Not sure if film can be philosophy -- Feyerabend encouraged 
philosophers to work in film decades ago -- but at least the two 
endeavors can be complementary I think. Philosophy can provide premises 
and arguments based on them and thus a clarity and precision that is in 
most cases unavailable in film. But film can provide a a sense of real 
like complexity that the clarity of philosophy tends to cover over. 
(This tends to apply more to ethical and social/political philosophy 
more than, for example, to the philosophy of logic and mathematics; for 
example, Hollis Frampton's Zorn's Lemma may takes off from set theory 
but I suspect it ends up being more metaphorical than really involved in 
set-theoretic concerns.) To use the vocabulary of some in the field, 
philosophy tends to be thin and film tends to be thick, and going back 
and forth between the two, which I try to do when teaching film within a 
philosophy department, can be productive on insight in a way that 
neither can do independently. This is related to, for example, Nussbaum 
on fiction and ethics.

I get the impression that Woody Allen paid attention to his philosophy 
classes at NYU before he had to leave while Martin Scorsese probably 
only took film courses seriously. Allen, at times amusing but in general 
a pretty mediocre filmmaker by my lights) seems to be giving a somewhat 
superficial illustration of a philosophical issue in a film like Crimes 
and Misdemeanors. I have a sense that Martin Scorsese, at NYU a few 
years later, probably put did less philosophical work in coursework but 
at times deals with philosophical issues directly, thickly, as if he is 
working out the issues (for example, individualism/communitarianism, 
especially in the early semi-autobiographical films) directly in sound 
and images (Bresson would be another.) rather than just illustrating 
them. These films tend to serve as thick thought experiments about the 
issue rather than illustrations.

Recently, in a philosophy course on the Western,  found strong thick 
counterparts to this opposition, especially in the form of the thin 
paradox of prisoner's dilemma in Mann's The Naked Spur and Aldrich's 
Vera Cruz. Or interesting relations between Locke's theory of property 
and Red River. Etc. Most of the textbooks on that try to use film in 
philosophical contexts that I've seen tend to reduce the complexity of 
the films, thin them out (or use thin films like Allens' to start), and 
thus make them illustrations of the issues. (At times on The Simpsons 
one can almost sense the writers going back to their old college 
textbooks for plot devices.) Peter French tries to come to terms with 
the Western in his book Cowboy Metaphysics but he engages in thinning 
out complexities and is very insensitive to the filmic aspects of the 
films; a bad example in my (most futile) attempts to get students to 
write philosophically-informed papers that go beyond what could be done 
from a plot description or a screenplay.

j

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