Thinking Through Cinema

Murray Smith is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Kent, UK. He is the author of Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford, 1995) and Trainspotting (British Film Institute, 2002), and the co-editor of Film Theory and Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 1998) and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (Routledge, 1998). He has published widely on the relationship between ethics, emotion, and films, including essays in this journal and Cinema Journal. Thomas E. Wartenberg is Chair of the Philosophy Department at Mount Holyoke College, where he also teaches in the Film Studies Program. He is the author of Unlikely Couples: Movie Romance as Social Criticism (Westview Press, 1999) and The Forms of Power: From Domination to Transformation (Temple University Press, 1990), the editor of The Nature of Art (Wadsworth Publishing, 2001), and the co-editor of Philosophy and Film (Routledge, 1995)and The Philosophy of Film: Introductory Text and Readings (Blackwell, 2005).

• PrefaceMurray Smith and Thomas E Wartenberg Introduction 1I The Very Idea of Film as PhilosophyPaisley Livingston These on Cinema as Philosophy 11Thomas E Wartenberg Beyond mere Illustration: How Films Can Be Philosophy 19Murray Smith Film Art, Argument, and Ambiguity 33II Popular American Film: Entertainment and EnlightenmentRichard Allen Hitchcock and Cavell 43Lester H Hunt The Paradox of the Unknown Lover: A Reading of Letter from an Unknown Woman 55Dan Flory Spike Lee and the Sympathetic Racist.' 67George Wilson Transparency and Twist in Narrative Fiction Film 81Stephen Mulhall The Impersonation of Personality: Film as Philosophy in Mission: Impossible 97Daniel Shaw On being Philosophical and Being John Malkovich 111Christopher Grau eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the Morality of Memory 119III: Continental Philosophy, Continental FilmAndras Balint Kovacs Sartre, the Philosophy of Nothingness, and the Modern Melodrama 135Paul C Santilli Cinema and Subjectivity in Krzysztof Kieslowski 147Katherine Ince Is Sexy Comedy or Tragedy? Directing Desire adn Female Auteurship in the Cinema of Catherine Breillat 157IV: Films as "THEORY": The Avant -GardeJinhee Choi Apperception on Display: Structural Films and Philosophy 165Noel Carroll philosophizing Through the Moving Image: The case of Serene Velocity 173Trevor Ponech The Substance of Cinema 187Whitney Davis The World Rewound: Peter Forgacs's Wittgenstein Tractatus 199Contributors 213Selected Bibliography 217Index 221