Clark Thanks for your detailed response to my own, slightly more abrupt(!), response. I'll try to expand upon them here: (First, a brief word on gender in _Fight CLub_: isn't it the case that the splitting of 'Jack's' character begins at the very moment he sees Marla walk through several lanes of traffic, oblivious to the onrushing cars? His entire project, the construction of his alter-ego and the misogynist ethos of the fight club, stems from an envious relation to this apparently unattainable woman... Any gender analysis of the film would have to being there.) Upon reflection, what I'm questioning is the general tendency to give a proper name (e.g., 'Nietzsche') as a means of reading the content of a film. Using 'Nietzsche' as a diegetic tool for reading _Fight Club_ or _2001_, as you show, can lead to interesting parallels and questions... But what does this tell us about 'film' or 'philosophy'? Ultimately, I think that this kind of approach will always be a lot easier with a text like _Thus Spake Zarathustra_ (a narrative text) than, say, a thetic text like _Human, All too Human_ or even _The Birth of Tragedy_ (which I don't think would allow us to equate technology with the Apollinian, as you argue - what about the fundamental Schopenhauerean thesis of the book: that art is required to make existence bearable). This same question could be extended to other philosophical voices. E.g., 'applying' Nietzsche to _2001_ is going to be a hell of a lot easier (but possibly just as irrelevant) than reading Hegel's _Phenomenology of Spirit_ with regard to, I don't know, let's say _La Haine_ - in spite of the fact that Hegel has far more interesting things to say about the nature of understanding, violence and conflict. (This doesn't mean I think that Hegel helps us understand Kassowitz's film, though.) The question is: what is the nature of our claim when we use a philosopher or a philosophical text to 'authorise' a particular reading of a film? This leads me to the underlying uncertainty that triggered my initial response to your email: to what extent can one 'pick'n'choose' elements and by employing them necessarily out of context, retain any meaningful sense of the ideas? (Here lie the twin pitfalls of loose generalisation and constrictive nitpicking... - I know that I've been guilty of both! - but then again, don't these two risks form the co-ordinates for *any* philosophical debate? This question needs to be examined...) As I think you originally pointed out in the email I quoted, existential readings of film seem to spring most readily to hand. Why is that? Is it because it gives us a readily accessible set of themes, a set of tools that we can bring to bear upon the cinema? Once again, why would that be the case? It is as if we needed some structural support, or authority (this is ironic with respect to existentialism, to say the least!), to validate the meaningfulness - that is, the *authenticity* - of what we have to say about a given film. I think perhaps that, instead, what we need to exploit a certain *lack* of authority in the realm of thinking film, that what we need to think *through* is the material specificity of film/cinema, by which I mean the particular ways in which films differ from all other art forms. Deleuze has an interesting way of putting this, which has consequences for thinking about/through film: '[cinema] is not the same as the other arts, which aim rather at something unreal through the world, but makes the world itself something unreal or a narrative [récit]. With the cinema, it is the world which becomes its own image, and not an image which becomes world.' (_Cinema 1: The Movement Image_, p.57) In cinema, the world becomes image: the world is not represented, like in a painting or a poem or a novel; rather, it *is* an image. (This is by no means a straightforward statement, of course. I think it's problematic...) However, it's not accidental that Deleuze's argument here is directed against phenomenology. What we get, he argues (via Bergson), is not the intentional directedness of consciousness ('all consciousness is consciousness *of* something: i.e., the film-spectator as illuminating ray of meaning), but rather the idea that 'all consciousness *is* something' - i.e., the film *happens* without me, it *is* a ray of light upon a screen. Here, the 'secondariness' of the art-form raises real problems for phenomenology's task of bringing to light the 'natural' attitude to the world. But from this *duplication* of intentionality - i.e., seeing through another's (the camera's) 'seeing' - thinking through film (philosophically or otherwise) might begin... (In fact, your own extended comments on phenomenology make the case here: it tends to double up pre-existing conceptual structures, rather than pre-exist them. In that case, coming back to my original question - 'why oppose "phenomenological investigations" and "formal conceptual analysis"?' - it might be more helpful to think of phenomenological/eidetic method precisely as a kind of conceptual analysis - e.g., a critical analysis of the presuppositions and relations held within the concept of 'perceiving'. In this way, phenomenology can actually engage with the world ('the thing encountered'), rather than just set up another one.) But I don't want to sound as if I think Deleuze provides the answers/model here, because I don't. What he does, I think, is take seriously the idea that philosophy only becomes productive if we cease to think of it as a domain of ideas existing 'outside' (fixed/eternal) of other realms of knowledge/practice. Which brings me back to the question of whether film can *do* philosophy. My point is simply that it seems an awful waste of the possibilities of philosophical thought to limit discourses about 'film-philosophy' to instances of diegetic analysis (although I am in no way disparaging this activity, honest!). So when do we *do* philosophy? How is it done? And *who* does philosophy? In whose *name* is it performed - i.e., "here, I am now 'philosophising'"? I don't know, and that's why I'm posing the question, because it troubles me... I've just noticed that Nathan has raised very similar questions vis-ŕ-vis this debate: does the relation of film and philosophy lie simply in the former being textual examples for the latter (such as teaching aids - I know that I use them like that all the time)? Like Nathan (and Stephen Mulhall, and Simon Critchley, and others besides - I won't mention Deleuze again...), I want to make the case that, on the contrary, cinema puts philosophy to the test. (Why else do we subscribe to this list!?) I'm sorry if this is a bit rushed (it's still far too sketchy, I admit) - that's the problem with writing after a good bottle of wine - but I'd like to think that we could extend this discussion further. For example, I think Levinas' modifications to phenomenology, although unwieldy around the question of art (cf. 'Reality and its Shadow'), might raise interesting questions/directions for the 'duplication' of intentionality (his project does spring from Husserl's 5th Cartesian Meditation on inter-subjectivity, after all). Still not sure I've got anywhere, Richard