Cinematic Ethics

Exploring Ethical Experience through Film

Robert Sinnerbrink

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317336105
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

How do movies evoke and express ethical ideas? What role does our emotional involvement play in this process? What makes the aesthetic power of cinema ethically significant?

Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience through Film addresses these questions by examining the idea of cinema as a medium of ethical experience with the power to provoke emotional understanding and philosophical thinking.

In a clear and engaging style, Robert Sinnerbrink examines the key philosophical approaches to ethics in contemporary film theory and philosophy using detailed case studies of cinematic ethics across different genres, styles, and filmic traditions.

Written in a lucid and lively style that will engage both specialist and non-specialist readers, this book is ideal for use in the academic study of philosophy and film. Key features include annotated suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter and a filmography of movies useful for teaching and researching cinematic ethics.

Part I

Cinema and/as ethics

1 Cinematic ethics

Film as a medium of ethical experience

Because cinema has its centre in the gesture and not in the image, it belongs essentially to the realm of ethics and politics (and not simply to that of aesthetics).

Giorgio Agamben (1992/2000, 55)

Giorgio Agamben, a philosopher only occasionally mentioned in contemporary film-philosophy, offers here an acute observation about cinema’s ethical (and political) significance. Although at one level film clearly belongs to aesthetics or the philosophy of art, the more challenging thesis he proposes is that it belongs essentially to the realms of ethics and politics, a thesis explored by many thinkers and filmmakers over the last century or so. For cinema, as Agamben suggests, is not simply an audio-visual medium centred on the capture, composition, and projection of moving images; it is a medium concerned with exploring what he calls the ‘gesture’: that expressive, non-linguistic, corporeal aspect of human action which remains irreducible to our intentional aims, instrumental goals, or attempts at defining through language. If cinema is concerned with gestures, in all their performative ambiguity and disruption of meaning, as well as with images, actions, emotions, and experience, then aesthetics must join forces with ethics (and politics) in order for us to understand the medium’s philosophical as well as cultural-historical significance. Taking a step beyond the aesthetics of cinema, in short, we can explore the idea of cinema as ethics (and politics): its potential to evoke ethical experience and invite philosophical reflection. That is the purpose and aim of this book, and the contribution I hope it can make to contemporary film theory.

Two perspectives on cinema and ethics

In Giuseppe Tornatore’s nostalgic memory picture Cinema Paradiso (1988), Salvatore, the film’s filmmaker protagonist, recalls the excitement he experienced discovering the movies as a child. He becomes fascinated, even obsessed with them, helping the village projectionist Alfredo [Philippe Noiret] work his projector at the local cinema. The young Salvatore [Salvatore Cascio] witnesses the village priest’s ham-fisted acts of censorship, watching with glee as Father Adelfio [Leopoldo Trieste] scrutinizes each new film in private, ringing a bell when he finds ‘immoral’ love scenes that Alfredo will later have to cut. Salvatore is transported by these images, especially the love scenes, and remains fascinated by the mysterious mechanics and magic of the cinema. He develops a lifelong passion for film, learning to use a 16mm camera, and develops a friendship with Alfredo that leads to his leaving the village to pursue a career as a filmmaker. In the final scene, the now adult Salvatore [Jacques Perrin], a successful movie director who has returned to the village for Alfredo’s funeral, watches a montage of excised love scenes and screen kisses, a parting gift from the old projectionist, and is transported by this nostalgic vision. In addition to nostalgia, the viewer has the pleasure of a communal cinephilia, acknowledging the power of cinema as a shared form of cultural experience. This nostalgic recollection of Salvatore’s life story suggests how a communal experience of cinema – shared by the village filmgoers, a raucous, demonstrative audience crossing barriers of age and class – expresses a moral-cultural good in danger of being lost, with Salvatore’s beloved ‘Nuovo Cinema Paradiso’ due to be demolished to make way for a car park.

Contrast this uplifting film fable with Alex [Malcolm McDowell], the violent gang leader and charismatic narrator of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971). Alex’s story is a cautionary moral and political tale, exploring the limits of moral autonomy, political authority, and what to do when individual freedom clashes with societal expectations (see Andersen 2014). He explains how his aesthetic passion for Beethoven, his cinematic immersion in the ‘feelies’, and bouts of random ultraviolence, were ‘cured’ through forced exposure to images of sex and violence coupled with electroshock therapy – a visual, visceral, and moral re-education that robs Alex of the capacity to ‘enjoy’ his former sociopathic and aesthetic pursuits. Far from being a source of communal cinephilia, shared cultural memory, or moral-ethical value, cinematic images, in Alex’s perverse and violent world, are both the cause and cure of a socially-sanctioned violence and anti-social perversity. At the same time, we are invited to watch and respond to Alex’s narration – and Kubrick’s depiction – of his rebellious, anti-social activities, as well as the state’s brutal and cynical attempts to harness, ‘cure’, and exploit Alex for its own political purposes. That Kubrick presents this confronting moral-political fable in the form of a compelling work of cinema only underlines our complicity as spectators of such a film and the ambiguity of its engagement with the philosophical and moral-political questions it raises.

