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Forgive me only for sporadically following this conversation - and thus likely for adding tuppence that is neither on point nor original.

I tend to agree with Elizabeth Robinson's comment (for which she should not apologise), but I wonder that it becomes a bit vague:

"A film allows (or can allow) the viewer to see something from a perspective other than her own (though complicatedly still within her own). The film provides events framed in a way distinct from the way we would frame them alone. I think this is part of the filmic quality of philosophy. Both film and philosophy can serve as a tool for framing human experience."

By this rationale, anything that offers a novel perspective is philosophical. I am not against this per se. But surely literature, graphic art, music, etc, all achieve this, too? So can a conversation (if anyone remembers what those are). Oh, and those internets things sometimes seem to do this, too. In fact, one might conceivably argue that since we are time-based creatures who travel forwards through time in such a fashion that we never see the same thing twice, and thus always see ever so slightly different things from 'moment' to 'moment' then the whole of existence is 'philosophical'...

One might also say that the translation of experience into language - permitting the assumptions necessary to make this statement - involves a modification of the experience itself, such that the linguistic version of the experience is a novel perspective on the actual experience, meaning that all linguistic expression is 'philosophical,' too (again, permitting assumptions about thought and language).

I am not against this, either. But if this is what one wanted to call 'philosophy', then cinema has no special relationship with it - it's simply one of myriad philosophy toys, as it were. (I think I am crediting a Stephen Prince article by using that term. A good one, too (as usual, of course) - it came out in Projections: Journal for Movies and Mind last year.)

Personally, I can dig Deleuze and Guattari's argument - provided I capisce it - that novel thought is key to philsophy, even though many don't dug dat. This definition of philosophy does enable arguments along the lines of cinema as de facto philosophy, perhaps even of a philosophical universe.

But for those who like the safety of a nice, clear definition (rather than ambiguity, which is necessary precisely to do that sweet D&G-style 'new thinking' sophophily), this won't wash.

What intrigues me perhaps more than the answer to this question is: why this question? Politically, does film studies use philo to legitimise itself? And does philo use film as a hip replacement?

To me, it speaks of the major distrust (mistrust?) of interdisciplinary work when such a big deal has to be made out of whether one discipline can talk to the other. Well, can they? Yes. So why not just let it happen?

Well, there's money and ugly things like trying to survive in an environment that encourages hostility between disciplines and, thereby, the delimitation of disciplinarity (plenty of counter-examples aside, of course, and I probably am no innocent party in this, having written vaguely chopper-esque comments on this matter in academic journals [that, fortunately for me, barely anyone reads], so I recognise I am as much the problem as a solution, and feel bad about this)...

To move further away from the original question: I've been teaching a module this term on digital cinema. But being a combination of dumb and naïve, I am still waylaid by philosophical questions, and I bring these up in class: has cinema infested human thought in such a way that we think 'cinematically'? Does the digital image's lack of an 'index' really matter? Is it reflective of a particular worldview that a shot can pass from inside to outside a human body without a cut and in a seemingly photorealistic fashion?

Feedback to me from my students, however, has so far resoundingly repeated several times: there is too much irrelevant philosophy in this class (can we go back to talking about how rad and awesome the special effects were in Immortals, please - and forget that stupid Socrates quotation they put in at the beginning of the film? Oh, and can we please not watch any more of those digitally shot films by Abbas Kiarostami and Jia Zhangke, please...? We signed up for Cloverfield...)...

I don't 'blame' my students for this resentment at my being a boring fart interested in dumb philosophical issues (and boring 'festival' films) when they've got lives to lead and jobs to get that some philosophising is not - as far as they can tell - going to help them achieve.

But the lack of interdisciplinarity in their thought (anything 'off topic' is 'irrelevant') surely only filters through from elsewhere - a culture that speaks a good game of encouraging interdisciplinary work, but which heavily questions it when it sniffs it.

I managed to go to bed with Timaeus this weekend, and greatly enjoyed the experience. I also was reading some work on Marx by Louis Althusser in the week. I got really excited about both - and wondered how I could bring them into class. Along the lines: wouldn't it be great just to *teach* stuff - with no agenda - and forgetting that I'm probably not allowed to teach Plato because I've forgotten how to read the original Greek (ahem, that's right, I used to be able to), and haven't read several hundred years' worth of work ON Plato in addition to this work BY Plato? A module that took in many disciplines, from the religious texts to Darwin to Freud to Marx to Plato to Eisenstein to whatever...

(The best thing my doctoral supervisor ever said to me was: go away and read Capital and Les paradis artificiels by Baudelaire - utterly 'irrelevant' and stuff that I've rarely if ever quoted since, but it made me feel something that I had not really felt before: intellectually free, to read, do research, to go into texts that were not on my immediate reading list, but in search of perhaps finding novel connections that no one else had yet seen - something I try to bring to all my work - in fact, I don't see the point of [the research side of] my job if I do NOT do this.)

Maybe such interdisciplinary modules do exist (I've heard stories about people like Nozick teaching modules in certain ways akin to this)... But I've not seen it for myself. So I pose now a question: would this work? Does it exist? Could I do a module on Plato and film? If not, why not?

(My real question is: could I teach a different module every time I teach, a module that is about the students and I learning the same stuff at the same time - going all over the shop in search of knowledge and understanding and writing up about what we find...?)

(By the way, an appeal that now really is off topic: I'd really like to a direct a contemporary film version of Phaedrus starring Sir Ian McKellen and St Stephen Fry, shot in Tuscany. A bit like Kiarostami's Certified Copy, only interesting. [Gags - I like(d) Certified Copy - but Kiarostami needs the odd piece of low brow spuzz in his films, otherwise they remain too, er, Platonic in their unrelenting high-mindedness...] Anyone want to fund this?)
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