as Ethics

Introduction: Film and / as Ethics Robert Sinnerbrink, Lisa Trahair SubStance, Volume 45, Number 3, 2016 (Issue 141), pp. 3-15 (Article)

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Introduction

Film and/as Ethics Robert Sinnerbrink & Lisa Trahair The relationship between film and philosophy, along with the idea of film as philosophy, has attracted widespread interest over the last decade. Film theorists and philosophers of film have explored not only the philosophical questions raised by cinema as an artform, but also the possibility that cinema might contribute to philosophical understanding or even engage in varieties of “cinematic thinking” that intersect with, without being reducible to, philosophical inquiry. Inspired by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell, many theorists are now engaged in what has come to be known as “film-philosophy,” developing philosophical insight out of their close engagement with film, and bringing philosophical concepts to bear on the aesthetic experience cinema affords. Despite the flourishing of this encounter between film and philosophy, there has been as yet comparatively little attention given to the relationship between ethics and cinema (see Choi and Frey, Cine-Ethics; Sinnerbrink, Cinematic Ethics; Terman, “Ethics”). Prior to the emergence of film-philosophy, questions about cinematic ethics came to the fore in relation to the photographic basis of the medium. André Bazin’s statement that the photograph has an irrational power to “bear away our faith” undoubtedly indicates some qualms about the ethics of the artform (14). And it is unsurprising that the first point of focus on cinematic ethics was the documentary film. The direct cinema and cinéma verité movements emerged in the wake of concerns about the ethics of the medium and its purported objectivity in representing “others,” and such movements were explicitly oriented toward developing more assuredly ethical and political means of telling stories. And there have always been filmmakers whose interest in cinema lay in its capacity to show us realities that were ethically complex. We only need to think of the cinema of Orson Welles or Stanley Kubrick to remind ourselves that ethical work has always been among cinema’s enterprises. The ascendancy of Hollywood cinema was made possible in the 1920s and 1930s by illegal and immoral monopolistic and exploitative practices that put national cinemas around the globe out of business, but such practices were actually buttressed by the implementation of the Production Code and a lot of loud talk about © Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2016

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the need for films to be moral. The assurances repeatedly given for Hollywood’s moral rectitude, even while its international ambitions meant that it avidly sought to colonize the cultural spheres of other nations, provide an obvious reason for why film studies has been more interested in unpacking the moral and political dimensions of the industry than in contemplating the ethical inquiry of some of its most revered directors. It is worth remembering that Cavell’s book on the remarriage cycle is a study of a popular film genre’s forays into finding a means to articulate the ethics of relations between men and women. Deleuze identifies ethical concerns in the European films of Carl Theodor Dreyer, Robert Bresson, Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Roberto Rossellini, and in the work of the Japanese filmmakers Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi; but these by no means delimit the field of the filmmakers of the twentieth century who took up ethical inquiry in the cinematic medium. In the fields of film criticism and film theory, the study of documentary is the most overtly ethical treatment of film but it would be remiss not to point to feminist film theory, psychoanalytic film theory, queer film theory and the study of third cinema as raising questions of ethical importance. That film has an ethical potential—for exploring moral issues, ethically ambiguous situations, or moral “thought experiments”—is clear from the way in which film theorists have explored cinema from a variety of philosophical perspectives (Mulhall, On Film; Shaw, Morality at the Movies; Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen). More recently, scholars 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, Selfless Cinema?; Downing and Saxton, Film and Ethics; Stadler, Pulling Focus; Wheatley, Michael Haneke’s Cinema). Philosophical film theory has now 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, Cine-Ethics). This is an important development that will enable the tradition of film theory concerned with politics and ideology to be revived and reanimated 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. That said, the nature of this “ethical” significance pertaining to cinema—outside more “standard” approaches to the ethics of spectatorship, of film production/distribution, or of critical interpretation—still remains obscure. Indeed, we still need to analyze the ways in which cinema can be related to ethics, to map conceptually the

