Bernd Herzogenrath, ed., Film as Philosophy (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2017)

The turn to philosophy within Film Studies is commonly located in the early 1990s, coinciding with the publication of the English translation of Gilles Deleuze’s books on cinema (Cinema 1: The Movement-Image in 1983 and Cinema 2: The Time-Image in 1985) and the launching of two journals, Film-Philosophy in 1994 and Film and Philosophy a year later,1 at a very specific critical conjuncture. Attacks to the Anglo-American film theory that had dominated Film Studies since its formation as a discipline in its own right in the 1970s – the so-called ‘Grand Theory’ or ‘Screen Theory’ – were responded by the adoption of less opaque forms of theorizing that focused on specific research issues grounded on evidence (cognitive approaches to film studies). Others responded by moving away from theory and taking new directions towards history and the archives, while some others became concerned about the theoretical challenges posed by the new media.2 Nevertheless, critical thinking at the intersection between film and philosophy has always existed since the early years of the film medium. Not only have philosophers written about cinema but also film commentators, and later Film Studies scholars, have regularly turned to philosophical ideas in the attempt to understand cinema as a distinctive art form and experience. Film and cinema have regularly been connected to various branches of philosophy, ranging from ethics and ontology to aesthetics and phenomenology.3 More recently, ‘film-philosophy,’ now a flourishing strand of contemporary film theory and one of the many ways of inquiring about the interaction of film and philosophy, has pursued, as Robert Sinnerbrink has put it, a way of “linking the two in a shared enterprise that seeks to illuminate the one by means of the other.