Filmed Thought

Cinema as Reflective Form

Robert B. Pippin

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780226672007, 9780226671956
• eBook ISBN: 9780226672144
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

With the rise of review sites and social media, films today, as soon as they are shown, immediately become the topic of debates on their merits not only as entertainment, but also as serious forms of artistic expression. Philosopher Robert B. Pippin, however, wants us to consider a more radical proposition: film as thought, as a reflective form. Pippin explores this idea through a series of perceptive analyses of cinematic masterpieces, revealing how films can illuminate, in a concrete manner, core features and problems of shared human life.

Filmed Thought examines questions of morality in Almodóvar's Talk to Her, goodness and naïveté in Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, love and fantasy in Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, politics and society in Polanski's Chinatown and Malick's The Thin Red Line, and self-understanding and understanding others in Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place and in the Dardennes brothers' oeuvre. In each reading, Pippin pays close attention to what makes these films exceptional as technical works of art (paying special attention to the role of cinematic irony) and as intellectual and philosophical achievements. Throughout, he shows how films offer a view of basic problems of human agency from the inside and allow viewers to think with and through them. Captivating and insightful, Filmed Thought shows us what it means to take cinema seriously not just as art, but as thought, and how this medium provides a singular form of reflection on what it is to be human.

INDEX

3:10 to Yuma (dir. Daves), 166

400 Blows, The (dir. Truffaut), 237

acknowledgment, 177–85, 232n3, 236, 253

action, 21–22, 178n14, 231–56

Adorno, Theodor, 16, 99, 107–8, 112

À la recherche du temps perdu (Proust), 33, 123

Aldrich, Robert, 100, 204n3

All about My Mother (dir. Almodóvar), 53

All I Desire (dir. Sirk), 117

All That Heaven Allows (dir. Sirk), 14, 16, 17, 117–44

Almodóvar, Pedro, 9, 13, 49–66; All about My Mother, 53; Bad Education, 52, 53–54, 56, 62n13, 64; Dark Habits, 53, 64; Live Flesh, 53, 64; Talk to Her, 9, 13, 49–66; Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, 53; What Have I Done to Deserve This?, 53; Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, 53

America, 16, 19, 69, 93, 109, 119, 121–22, 124n21, 126, 130–31, 144, 158, 194n36, 212n20

Andrews, Dana, 103n6

Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 196n40

“Annum per annum” (Pärt), 213

Antigone, 88

Apocalypse Now (dir. Coppola), 204

Aristotle, 10, 242

Attack! (dir. Aldrich), 204n3

Au dos de nos images (Luc Dardenne), 237, 244

Augustine, 17n12

Au hasard Balthazar (dir. Bresson), 237

authenticity, 119, 121, 125, 134, 137, 140–42

Bad Education (dir. Almodóvar), 52, 53–54, 56, 62n13, 64

Badlands (dir. Malick), 206n8

Balzac, Honoré de, 123

Barry Lyndon (dir. Kubrick), 118

Barthes, Roland, 238

Bausch, Pina, 54, 55, 60, 62–63

Bazin, André, 157

Bertolucci, Bernardo, 166n39

Bicycle Thi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• SECTION I  ·  CINEMA AS REFLECTIVE FORM
• SECTION II  ·  MORAL VARIATIONS
• SECTION III  ·  SOCIAL PATHOLOGIES
• SECTION IV  ·  IRONY & MUTUALITY
• SECTION V  ·  AGENCY & MEANING
• Acknowledgments
• Works Cited
• Index
• Footnotes