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film-ethics relationship, and to explain how particular films both express and evoke ethical experience. The papers collected together in this special issue of SubStance are dedicated to this task, and all engage, from a variety of theoretical perspectives, with what we might call “cinematic ethics.” To sketch this idea, it is useful to map conceptually some of the ways in which cinema and ethics have been related. We can describe ethical approaches to cinema as focusing on one of three aspects of the relationship between film, spectator, and context: 1) ethics in cinema (focusing on narrative content including dramatic scenarios involving morally charged situations, conflicts, decisions, or actions); 2) the ethics of cinematic representation (focusing on the ethical issues raised by elements of film production and/or audience reception, for example, the ongoing debates over the effects of depictions of screen violence); and 3) the ethics of cinema as a cultural medium expressing moral beliefs, social values, or ideology (such as feminist film analysis of gender or Marxist analyses of ideology in popular film). Each of these three aspects of the film–spectator–context relationship has spawned a distinctive approach to the question of cinema and ethics (see Downing and Saxton, Film and Ethics; Stadler, Pulling Focus; Wheatley, Michael Haneke’s Cinema), although few theorists have attempted to articulate the relationships between these aspects with a view toward their ethical implications (see Choi and Frey, Cine-Ethics; Sinnerbrink, Cinematic Ethics). To these three dimensions we can add a fourth: the aesthetic dimension of cinema—in particular the role of aesthetic form in intensifying our experience, focusing our attention, and thus of conveying the complexity of meaning through manifold means—as a way of evoking ethical experience and thereby inviting further ethical-critical reflection. The question of ethics in cinema, or of cinema as ethical, is not exhausted by narrative explorations of ethics, or questions of production and consumption, or by the ethics of spectatorship, or by the ideological-political dimensions of cinema. Rather, it is important to understand how aesthetics and ethics are intimately and expressively related: how the particular aesthetic elements and features of a film are articulated with each other, and how these communicate ethical meaning via aesthetic means. The authors featured in this special issue of SubStance explore the nexus between film and/as ethics in a plurality of ways that span all four dimensions of the cinema-ethics relationship. Their essays are not only concerned with the “ethics of film” in general but with the idea of film as a medium that can express and evoke ethical experience—the idea of “film as ethics” or “cinematic ethics.” For cinema can question and confront social and cultural situations in ways that force viewers to rethink what they regard as morally and politically significant. It can

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challenge our ways of thinking through confronting forms of ethical experience, showing us the intolerability of certain ways of being, thinking or feeling, provoking us towards a more ethical engagement with others and the world. Indeed, cinema’s power to induce perceptual fascination, emotional engagement, and cognitive understanding give it a remarkable capacity to evoke ethically significant experience with the power to provoke philosophical thinking. Cinematic ethics offers ‘thick’ descriptions of complex forms of ethical experience that might otherwise be difficult to comprehend, hard to imagine, or escape our theoretical notice. From this point of view, philosophy provides a path for thinking about cinema, while cinema provides an experientially rich way of extending and enhancing ethical inquiry. The essays in this special issue of SubStance all seek to map out ways to conceptualize the relationship between ethics and cinema but also to explore the idea of a cinematic ethics. And they do so by way of close critical engagement with a variety of innovative films, bringing philosophical and ethical reflection into dialogue with film analysis and aesthetic evaluation. As the essays in this issue demonstrate, cinema can not only ‘illustrate’ ethical issues or moral situations, it can engage in complex forms of cinematic thinking with the power to elicit ethical experience and provoke thought. Lisabeth During’s paper, “Saints, Scandals and the Politics of Love: Simone Weil, Ingrid Bergman, Roberto Rossellini,” which opens this issue, explores the stakes of cinema’s appeal to the soul. Where Gilles Deleuze identifies cinema as the third social institution, after religion and politics, to orient itself specifically to capturing the soul of the masses, During explores the contradictions that emerge when these institutions are no longer seen in a competitive struggle for the hearts and minds of “the people” but combine together into a single entity. In his film Europa ’51, Roberto Rossellini casts the Hollywood star Ingrid Bergman as Irene Girard, a character loosely inspired by the philosopher-mystic-political activist Simone Weil. As During notes, Weil conceived heaven not as spiritual enlightenment but as political emancipation and her religious politics entailed an uncompromising rejection of all forms of identity, a willful disintegration of ego and a refusal of recognition. Rossellini’s project was also to “decreate” the star that Hollywood had made of Bergman, and, as During puts it, squander the capital Hollywood had invested in her. In teasing out the contradictions and perverse complicities between these three institutions as they manifest in Rossellini’s film, During poses questions relating to the ethics of sacrifice—both the sacrifice of the self and the sacrifice of others.

