on time and image, or its intra-active entanglement with reality or truth, this book is intended to grasp film’s nature philosophically and provide new insights for the film philosopher and the filmmaker as well as for the freshman fascinated by film for philosophical reasons. We have complemented the list of classical philosophical essays with the reworked transcriptions of two compelling film-philosophical dialogs among filmmakers and philosophers, which took place at pivotal moments of the Conference and which will now bring to the book the vivacity of the personal reflections of the creators, drawing on their own works at the crossroads of a robust philosophical inquiry.