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/////////////// F I L M - P H I L O S O P H Y
///////// International Salon-Journal
//////////////////// ISSN 1466-4615
//////// PO Box 26161, London SW8 4WD
///////////// http://www.film-philosophy.com
1 November 2004
Film-Philosophy is 8 years old today.
So just a short note to mark our birthday, and offer a reminder of our reason to be.
Founded in November 1996, Film-Philosophy is a 'salon-journal': an international para-academic 24-hour live-event version of specialised academic publishing. The journal texts, which are published one at a time through the email salon as well as on the website, exist ultimately in order to provoke the international discussion that is so unique to the internet -- the texts are there to be completed or continued by you members in an ongoing/endless conversation.
The survival of a new-born academic interdisciplinary field depends on how well it does actually create a new type of study. Cavell has written that philosophers who write about film risk the pleasure of an 'identity crisis'. Perhaps philosophy needs to work more *for* film studies to re-balance the weight of writings that simplistically search film dramas for philosophical illustrations? Do we approach 'film philosophy' as a new subject to be criticised and defended, or is it not better to indicate, to encourage, a less explicit, *more fluid conjoin*, allowing 'philosophicalness' where it is apparent and needed, rather than just where identifiable philosophical problems are implied or explicitly covered. As Deleuze writes: 'I was able to write on cinema, not by right of reflection, but when philosophical problems led me to seek answers in cinema, which itself then relaunched other problems.'
For example, film offers our first experience of an *other* experience (not simply the experience of the film camera, as it were). Thus our understanding of our world can be informed and changed by this other way of experiencing the world, this other view of the world. The epistemological difference is the key to the problem and lesson -- and, for Pudovkin, the key to understanding film as art: 'Between the natural event and its appearance on the screen there is a marked difference. It is exactly this difference that makes the film an art'. In one sense the world 'taken' by film is immediately transfigured, but also it might be argued that there is a certain cinematic slice of the world that appears -- that when the camera is turned-over a certain kind of reality pushes its way to the front, like a star-struck wannabe. This cinematic world was noted by Walter Benjamin, who saw that 'a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye', and Ricciotto Canudo, writing in 1923, saw that film presents and must exactly develop, 'the extraordinary and striking faculty of *representing immateriality*'. Film presents (reveals) moments (slow or close or backwards or linked) that we could not ourselves experience normally, and Eisenstein is also moved by a further dimension of cinematic duration: 'what is spatially unrepresentable in three-dimensional space and only emerges and exists in the fourth dimension (three plus time)'. All of which recalls the words of Emile Vuillermoz in 1912, who remarked that cinema produces a 'superreality' which may be 'more intense than the truth'.
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