What Philosophy Wants from ImagesThis book asks what has been happening to film and to cinema as every aspect of making and viewing movies is being replaced by digital technologies. Even the idea of "watching a film" has become an anachronism as new media has ascended and as physical film has disappeared. The urgency for Rodowick is that, for eighty years, moving images offered a conceptual framework for philosophers such as Benjamin, Cavell, Barthe, and Deleuze to think through some of our most fundamental dilemmas involving questions of meaning and experience, our knowledge of the world and of other minds. Rodowick wonders if the philosophical power of film has faded as it has disappeared and fragmented into new, distinct types of media and screens; perhaps now, he wonders, algorithmic thought and computer-mediated communications really are becoming our most powerful sites of ontological fascination and exploration. At the same time Rodowick notices that contemporary artists are increasingly fascinated by cinema: or by what he calls a certain "memory of cinema." Sometimes this involves a literal return to the archaic medium itself, as in hand-spliced 16-mm films. There is also the practice that incorporates an "archival historical impulse" (e.g., Christopher Marclay's 24-hour moving image loop, The Clock). Such works produce what Rodowick calls "a future memory of cinema"--an anticipatory move that investigates not only what the image has been and can be no longer, but what it is becoming. These artist films challenge both the history of cinema and our memory of the history of cinema in complicated ways. They engage the spectator in a temporary experience where traditional concepts of image, space, movement, and time no longer suffice, and new concepts, not yet nameable perhaps, must be created. |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
actions actual Adorno aesthetic analog appears automatic become belief body Burgin’s calls camera Cavell chapter characterizes cinema collective complex concept considered construction contemporary continually create critical cultural Deleuze diagram direct disappearance duration effects elements emerge essay ethical event example existence experience expression fact fantasy Farocki fetishism Figure film finally force forms frame future give given hand human Idea imagined intensive intuition kind knowledge less light limits lines logic marks material matter means memory Metz Model movement moving image natural object passing past perception perhaps philosophy photography possible practice present Press produced projected question reading reference relation repetition screen sculpture sensation sense similar situation space spatial structure subjective suggests temporal theory things thinking thought tion transformed turn understand University virtual visual writing