Interdisciplinary Research
“What if God created the cat in his image?”
--”Je t’aime, Je t’aime,”
Alain Resnais
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Film
![Contents:
I. Films Grouped by Philosophical Theme
II. Essays and Reflections on Film
III. Links to Directors, Criticism, Film Journals
I. Films Grouped by Philosophical Theme
--- Ontological or Existential Themes ---
Faith and Doubt:
Ingmar Bergman, “Through a Glass Darkly,” Swedish, 1961
––, “Winter Light,” 1962
––, “The Silence,” 1963
––, “The Seventh Seal,” 1957
Krzysztof Kieslowski, “The Decalogue,” One, 1988
Marco Bellocchio, “My Mother’s Smile,” Italian, 2002
Gabriel Axel, “Babette’s Feast,”
Carl Theodor Dreyer, “Ordet,” 1955
---, “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” 1928
Roberto Rossellini, “The Flowers of St. Francis,” 1950
Bruno Dumont, “Hadewijch,” French, 2009 (from a nunnery to secular life on the streets and in bars to islam, a young girl’s spiritual development)
“More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads.
One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction.
Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”
--Woody Allen, “Annie Hall”
Existential Crisis:
Ingmar Bergman, “Winter Light,” Swedish, 1962 (priest cannot counsel a parishioner optimistically so as to prevent his suicide)
––, “Persona,” 1966 (an actress goes mute during a performance of Electra and her nurse begins to reveal many stories to the point of mental collapse)
Woody Allen, “Another Woman,” American, 1988 (philosophy professor listens to the psychoanalysis sessions of a woman, which awakens her own mental collapse)
––, “Love and Death,” 1975 (satire of Russian novels)
––, “Midnight in Paris,” 2011 (writer finds himself by confronting the appeal of nostalgia by a sort of time travel)
Wim Wenders, “Wings of Desire,” German, 1987 (an angel in Berlin, who can hear the thoughts of people, falls in love with a trapeze artist and gives up his wings)
Andrei Tarkovsky, Russian, “Stalker,” 1979
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, German, “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul,” 1974
Werner Herzog, “Woyzeck,” German, 1979 (soldier loses control, voices lead him to murder)
––, “Heart of Glass,” 1976 (a glassblowing foreman dies, taking with him the secret of how to produce red glass, for which the town is known and on which it depends; all slip in obsessed panic and depression over the lost secret)
Khyentse Norbu, “Travellers and Magicians,” Bhutanese, 2003 (young man infatuated with West encounters an odd collection of people when trying to run away from Bhutan and comes to embrace his own culture after the long tales of a monk).
Hiroshi Teshigahara, “Face of Another,” Japanese, 1952 (man who suffers a chemical burn receives a mask of another man’s face)
Alejandro Jodorowsky, “The Holy Mountain,” Mexican, 1973 (a Christ-like man wanders, meets a mystical guide)
“The cinema of Hollywood is a cinema of exclusion,
reduction and denial, a cinema of repression.
There is always something behind that which is being represented,
which was not represented.
And it is exactly that that is most interesting to consider.”
--Martin Arnold, http://www.r12.at/arnold/pages/alone/alone.html
Identity:
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, “Despair” [Eine Reise Ins Licht], German, 1978
---, “Why Does Herr R. Run Amok,” 1970
Woody Allen, “Zelig,” American, 1983
––, “Melinda and Melinda,” 2004
––, “Husbands and Wives,” 1992
Ingmar Bergman, “Persona,” 1966
––, “Wild Strawberries,” Swedish, 1957
Hiroshi Teshigahara, “Face of Another,” Japanese, 1966
Peter Howitt, “Sliding Doors,” British, 1998
Harmony Korine, “Mister Lonely,” American, 2007
David Cronenberg, “A History of Violence,” Canadian, 2005
Spike Jonze, “Being John Malkovich,” 1999
Federico Fellini, “8 1/2,” Italian, 1963
Wim Wenders, “Paris, Texas,” 1984
The Coen Brothers, “The Big Lebowski,” 1988
Jim Jarmusch, “Broken Flowers,” 2005
Christopher Nolan, “Memento,” 2000
Alfred Hitchcock, “Vertigo,” 1958
David Lynch, “Blue Velvet,” 1986
---, “Inland Empire,” 2006
---, “Mulholland Drive,” 2001
---, “Lost Highway,” 1997
---, “Wild at Heart,” 1990
François Truffaut, “Jules et Jim,” 1962
Werner Herzog, “The Engima of Kaspar Hauser,” 1974 (a young man appears in town, just released from captivity since birth in a dungeon)
“I spit upon the honourable and on those who vainly admire it,
whenever it produces no pleasure.”
--Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 12, 547a (512 U).
Memory:
Alain Resnais, “Last Year at Marienbad,” French, 1962
Chris Marker, “La Jetée,” French, 1962
Peter Howitt, “Sliding Doors,” British, 1998
Robert Zemeckis, “Back to the Future,” 1985
Andrei Tarkovsky, “Solaris,” Russian, 1972
---, “Ivan’s Childhood,” 1962
David Lynch, “Inland Empire,” 2006
---, “Lost Highway,” 1997
Akira Kurosawa, “Rashomon,” Japanese, 1950
“What if God created the cat in his image?”
--”Je t’aime, Je t’aime,”
Alain Resnais
Gender, Feminism, Battles of the Sexes:
Peter Howitt, “Sliding Doors,” British, 1998
Ridley Scott, “Thelma and Louise,” 1991
Garry Marshall, “Pretty Woman,” 1990
Louis Malle, “Pretty Baby,” 1978
Alain Berliner, “Ma vie en rose,” French, 1997
Woody Allen, “Love and Death,” American, 1975
---, “Annie Hall,” 1977
---, “A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy,” 1982
---, “Alice,” 1990
---, “Husbands and Wives,” 1992
---, “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” 2008
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, “The Marriage of Maria Braun,” German, 1979
David Lynch, “Lost Highway,” American, 1997
---, “Inland Empire,” 2006
Khyentse Norbu, “Travelers and Magicians,” Bhutanese, 2003
Alain Resnais, “Last Year at Marienbad,” French, 1962
David Cronenberg, “M. Butterfly,” Canadian, 1993
Jon Avnet, “Fried Green Tomatoes,” 1991
Yimou Zhang, “Raise the Red Lantern,” Chinese, 1991 (set in China in the 1920’s, a young woman is married off to a powerful man with three other wives)
Robert Altman, “3 Women,” French, but film in English, 1977 (three quirky/damaged women come to live together after emotional crises, then come to transfer their personalities, eventually founding a unique family)
Stephen Daldry, “The Hours,” American, 2002 (three stories are interlinked: Virginia Woolf is writing Mrs. Dalloway, the novel two other women--one a pregnant housewife, another, a woman with a dear friend dying of AIDS--cannot stop reading while planning parties)
Krzysztof Kieslowski, “Red,” 1994
---, “Blue,” 1993
---, “White,” 1994
---, “The Double Life of Veronique,” 1991
Hiroshi Teshigahara, “Face of Another,” Japanese, 1966
---, “Woman in the Dunes,” 1964
Jean-Luc Godard, “A Woman is a Woman,” French, 1961
Medieval Related:
Directly or indirectly related ...
Jean-Jacques Annaud, “The Name of the Rose,” Italian, 1986
Igmar Bergman, “The Seventh Seal,” Swedish, 1957
Akira Kurosawa, “Throne of Blood,” Japanese, 1957
Carl Theodor Dreyer, “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” French, 1928
Robert Bresson, “Diary of a Country Priest,” French, 1951
Andrei Tarkovsky, “Andrei Rublev,” Russian, 1966
Martin Scorsese, “The Last Temptation of Christ,” 1988
The Difficult to Categorize:
Jan Svankmajer, “Little Otik,” Czech Republic, 1988 (stop-gap animation)
---, “Alice,”
Godfrey Reggio, “Powaqqatsi,” American, 1988 (artistic documentary)
Andrei Tarkovsky, “Andrei Rublev,” Russian, 1969
---, “Solaris,” 1972
Jean Cocteau, “Beauty and the Beast,” French, 1946
Michelangelo Antonioni, “L’avventura,” Italian, 1960
Stan Bralhage, “By Brakhag: An Anthology,” 1954-2001, American, (experimental shorts
--- Broadly Construed Ethical Themes ---
“My films are.... an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions
instead of false (because too quick) answers,
for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness,
for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus.”
