Philosophy of Film

What it asks

A painting of your grandmother is a representation. A photograph of her, on one influential account, is something more: you literally SEE her through it, as you see through a mirror or a telescope, because the process runs from her to the image without a person's beliefs in between.

That transparency claim is strange and hard to dismiss, and it would explain something real - why photographs carry conviction that drawings do not, and why a photograph of a dead person is affecting in a way a portrait is not.

The second question is whether film can do philosophy rather than merely illustrate it. The strong claim is that some films work through a problem in ways an argument could not reproduce, using duration, attention and point of view as the means.

The recurring problems

Transparency. Whether photographic images are a means of seeing or a means of representing. Digital images complicate it further, since the causal chain can be broken invisibly.

Whether film can philosophise. Sceptics argue that any philosophical content is put in by the interpreter and could be stated in a paragraph. Defenders argue that what the film does - making a viewer occupy a position over time - is itself the philosophical work.

How narration works. Film has no narrator by default and yet organises what is known and when. Whether there is an implicit narrator, and whether viewers imagine seeing events or seeing a record of them, is disputed.

Emotional engagement. Viewers respond to fictional events with real feeling, as in literature, with the added problem that they are watching real actors who are visibly present.

How it developed

The first writers had to argue that film was art at all, against the objection that a machine recording events cannot be. Both the earliest theorists made the same move in reply: film is art precisely where it departs from mere recording, through framing, editing and time.

Bazin argued the opposite from mid-century - that film's value lies in its photographic relation to reality, and that techniques preserving that relation are truer to the medium than those that manipulate it. The realist and formalist positions have divided the field since.

For much of the twentieth century film theory was dominated by psychoanalytic and semiotic frameworks, largely in departments of film rather than philosophy.

Analytic philosophy of film formed in the 1980s in explicit opposition to that, arguing for cognitive accounts of how viewers actually follow and respond to films. The transparency argument in 1984 gave the field its most discussed thesis, and the debate about film as philosophy has been its liveliest since the 2000s.

The positions within it

Realism and formalism about the medium; transparency theories and their critics; cognitivism against psychoanalytic-semiotic film theory; bold and moderate views on film's capacity to do philosophy. All are in the Schools section.

Where it stands now

The field is small, active and unusually engaged with actual films rather than with film in the abstract.

Digital production has reopened the transparency question, since an image that looks photographic may have no causal connection to anything - which matters well beyond aesthetics now that the same is true of images offered as evidence. Serial television has also raised questions about long-form narrative that the film-length framework did not address.