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James Phillips’ essay, “Anti-Oedipus: The Ethics of Performance and Misrecognition in Matsumoto Toshio’s Funeral Parade of Roses,” considers how the gei boi Eddie’s recreation of himself by passing as a girl to become, unknowingly, his father’s lover constitutes not so much a reconfiguring of the Oedipus myth as its hollowing out. For Matsumoto, the ethical is aesthetic and the aesthetic here is rendered ethical by being intentionally superficial. Camp aesthetics redefine the relations of the nuclear family as role-playing, self-stylization, and dramatic presentation, where the son kills the mother, adopts the accoutrements of femininity, and thus attracts the love of the father. Matsumoto’s setting of the film in the underground entertainment culture of the Japanese city of Shinjuku, and that culture’s emphasis on performance and performativity, further enhance a camp sensibility. The deactivation of the ‘truths’ of the Oedipus myth voiced by Sophocles occurs because, in Matsumoto’s hands, the facts of the matter are on the outside, literal and performative. It is the father who kills himself on realizing that he has taken his son as his lover, while his son, Eddie, blinds himself because of distress at his lover’s suicide, not because any truth of the origin of their relationship is revealed to him. As Phillips aptly puts it, the myth of heteronormativity is that the truth of sex is an ideality that is separate from it and measurable against it. At another level, however, the play with the structures of Oedipus in the film is itself politically oriented. It is not the superficial play of postmodernism but a kind of aesthetic play that vigorously opposes the normative conceptions of sexuality and of familial relations. Christopher Falzon’s paper, “Dirty Harry Ethics,” is also a characterbased analysis of ethics, but one that examines the broader ramifications of departing from the ethical norms and legal constraints upheld by liberal democracies in response to “states of exception” such as acts of terrorism. What Falzon finds is not only a misapplication of the term to the abusive political practices of post-September 11, but an unacknowledged complexity in the Hollywood film that provides insight into what is at stake in the adoption of morally questionable practices for political expediency. As Falzon’s analysis makes clear, the narrative of the film Dirty Harry is a critique, rather than a celebration (as some film commentators claimed) of the logic of such practices, of their impact on the individuals who are required to perpetrate them. The depiction of Harry Callaghan turns out not to be a celebration of the triumphant heroic individual who is prepared to go to any means to combat criminality, who undertakes the egregious acts the state requires of him, and whom we might acknowledge as a necessary evil. The film is not an endorsement of the utilitarian ethics that requires an acceptance of extra-legal excesses in order to ensure

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society’s moral and social stability. The film, as Falzon notes, does not celebrate Harry’s ruthless efficiency but criticizes it by drawing (visual and cinematic) parallels between him and the serial killer Scorpio, who incarnates pure evil, by pointing out just how much he identifies with the criminality he is trying to overcome. The movie lays out the practices of self-deception the state engages in, the dirty methods it undertakes privately while publically repudiating them. If we can acknowledge the film for exposing these contradictions, Falzon notes that it nonetheless falls short in its representation of the serial killer as inhuman; the film does not reflect on the fact that we can only understand Harry’s moral complexity by identifying him with a certain non-humanness. David H. Fleming is similarly concerned with cinematic representations of ‘pure evil’ and how they hamper our capacity to judge representations of complex social and political situations. As instances of this difficulty, he examines Dan Reed’s recent 2014 documentation of the Al Shabaab’s 2013 siege of the Westgate Mall in Nairobi in his film Terror at the Mall (2014). Fleming probes the significance of the obfuscations of fiction and reality in dramatic representations of the contemporary ‘politics of terror,’ and attempts to evaluate their capacity to negotiate and indeed reflect upon the universal and relative dimensions of the moral perspectives they produce. To do this, he considers how the formal procedures of Terror at the Mall—the editing of raw footage, emotional manipulation of viewers, evaluation of events, methods of investigation—compare with two other televisual treatments of the event: NBC’s Nowhere to Run and KTN’s The Inside Story: Wolves at Westgate. Fleming’s concern is with how the ethical intentions of such films are undermined by their deployment of the codes and tropes of the Hollywood action film, which make their methods of storytelling inherently moralistic. The most obvious implication of this approach is that terrorists are rendered as two-dimensional stereotypical caricatures of moral evil, and the emotive valence of the term ‘terrorism’ loses its technical meaning of war by unconventional means and with it any sense that there are real causes to current ideologicalpolitical conflicts. In response, Fleming calls for the adoption of a working distinction between moral and ethical evaluations of life and image-events, opting for an “immanent” ethics of practical power relations associated with philosophers like Spinoza, Nietzsche and Deleuze. Such ethics, Fleming suggests, requires a rejection of transcendent systems of judgment in favor of “a typology of immanent modes of existence” according to which judgment is based solely on a given encounter’s capacity to communicate adequate ideas, to increase our power to think and to act. Applied to film, this would mean understanding film images as active material

