A brief note of thanks to Melissa Zinkin who replied to me off-site,
saying that she was gratified that I had read her chapter on Kant and
Hitchcock's THE LADY VANISHES.
Melissa added that she wished that she knew more about Schopenhauer, but
that what I had said about the life-force 'seems about right' -
interestingly, Melissa's own work has to do with force in Kant.
Irving Singer's new book 'Three Philosophical Filmmakers' has a brief
note (p. 230) on Schopenhauer re Hitchcock (though no acknowledgement to
yours truly, who has been pointing out correspondences between the
philosopher and the filmmaker for over a decade!!!). But, perhaps
unfortunately, he speaks of the concept of 'the will to live' (which
essentially concerns volition) without distinguishing it from the
broader concept of Will itself (cf. the 'Brahman' of Hinduism). It is
the latter that I find analagous to what Hitchcock intuitively meant by
'pure film' when he spoke of the director being like God and using 'pure
film' to create his effects (including effects on an audience); in a
different sphere, the composer Wagner (Hitchcock's favourite composer)
consciously applied Schopenhauer's thought to his music and drew
analogies with that thought (as in his technique of 'the suspension').
Btw, Bryan Magee's 'The Philosophy of Schopenhauer' (Clarendon Press,
second edition, 1997) - surely one of the best-written books on a
philosopher and his ideas ever published - is from the pen of someone
who is also a leading Wagner authority. Not unexpectedly, the chapter
"Schopenhauer and Wagner" is a highlight!
- Ken Mogg (Ed, 'The MacGuffin').
Website: http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~muffin
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