Film and the Ethical Imagination

Asbjørn Grønstad is professor of visual culture in the Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen, where he is also founding director of the Nomadikon Center for Visual Culture Studies. The author or editor of nine books and numerous articles, his latest publication is Seeing Whole: Toward an Ethics and Ecology of Sight (co-edited with Mark Ledbetter, 2016).

• Introduction.- Part I: Ethics.- From an ethics of transgression to a general ethics of form.- Optics as an Ethics.- The Return of Ethics in Literary Studies.- Screen Ethics before the Ethical Turn.- The Ethical Turn in Film and Visual Culture: From Content to Form.- The Responsibility of Forms.- Six Theses on the Ethical Imagination.- Part II: Imagination.- Ethical Intimacy and the Cinematic Face.- Slow Cinema and the Ethics of Duration.- The Ethics of Dying.- A Cinema of Gestures.- Ethics, Politics and the Question of Form.- The Ethical Image Between Fiction and Politics.- The Ethics of Matter and Memory.- Bioscreens.- Film Visions, Planetary Ethics.-

“Grønstad’s thought-provoking work provides a significant and novel contribution to the investigation of the relationship between ethics and film form.” (Andrew Jones, Film-Philosophy, Vol. 23, 2019)“Film and the Ethical Imagination is a significant contribution to the field of film ethics; it does not set itself up as a survey of the field, but offers efficient overviews of developments in the past twenty years, as well as makes certain original contributions … .” (Jonathan Wright, Film Matters, Vol. 09 (2), 2019)