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forces that increase or decrease our abilities to interact with our world. In still more concrete terms, this would mean evaluating such images not according to their capacity to reinforce pre-existing knowledges but on their capacity to enhance our power and knowledge by pursuing what is unknown—the obscured causes of political conflict whose cultural and ideological effects are all too familiar. Damian Cox’s essay, “Le Fils and the Limits of Philosophical Ethics,” turns to an examination of agential ethics to argue that ethical outcomes do not necessarily derive from intentional moral acts. Rather, they require a confluence of fortuitous events, the willing complicity or compliance of others, and a kind of blind fumbling through the maze of obstacles thrown in our life paths. As Cox notes, the famous “trolley” problem—in which subjects are asked whether they would switch the course of an out-of-control railway trolley such that it would hit only one unsuspecting victim instead of several—is among the most common thought experiments used by analytic philosophers and moral psychologists interested in determining the intuitions, motivations, and reasoning processes behind moral judgments. For Cox, however, these abstract examples or hypothetical scenarios tell us little about how we experience real world situations that demand an ethical response. Cox finds film to be an infinitely more vital and complex medium than these restrictive hypothetical scenarios. While film is not usually offered as a moral thought experiment, its capacity to capture complex and engrossing situations in which characters must make morally ambiguous decisions means that it offers a far more comprehensive picture of the realities of moral and ethical experience. What film adds is that the moral choices and ethical responses to situations are, at least with the Dardenne brothers’ films, bound by the conditions of realism, which means here that the choices must be credible and believable. The fact that filmmakers have to account for the moral complexity of the situation makes them better able to articulate the forces and variables at work in the characters’ moral and ethical dilemmas. For Cox, film’s non-discursive immediacy, moreover, gives it an aesthetic power to prime us for understanding the complexity of ethical life. What makes the Dardennes’ film an especially salient example for Cox is that the film does not psychologize the characters or try to manipulate the viewer into an identificatory position that would allow reflective judgment of the situation. Its withholding of a rich backstory, on the contrary, draws our attention to the limitations of trying to understand the nature of moral decisions as though they were made simply in the light of the present. Through the ambiguity of the main character Olivier’s actions, the film also shows how people act without being fully aware

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of or purposive in their intentions. Most interestingly, for Cox, the film shows how “wrong” moral decisions are often unexpectedly modulated into correct ethical outcomes. Continuing this Dardennes’ theme, Lisa Trahair’s essay, “Belief in this World: The Dardenne brothers’ The Son and Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling,” explores the complex relationship between ethics, cinema, and belief through a close reading of this film in conjunction with an interpretation of the problem of sacrifice in Kierkegaard. Questioning Joseph Mai’s analysis of the film as affirming law via the rejection of sacrifice, Trahair examines the question of ethical motivation in the Dardennes’ work. She focuses on the conflicting motivations—sheer survival, ethical commitment, and a belief in the absurd—that seem to drive their marginalized characters when confronted by ambiguous social situations demanding difficult decisions or unexpected responses. At the same time, she questions Mai’s claim that The Son is a parable of the rejection of sacrifice in favor of the law, an ethical affirmation of law and restoration of justice through moral responsiveness. The latter becomes manifest, in the film, via the father’s harrowing struggle with the boy who killed the man’s son, yet with whom the man forms a strange kind of bond. This bond hints, by film’s end, at the possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation, but also suggests the forging of a morally ambiguous, substitute filial relationship that both replaces and honors his dead son in a manner that those around him, not least his wife, find inexplicable. For Trahair, the film’s exploration of the religious dimension of moral experience—beyond Kierkegaard’s aesthetic and ethical stages of comportment—defines its ethical importance and moral provocation, opening up of a way of thinking that might be called an ‘ethics of the absurd.’ Drawing on Deleuze’s remarks (in the Cinema books) on Kierkegaard’s ‘Knight of the Faith,’ and his examination of the relationship between thought and belief, Trahair explores how sacrifice is presented in the film as a problem of choice—the existential choice of ‘choosing to choose.’ Indeed, The Son’s ethical task becomes evident through its cinematic strategies—through its eschewal of direct or conventional presentation of the characters in favor of oblique perspectives on their bodies—that minimize moral psychology in favor of bodily proximity: an experience of thought in relation to an ‘outside’ that defies rationalistic judgment or consequential calculation. David Macarthur’s essay, “Living our Skepticism of Others through Film: Remarks in the Light of Cavell,” takes up the theme of ethics and cinema by exploring Stanley Cavell’s conception of acknowledgement as a relation to the other, as revelation of the self to the other and vice versa. What concerns Macarthur is film’s power to diminish the imperative of acknowledgement, whether of external reality or other minds. Such dimi-

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nution links up with questions about cinema’s relation to skepticism; but Macarthur argues for some further refinement of Cavell’s proposition that “film is a moving image of skepticism,” insisting that one does not necessarily succumb to such skepticism, at least when it emanates from film’s capacity to reproduce external reality. According to Macarthur, Cavell’s view is that the automatism of cinema means not only that others (the film actors) do not acknowledge me, but reciprocally, that I do not have to acknowledge them. The conditions of cinematic viewing appear to free us from the burden of responsibility. Macarthur’s point, as distinct from Cavell’s, however, is that it is not the automaticity/realism of film that produces this freedom, but rather the permission it gives the viewer to escape reality and to be voyeuristic in our relation to others on screen. Far from just removing the requirement of acknowledgement, this freedom offers the means of reflecting on acknowledgment itself. Film thus offers us a meta-ethics, the opportunity to examine the preconditions of thinking through ethical life as such. In the process of challenging Cavell’s claims about cinema’s absence of acknowledgment, Macarthur finds that it is not external world skepticism enacted by the medium of cinema but rather an ‘other minds’ skepticism. Mathew Abbott’s essay takes up the issue of other minds and voyeurism in a way that calls into question the reciprocity of acknowledgment. The ethical issue of acknowledgement arises here in the context of two films dealing with the human fascination with wild animals—Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005) and Phillip Warnell’s Ming of Harlem: TwentyOne Storeys in the Air (2014). Wild animal minds thus provide the degree zero of our acknowledgment of others. In these films, two eccentric human individuals try to form relationships with wild animals, to establish some kind of “community” with them. Abbott’s interest lies in the steps they have to take in order to do so, and the philosophical insights their experiences offer into “mindedness.” But just as importantly, Abbott examines how cinema’s engagement with the wildness of these other minds can open up the question of what an ethical relation to animals really means. In short, Abbott is trying to formulate an ethics out of the question of the mindedness of wild animals and to consider what such an ethics tells us about normative human ethics. In considering Grizzly Man (2005), Abbott observes the philosophical limits of the sentimental ethos of the main character, Treadwell, the man who is eventually devoured by the very bears with which he wants to be “at one,” as well as the limits of Herzog’s assessment of Treadwell as fundamentally misrecognizing his capacity to relate to wild animals, and hence misrecognizing wild nature’s utter indifference to him. Ming of Harlem, by contrast, offers Abbott the basis for formulating the kind of acknowledgement that might

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take place between the human being and the wild animal being as some intermediate “subjectivity.” As Abbott demonstrates, this film deals much more provocatively with the question of the animals’ intentions (in this case, a tiger and alligator). Instead of using camera angles and framing to “theatricalize” their wilderness or domesticity, the director poses questions regarding the ambiguity of their behavior and how to understand the companionship between these three cohabiting species. From his analysis of the film, Abbott concludes that what we share with animals, wild or tame, is a sense of embodiment, of being alike as creatures who live and die and are vulnerable to suffering and that this is available to being acknowledged on both sides. Regarding the issue of reciprocation, Abbott demonstrates that such acknowledgement is not based on sameness, but on difference, and on not being able to know, precisely, what this difference is, yet acknowledging it all the same. The two final essays of this volume continue with the ethics of spectatorship initiated by Macarthur’s discussion of Cavell and considered (less directly) by Abbott. In their contributions, Angelos Koutsourakis and Gregory Flaxman respectively deal with the ethics of active and passive spectatorship. Koutsourakis’ essay, “The Ethics and Politics of Negation: the Postdramatic on Screen,” weds Adorno’s aesthetics of negation to Hans-Thies Lehman’s theory of the postdramatic in order to challenge the Brechtian orthodoxy that still defines interpretations of Straub/Huillet and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s theatrical-cinematic collaborations (in the late 1960s productions Der Bräutigam, die Komödiantin und der Zuhälter (1968) and Katzelmacher (1969), respectively). In so doing, Koutsourakis takes to task the views of moral philosophers and cognitive film theorists who have identified cinematic ethics in terms of moral universals. Criticizing such models for their reliance on suppositions of a homogeneous audience, Koutsourakis asks, “[I]s it ethical to prompt an unambiguous moral response without allowing the audience to reflect on it?” Lehman’s conception of the postdramatic is not so much a rejection of Brecht’s adoption of Marxist-Hegelian insights as a recognition of their limits and an attempt to push them further by radicalizing its inherent critique of representation while forsaking its revolutionary politics. Like Brechtianism, postdramatic theatre focuses on concrete social processes rather than the problems of individuals. Its democratic ethos derives from its sense that meaning is not delivered for the audience as pre-given content, but rather requires them to produce it for themselves in accordance with, and by working through, their social and communal differences. Postdramatic theatre thus shares common ground with Jacques Rancière’s formulation of emancipated spectatorship, both of which are based on

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“dissensus” rather than assumed agreement among the diverse members of an audience concerning the meaning of the work. Straub/Huillet and Fassbinder together anticipated such an audience for their collaborative project, developing strategies that refused the univocal communication of political ideas, involving the audience in the production of the work’s meaning, promoting an ethics of negation in place of manipulation, ensuring that their images are understood as located in a framework of production and exchange, and so forth. Gregory Flaxman’s essay, “Once More with Feeling: Cinema and Cinesthesia,” takes as its point of departure the recent debate in Critical Inquiry between Ruth Leys and various affect theorists in order to contemplate what the “affective turn” has meant for film studies. As Flaxman sees it, Leys’ contention is that the recent absorption of scholarly interest in affect and theories of affect has wrongly deemed emotion, sensation, and passive bodily states to be sources of ethical creativity. The merit in Leys’ consternation for Flaxman is her alerting us to a tendency to conflate affect and agency. Flaxman finds this very conflation to operate in film studies in its simultaneous avowal of cinema as a medium which both generates its effects through affect and increasingly promotes an idea of active spectatorship. Flaxman has no interest in defending the link between affect and ethics, but the implication of his argument is that the more ethical stance for film studies would be to acknowledge the radical passivity induced by the film medium. Flaxman thus returns to a late nineteenth century constellation of psychologists, philosophers and art theorists interested in understanding (and contesting) the scope of the concept of Einfühlung (empathy or ‘feeling into’). Psycho-aesthetics was a field of inquiry that paved the way for understanding the inherently passive affection, or cinesthesia, that for Flaxman defines our encounter with the medium. We can rehabilitate today the discoveries and insights derived from such inquiries, Flaxman argues, in order to understand better the image’s capacity to communicate a range of aesthetic experiences. These include the feeling of motion, the phenomenon of inner imitation by which the mind innervates the body with respect to what it perceives, affect at a distance, and the moving image’s capacity to induce sensations and feelings in its audience. Flaxman adds to this the important art historical work undertaken at the time of the invention of cinematography by Adolf Hildebrand, Aloïs Riegl, and Wilhelm Worringer, who began to apply the insights of psycho-aesthetics to art and whose theoretical reflections can deepen our engagement today with cinema on the question of affect, passivity, spectatorship, and thought. Understanding cinematic movement as “automated, autonomous animation,” Flaxman observes how the me-

