The Malick Viewed

Is there any Cinematic Heir to Cavell’s Philosophical Thinking Today?

Abstract

The question of the relation between Film and philosophy has been at the center of many intellectual debates since the foundation of cinema. It has been paraphrased and articulated in many disciplines such as Philosophy of Film, Film-Philosophy, Philosophy of Motion Pictures, Philosophy of Moving Images, even Film Theory. Nevertheless, as much as the technical aspects of the movies developed rapidly, the philosophical questions around it became more and more specific and the answers became more fallible by the end of the day. If you could agree before with some of the ontological conclusions of Bazin, Deleuze, Badiou or Cavell about celluloid-based Film, you certainly cannot share that agreement to generalize that to the kind of digital imagery that we call ‘Film’ today, nor can you justify the Hologram or 3D IMAX footage as constituents of a motion picture. The irony is that the old question, ‘what is Film?’, is as often and as rapidly revised as the question, “what is philosophy?”.