Branded as film theory’s ‘philosophical turn’, in Anglophone film departments recent years have witnessed a bourgeoning of interest in texts dedicated to cinema, aesthetics and the image by French philosophers. In many ways, by turning to French philosophy to extract new hermeneutic approaches to the study of film, this development adds to a long running fixation that Anglophone academia has entertained with its French counterpart, whose intellectual labours have at times been assembled under the moniker ‘French theory’.
This course will provide an alternative perspective on Francophone film theory as a tradition which was always already in dialogue with philosophy by tracing its development as a critical practice from the 1940s to the present. More precisely, it will explore a little-discussed intersection of philosophy and film theory in France by exploring the extent to which philosophical debates concerning the nature and genesis of meaning or sense [sens] have impinged upon a number of attempts to grapple with the question of cinematic meaning. Surveying a combination of texts dedicated by philosophers to cinema and texts by film theorists and film critics that engage with philosophy, the course will demonstrate that cinema’s rarefied status in the French context has allowed for an ongoing dialogue between film and philosophy that is unparalleled elsewhere.
Participants should come away from the course with an understanding of the key concepts and texts in the history of film theory in France and a conception of their relevance to ‘the philosophy of sense’.
Session 1: What is sense?
This session will provide an overview of the concept of ‘sense [sens]’ in twentieth century French philosophy, touching upon texts by Kojève, Bataille, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Hyppolite, among others, along the way. The second half of the session will focus on Merleau-Ponty’s important 1945 lecture “Film and the New Psychology”, exploring the philosopher’s reconceptualization of sense/meaning as something immanent to perception.
Recommended Reading:
- Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. "The Film and the New Psychology." In Sense and Non-Sense, 48-59. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.
Further Reading:
- Entry on 'Sense'. Cassin, Barbara, Sandra Laugier, Alain de Libera, Irène Rosier-Catach, and Giacinta Spinosa. 2014. In Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, edited by Barbara Cassin, 949-969. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Session 2: The ‘Cahiers line’
Session 2 will focus on the ever-influential film publication Cahiers du cinéma. The first half of the session will explore the work of André Bazin: the founder of Cahiers du cinéma and iconic advocate of cinematic realism. The second half of the session will focus on the problem of mise en scène, as developed in the much less systemic work of the younger Cahiers critics, which lies at the basis of the famous ‘auteur theory’ or politiques des auteurs.
Recommended Readings:
- Bazin, André. 2011. "In Defense of Rosselini." In André Bazin and Italian Neorealism, edited by Bert Cardullo, 163-171. New York: Continuum.
- Truffaut, François. 2014. "A Certain Tendency in French Cinema." In Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures, edited by Scott MacKenzie, 133-144. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press.
Further Readings:
- Cribb, Corey P. 2021. "“To Believe in an Image (Again)”: The Politics of the Index, André Bazin’s Ontology of Sense, and the Antidote to Digital Skepticism." Cultural Politics 17 (3):314-332.
- Hillier, Jim. 1986. "Introduction: Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1960s." In Cahiers du Cinéma: Volume 2 - 160-1968: New Wave, New CInema, Re-evaluating Hollywood, edited by Jim Hillier, 1-18. London: Routledge & Keagan Paul.
- Hoveyda, Fereydoun. 1986. "Sunspots." In Cahiers du cinéma volume 2 1960-1968: New Wave, New Cinema, Re-evaluating Hollywood, edited by Jim Hillier, 135-143. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Session 3: The Semiotic turn
Our third session will focus on the work of Christian Metz, a polemical figure who attempted (with notable success) to convert the discipline to structuralist semiotics in the 1960s, dispensing with phenomenology in the process. It will subsequently outline the dramatic change of direction that film theory took in the 1970s as it came to engage with political and psychoanalytic concepts.
Recommended Reading:
- Metz, Christian. 1991. "The Cinema: Language or Language System?" In Film Langauge, 31-44. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Further Readings:
- Baudry, Jean Louis. 1974-1975. "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus." Film Quarterly 28 (2): 39- 47.
- Château, Dominique, and Martin Lefebvre. 2014. "Dance and Fetish: Phenomenology and Metz’s Epistemological Shift." October 148: 103–132.
Session 4: Rethinking Film Semiotics
This session will explore the new directions which French film theory takes in the 1980s with the rise of so-called ‘post-structuralism’. The first half of the lecture will interrogate Gilles Deleuze’s extremely influential critique of Metz’s semiology and subsequent attempt to create a new semiotics of cinema which circumvents the idea of cinema as a ‘language’. We will also discuss the work of Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier who drew on works by Derrida and Blanchot to rethink the relationship between cinema and writing.
Recommended Readings:
- Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, pp 25-30. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London: Athlone.
- Ropars-Wiulleumier, Marie-Claire. 2007. "On Filmic Rewriting: Contamination of the Arts or Destruction of Art’s Identity?" Rouge (11).
Further Reading:
- Rodowick, D. N. 1997. “Image and Sign”. In Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine, 38-78. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
- Polan, Dana. 1984. ‘‘Desire Shifts the Differance’’: Figural Poetics and Figural Politics in the Film Theory of Marie-Claire Ropars”. Camera Obscura 12 (Summer): 67-88.
Session 5: Rethinking Sense with Film-Philosophy
Our final sessional will focus on two texts by philosophers who have tried their hand at film criticism: Jacques Rancière and Jean-Luc Nancy. It will interrogate each thinkers revised approach to the question of cinematic meaning following the demise of semiotic approaches to film analysis, addressing questions of ‘sense’ and ‘the sensible’.
Recommended Readings:
- Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2001. The Evidence of Film, 12-56. Brussels: Yves Gevaert.
- Rancière, Jacques. 2016. "Béla Tarr: The Poetics and the Politics of Fiction." In Slow Cinema, edited by Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge, 245-260. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Further Reading :
- Rancière, Jacques. 2013. Béla Tarr, The Time After. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing.