First of all, let me applaud Daniel Frampton and his contributors for putting together a smashing symposium on Mulhall's book. Their discussion has been as meaty philosophically as anything I have read this summer. As a sub-discipline of aesthetics, film-philosophy needs to spend a good deal of time in its infancy trying to define itself and its tasks. I suspect that something like Carroll's criticisms of the specificity thesis may come in here... film-philosophers will probably end up doing very much the same things that aestheticians have from the beginning. But we do need to get the conversation going on some common threads.
The question of what makes a film philosophical is indeed an intriguing one. If your conception of philosophy is Nietschean, or Rorty-an, you abandon the ideal of rationality as propositional demonstration and embrace the notion that a truly creative philosopher offers a weltanschauung, and that it is the world-view itself that is either convincing or unconvincing, in a rhetorical and sophistic sense. Philosophers are not unique in doing so (founders of states, builders of temples, and poets also erect worlds), but we are the generalists (in the Platonic and Rorty-an sense) best suited to the task.
One of the more thought-provoking articles in the upcoming edition of Film and Philosophy concerns this very question. Herbert Granger argues that merely illustrating a philosophical concept (like Woody Allen showing how one can get away with murder with a fairly clear conscience in Crimes and Misdemeanors) isn't profoundly philosophical because it doesn't further the inquiry (we all knew that, didn't we? They just don't show that very often in Hollywood. Herb's reading of Louis Malle's early classic "Le feu follet" argues that it is a genuinely philosophical investigation into the meaning of life, precisely because it refuses to simply illustrate the director's answer to this most personal of questions. Alain's desperate search for value on the day that he commits suicide is riveting because it seems so contingent. One gets the sense that he might have found love, or excellence, but that he just didn't.
Trying to be philosophical on film is a real challenge. As the recent debacle of The Matrix Reloaded demonstrates, you can't have long soliloquys that articulate abstract philosophies (summations in courtroom dramas like Compulsion may provide the only exceptions). The first Matrix was much better cinema, and much more intriguing philosophically, because it eschewed such didactic speeches. You can't just be telling morality tales or spinning metaphysical fantasies. Philosophical films (like "Le feu follet", or Renoir's "Rules of the Game") are as rare as genuine philosophers (like Nietzsche and Rorty)and great art in general, because they make significant contributions to the conversation of mankind.
Dan Shaw
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