These films present two extremes in the way the cinema can be figured in relation to ethics: as an ‘innocent’ form of communal storytelling, sensory-imaginative experience, and shared cultural memory; and as a ‘corrupting’ moral and political force, whose audiovisual powers can desensitize viewers, even incline them to violence.¹ They reflect opposing views concerning the morally corrupting and ethically educative potential of cinema, views that find their correlates in the history of film theory. On the one hand, there is the persistent cultural concern with the psychologically damaging, morally corrupting, or ideologically manipulative effects of cinema, and on the other, a utopian vision of cinema’s psychological, cultural, even politically transformative power to question social reality and empower us to experience and see the world anew. How do these two opposing views of cinema relate to each other? How should we conceptualize cinema’s power not only to reflect social, cultural, and moral values but to exercise our moral imaginations and deepen our ethical experience? How might film contribute to philosophy, indeed to ethical understanding, via cinematic means? This book seeks to address these questions and to explore a conception of cinema as a medium of ethical experience, one with the capacity not only to enhance our grasp of philosophical approaches to ethics, and to exercise our capacity for moral perception and ethical understanding, but to provoke philosophical thinking through experiential, which is to say aesthetic and cinematic, means.

Despite the flourishing of philosophy of film in recent decades (see Elsaesser and Hagener 2009, 185–187), there have been few explicit theoretical investigations of the relationship between ethics and cinema (see Choi and Frey 2014, Jones and Vice 2011, Sinnerbrink 2014, Tersman 2009). That film has an ethical potential – for exploring moral issues, ethically-charged situations, or moral ‘thought experiments’ – is clear, however, from the way in which philosophical film theorists have explored cinema from a variety of philosophical perspectives (Flory 2008, Mulhall 2008, Shaw 2012, Wartenberg 2007). More recently, theorists have begun to explore the ways in which cinema can be read alongside philosophical approaches to ethics, or how certain filmmakers can be understood as engaging in ethics through film (Cooper 2006, Downing and Saxton 2010, Stadler 2008, Wheatley 2009). Indeed, film theory, philosophy of film, and film-philosophy,² have not only begun to explore the question of ethics, but could be described as undergoing an ‘ethical turn’ – along with other areas of the humanities – in reflecting upon cinema as a distinctive way of thinking through ethical concerns (see Choi and Frey 2014).

This is an important development that will enable the tradition of film theory concerned with politics and ideology to be revived and re-appropriated in new ways. It will also broaden the reach of philosophical engagement with film beyond abstract questions of ontology and metaphysics as well as more technical and formal questions concerning epistemology and film aesthetics (while recognizing the intimate relations that obtain between these different aspects of the philosophy of film). Beyond sophisticated questions of ontology, aesthetics, or spectatorship, one could say that ‘film ethics’ describes the more culturally familiar sense in which moviegoers might think of cinema as having philosophical significance. When non-academic film viewers describe a film as ‘philosophical’ they generally mean it deals with moral or ethical rather than metaphysical or aesthetic themes. Yet philosophers, on the whole, have given the question of ethics and film scant attention, even within aesthetics, philosophy of film, and film theory. Indeed, we still need to analyse philosophically the ways in which cinema can be related to ethics, map conceptually the film-ethics relationship, and explain how particular films might both express and evoke moral reflection. This kind of inquiry into cinema and ethics, as I argue in this book, opens up the possibility that cinema can be understood as a medium of ethical experience: a ‘cinematic ethics’ that brings film and philosophy together in order to cultivate an experiential approach to ethical understanding and philosophical reflection. It can even expose us to morally confronting, ethically estranging, and emotionally challenging forms of experience that demand some kind of philosophical response on our part: an effort of thinking to which we might otherwise remain oblivious or that we might otherwise prefer to ignore.

The idea of ‘cinematic ethics’

Cinema and philosophy have always enjoyed a close, if sometimes fraught, relationship. From early film theorists such as Hugo Münsterberg, classical theorists such as Bazin and Kracauer, semiotic and psychoanalytic theorists such as Baudry and Metz, to contemporary philosophers of film such as Stanley Cavell, Gilles Deleuze, and Noël Carroll, the exploration of the relationship between philosophy and film inevitably broaches the question of ethics (and politics), the possibility that cinema might have an important ethical dimension. Nonetheless, it is striking how few philosophers have explicitly addressed the question of film and ethics, despite widespread acknowledgement of cinema’s philosophical as well as ethico-political potential.