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dium replaces natural with readymade perception, turning the audience into a medium for images that derive from contexts other than our own. Stanley Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange, with its visceral presentation of Alex’s violent “ethical” reprogramming via cinematic means, is but a brutal and arresting instrumental example of cinema’s inherent capacity to “vehicularize” its audience—to engage our brains and bodies as part of a dynamic, but also ambiguous, cinematic assemblage. The essays comprising this special issue demonstrate the diversity of approaches characterizing contemporary film-philosophical engagement with cinematic ethics. Far from remaining confined within the thematic analysis of narrative film, film-philosophers take a variety of different theoretical approaches: analyzing the ethical significance of formal and aesthetic dimensions of particular films; exploring philosophical problems or questions as articulated, evoked, or expressed by film; interpreting closely individual films in conjunction with philosophical reflection on particular concepts or ideas; situating films within a broader ethico-cultural context in order to discuss the particular cultural, moral, and political questions such films raise; investigating particular moral-philosophical concepts and arguments via close interpretation of film; analyzing the use of narrative and generic tropes in (fictional and non-fictional) film in order to address their ethical and ideological implications. The authors have also drawn on the work of a range of philosophers—from Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell to Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard, Bergson, and Simone Weil—adapting various concepts in their diverse engagements with particular films that evoke and express ethical thinking. In some cases, the films in question do not explicitly thematize or explore their own status as cinematic works or show much concern with the ethical implications of the medium, their generic status or narrative construction; in other cases, the films analyzed demonstrate a remarkable degree of reflective engagement not only with their own medium but with ethical questions of spectatorship, the ethical implications of cinematic style, and the power of cinema to evoke ethically transformative forms of experience. In these cases especially, we might talk of such films as engaging in a distinctive kind of cinematic thinking that communicates complex forms of ethical experience—an experience of ethical engagement demanding thought. We hope that the articles collected here will contribute to opening up the creative and critical possibilities of cinematic thinking, and invite further theoretical engagement with the possibilities of cinema as a medium of ethical experience. Macquarie University (Sinnerbrink) & University of New South Wales (Trahair)

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Authors’ Note: Research and editing work for this special issue have been made possible by the support of the Australian Research Council (ARC). The views expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the ARC. Most of the papers presented in this volume were presented at Third Cinematic Thinking Workshop held at the University of New South Wales in 2013. This workshop was part of an ARC-funded project by Lisa Trahair, Robert Sinnerbrink, and Gregory Flaxman, entitled “Film and Philosophy: What is Cinematic Thinking.” More details about the project and the Cinematic Thinking Network can be found at the following websites: http://cinematicthinkingnetwork.org/ http://www.cinematicthinking.unsw.edu.au/

Works Cited

Bazin, André. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” What is Cinema? Volume 1. Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. Cavell, Stanley. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981. Choi, Jinhee, and Mattias Frey, eds. Cine-Ethics: Ethical Dimensions of Film Theory, Practice, and Spectatorship. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2014. Cooper, Sarah. Selfless Cinema? Ethics and French Documentary. London: Legenda, 2006. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. ---. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London: The Athlone Press, 1989. Downing, Lisa, and Libby Saxton, eds. Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2010. Mulhall, Stephen. On Film. 2nd Edition. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2008. Shaw, Dan. Morality and the Movies: Reading Ethics through Film. London and New York: Continuum, 2012. Sinnerbrink, Robert. Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience through Film. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. Stadler, Jane. Pulling Focus: Intersubjective Experience, Narrative Film, and Ethics. New York and London: Continuum, 2008. Terman, Folke. “Ethics.” The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. Eds. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2009. 111-120. Wartenberg, Thomas. E. Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2007. Wheatley, Catherine. Michael Haneke’s Cinema: The Ethic of the Image. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009.

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