In Part I of this book I introduce some of the new approaches to philosophising on film, which I have dubbed the analytic-cognitivist paradigm, analysing the related strands of its critique of the preceding model of film theorising, so-called ‘Grand Theory’. This approach has produced a host of powerful theories addressing philosophical, psychological and aesthetic aspects of film (see Livingston and Plantinga 2009). In Chapter 1, I examine the influential critique of ‘Grand Theory’ developed during the 1990s by David Bordwell, Noël Carroll, Richard Allen, Murray Smith and a host of other theorists. Underlying this critique is a dispute between competing ways of doing philosophy, associated with the vexed analytic/‘Continental’ philosophy divide (see Critchley 2001; Glendinning 2006; Sinnerbrink 2010). After addressing the critique of ‘Grand Theory’, I examine Carroll’s philosophy of film (his ‘dialectical cognitivism’), which argues against ‘medium essentialism’ (the idea that film has a definable medium that would determine aesthetic style and value); against interpretation (which conflates film theory with film criticism); and against the ‘film as language’ thesis (that language provides an appropriate model for theorising film). I also consider Bordwell’s related critique of film hermeneutics and of speculative film theory, suggesting that there are problems with Bordwell’s critique of the hermeneutic (interpretative) approach to film. Although generating a rich array of new theoretical work, the analytic-cognitivist turn can also be challenged for its sometimes ‘reductionist’ approach to the complex aesthetic, hermeneutic and ideological dimensions of film. In good dialectical fashion, the challenge is to incorporate theoretical innovations in the new approaches, yet retain what remains valuable in the older paradigms. The aim, in short, is to avoid both reductionism and dogmatism (the bugbear of so-called ‘Grand Theory’).

As Adrian Martin observes (2006), every 15 years or so film studies seem to undergo a distinctive kind of theoretical ‘turn’. From the psychoanalytic turn of the 1960s and 1970s through the historiographic turn of the 1980s and 1990s, we now find ourselves, Martin remarks, in the midst of a ‘philosophic turn’ that was sparked by Deleuze’s Cinema books in France and Cavell’s works in the United States (2006: 76). In the 15 years or more since Martin’s observation, we still appear to be working through this philosophical turn (see Elsaesser 2019; Rawls, Neiva and Gouveia 2019). As Martin remarks, the Deleuzian turn was followed by ‘various certified philosophers exploring their passions for cinema – Bernard Stiegler, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Giorgio Agamben, and Jacques Rancière, among others’ (2006: 76). To explain this ‘philosophical turn’ in film theory, some philosophers have cited the general cultural popularity of film, its pedagogical potential (particularly for teaching philosophy) and the rise of cognitivist approaches in psychology and philosophy of mind (see Carroll 2008; Gaut 2010; Shaw 2008). Although these are all relevant factors, the most obvious reasons for the turn were institutional and theoretical: the collapse of what Bordwell and Carroll (1996) called ‘Grand Theory’ – 1970s and 1980s film theory that combined psychoanalytic, semiotic and ideologico-critical perspectives – and its replacement by historicist, culturalist and media-oriented approaches. In the so-called ‘theoretical vacuum’ that followed the demise of ‘Grand Theory’ and the cultural-historicist turn, so Carroll claims, philosophy offered the theoretical resources required to renew the ‘classical’ problems of film theory that had been left in abeyance by the previous paradigm (see Carroll 1988a, 1988b).

Noël Carroll’s critique of ‘Grand Theory’ targets its uncritical commitment to eclectic strains of ‘Continental’ philosophy (1996: 37–68). Indeed, Carroll identifies what we might call ‘five obstructions’, pace Lars von Trier, to what he argued were more rationally defensible ways of theorising on film, difficulties that stem, he claims, from the flawed foundation of ‘Continental’ theory: