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Firstly, it is fascinating to see how a topic changes and its name changes
in the to and fro of discussion. This shows something about the social
evolution of culture.

Secondly, like Trish and Jon, I too think that experience in film and video
production is important for thinking in and about film.

Thirdly, to Nathan, I think that narrative art has always been a medium for
philosophical reflection, aesthetic and ethical, and political. Earlier in
this discussion The Circle came up with the comment that its images
represented a kind of deterministic political space. As a reflection on
space I would cite the geographical crypticness of the town in The Wind Will
Carry Us, or of the big grassy hill in Thin Red Line or the daily route and
routine of the protagonist of Rosetta, etc. Film can show space in a way
that is philosophically revealing and poetically revealing at once, and has
been doing so for a long time.

But I hear the voice of your interlocutor and I am reminded of a line in
Tristram Shandy (surely a philosophical fiction if ever there was one)
that - Philosophy is not built upon tales. Though no doubt somewhat ironic,
narrative has always been something that philosophy has distinguished itself
from or something that it has treated as its (non reflexive) object.

I certainly dont think there is necessarily a difference between film and
philosophy, but there is a distinction I would like to make between
narrative art film and another kind of film that may not have been invented,
although I suspect that it has been and that my experience has been to
limited to fiction and narrative documantary -namely film as philosophical
essay, treatise or argument. In such a film we would think, as Deleuze puts
it, in film, but not necessarily in narrative concepts. What kinds of
concepts might occur to us? Perhaps such film thought, in being conceived
and communicated in moving images rather than linguistically might not
strike one as philosophy, although I think such films should also have sound
and therefore speech at their philosophical disposal. Such films,if they
exist, may generally have been consigned to the genre  *experimental*, as if
these artists (or philosophers?) are working on cinematic expressions that
may later be useful for the narrative artists and the industry.

Can anyone cite an instance of such a film?

Ross