So how are film and philosophy related? French philosopher Alain Badiou (2013, 208–211) provides a helpful conceptual map by identifying five ways in which philosophy – or philosophically-oriented film theory – has approached thinking through cinema. As Badiou observes, the first way of thinking through the film-philosophy relationship is to commence with a theoretical inquiry into the moving image; hence this approach is defined by questions of ontology (the ontology of cinematic images, reflections on representation in cinema, the problem of realism, and so on). Bazin’s theoretical and aesthetic reflections on cinema (1967, 1971), focusing on the ontology of the cinematographic image and the problem of moral and aesthetic realism, are exemplary cases of this way of thinking. The second concerns the problem of time (and of movement) raised by the cinematographic image: moving images are temporal phenomena that provide a novel means of capturing and exploring time in a manner that both emulates and goes beyond ordinary temporal, perceptual experience. Phenomenological approaches to cinema have become important representatives of this kind of theoretical perspective on the moving image (see Sobchack 1992).

The third approach, prevalent in early film theory, was to theorize cinema in relation to the other arts (painting, theatre, photography, drama, literature, music, and so on), exploring questions such as whether the ‘seventh art’ was indeed a new kind of art form, what relations it bore to earlier arts, whether it could be understood as synthesizing elements from previous art forms, and so on (Badiou 2013, 210). Here one thinks of early and classical film theorists such as Hugo Münsterberg (2002 [1916]), Rudolf Arnheim (1957), and Bazin (1967, 1971) but continuing today in philosophical debates, for example, on the relationship between photography and cinema and the related question of the ontological ‘transparency’ of moving images (see Cavell 1979, Scruton 1981). The fourth approach concerns the complex relationship between art and non-art that is introduced by the cinema (Badiou 2013, 210–211), which has always been a ‘hybrid’ art form combining elements of popular entertainment (circus, burlesque, sideshows, photography) with elements borrowed from ‘higher’ culture (painting, drama, literature, opera, music) (see Rancière 2006). Given cinema’s character as the technological, mechanized, industrialized art form par excellence (especially with the shift to digital media), we can see this trend appearing in those important strands of film and media theory that explore the relationships between technology, aesthetic experience, and cultural-historical meaning.

Finally, the fifth way of conceptualizing the relationship between film and philosophy, according to Badiou, is by way of its ethical significance (2013, 211). Drawing on both mythic and literary narratives, cinema has always been an art form concerned with the human figure in action, the individual in relation to the community, the human being against nature, or the interpersonal world of psychological and emotional conflict.³ As Badiou remarks, with the development of narrative cinema, this ethical and moral dynamic was readily translated into the great film genres: ‘[t]he major genres of cinema, the most coded ones, such as the melodrama and the western, are in fact ethical genres, genres that are addressed to humanity so as to offer it a moral mythology’ (2013, 211). In this respect, the movies are heir to the moral and cultural functions of the theatre, taking over its role as an open, ‘democratic’ sphere of the artistic, even mythological, exploration of ethical, socio-cultural, and ideological themes. At the same time, cinema develops its own forms of narration and myth-making, creating genres that can challenge and question, but also justify and confirm, all sorts of significant cultural values, ideological beliefs, and ethical forms of meaning.

Badiou’s characterization of the five ways of conceptualizing the film-philosophy relationship is illuminating and helps makes sense of the often confusing accounts of how film can be understood as philosophical. It is also to our purpose that he identifies ethics as one of the fundamental ways to think about the relationship between film and philosophy: to explore how the distinctive features of cinema – the powerful syntheses of images, of appearances and reality, time and memory, perception and experience, individual and community, that it makes possible – open up new ways of thinking that invite further philosophical reflection and ethical engagement. Nonetheless, one might query Badiou’s account of cinema’s ‘ethical’ dimension for its exclusive focus on the ‘heroic’ aspect of classical narrative film, its focus on ‘the great figures of humanity in action’, its presentation of the world as ‘a kind of universal stage of action and its confrontation with common values’ (Badiou 2013, 239). In short, one can question here Badiou’s rather narrow focus on the narrative, representational, and dramatic elements of popular narrative film as distinct from its more aesthetic, specifically cinematic dimensions.

To be sure, it is not hard to see how cinema retains this popular emphasis on heroes in a post-heroic age, its dramatization of common values in conflict – ‘the great American battle between Good and Evil’ (Badiou 2013, 239–240) – its valorization of the actions of heroic individuals over the power of thought or the virtues of contemplation. At the same time, however, even popular genres and forms of narrative cinema have explored aesthetic dimensions of cinematic presentation that can intensify, undermine, question, or ironize the narrative ‘content’ and thematic emphasis on values that Badiou identifies: one thinks, for example, of film noir, certain kinds of Western and crime drama (Ford, Mann, Hawks), melodrama (Minnelli, Sirk), even comedy and romantic comedy (Chaplin, Keaton, Sturges, Cukor) as genres whose ‘formal’ aesthetic features can stand in tension with or even ironize their ostensible narrative content. Certain kinds of cinema, moreover, have questioned this ‘heroic’ form of narrative, and sought to present reality, including nature, society, and history, from multiple, ambiguous, often conflicting perspectives, showing us different, alternative, even inarticulable aspects of our experience of the world rather than directing u...