–Michael Haneke, “Film als Katharsis”
in Austria (in)felix: zum österreichischem Film der 80er Jahre, ed. Francesco Bono (Germany: Aiace or Graz: Blimp, 1992).
Perfect (more or less) Murders:
Woody Allen, “Cassandra’s Dream,” 2007 (family bonds and money troubles lead to murder, which leads to murder within the family)
––, “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” 1989 (A doctor has his mistress killed when she threatens to tell his wife, a ‘perfect murder’ plot he discusses as if for a film with a married filmmaker who has fallen for another woman)
––, “Match Point,” 2005 (A mistress must die for preserving the perfect stability afforded by a life, job, and affluent lifestyle)
Hitchcock, “Rope,” 1948 (dramatization of the 1924 Leopold and Loeb case of a “thrill kill,” other movie adaptations include Compulsion and Swoon)
Fernando Meirelles, “The Constant Gardener,” Brazilian, but film in English, 2005 (Political activism in Africa leads to the death of a lover and his pursuit of the truth of the event)
The Coen Brothers, “No Country for Old Men,” American, 2007
War and Anti-War:
Kon Ichikawa, “The Burmese Harp,” Japanese 1956
Mike Nichols, “Catch 22,” 1970
Francis Ford Coppola, “Apocalypse Now,” 1979
Stanley Kubrick, “Full Metal Jacket,” 1987
Errol Morris, “The Fog of War,” 2004 (Documentary, mainly on Robert S. McNamara and WWII, includes long firebombing of Tokyo scene)
Steven Spielberg, “Saving Private Ryan,” 1998 (D-Day invasion)
Ken Annakin and Andrew Marton, “The Longest Day,” 1962 (D-Day invasion from Allied and German views)
Utopia and Dystopia [technology]:
Directly or indirectly related ...
Michael Haneke, “Time of the Wolf,” German, but the film’s subtitled from French, 2003 (post-apocalyptic event, follow a family as they attempt to survive, and witness societal reconstruction)
Peter Howitt, “Sliding Doors,” British, 1998 (chance event causes a duplication of lives, dual worlds, wherein each follows a different course of life)
Khyentse Norbu, “Travellers and Magicians,” Bhutanese, 2003 (the desire for cosmopolitanism, American-style modernism finds its way to a Bhutanese young man who struggles to leave home and post for the ‘new world,’ although encounters a storyteller along the way who awakens an appreciation for what he wants to flee)
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, “Mother Küsters goes to Heaven,” German, 1985
David Cronenberg, “eXistenZ,” Canadian, 1993
Terry Gilliam, “Brazil,” 1985 (The bureaucracy deems a man guilty of terrorism while he tries to correct a wrongful arrest and dreams of escape with a woman)
Steven Soderbergh, “Kafka,” American, 1991 (merging the biographical with his fiction, Kafka uncovers a secret organization that seeks to make perfectly obedient citizens)
Lars Von Trier, “Melancholia,” Danish, but in English, 2011 (a melancholic bride ruins her reception and wedding; her sister is brought to a deeper mental ruin by the realization of an impending planetary collision)
Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, “The City of Lost Children,” French, 1995 (children are kidnapped by a scientist seeking to stop his aging)
Werner Herzog, “Fitzcarraldo,” German, 1982 (the crazed perseverance of a man who wishes to build an opera house in the jungle)
---, “Stroszek,” 1977 (alcoholic man is freed from prison and decides to seek the promised life of the American Dream in Wisconsin, to great disaster)
“We must make the building of a free society
once more an intellectual adventure,
a deed of courage.
What we lack is a liberal Utopia ...
which is not too severely practical and which does not confine itself
to what appears today as politically possible…
Unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society
once more a living intellectual issue,
and its implementation a task which challenges
the ingenuity and imagination of our livliest minds,
the prospects of freedom are indeed dark.”
–Friedrich August von Hayek,
Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (1967)
Environmental:
Al Gore, “An Inconvenient Truth,” 2006 (his documentary on global warming)
Annie Leonard, “The Story of Stuff” (lecture plus animation at www.storyofstuff.com)
Ron Fricke, “Baraka,” 1992 (“blessing,” visual investigation around world into culture broadly construed)
Gabbert and Justin Schein, “No Impact Man,” 2008 (documentary following author Colin Beavan and family who try to have a zero impact on the earth for a year, screened at Sundance 09, currently unknown distribution)
Bill Benenson and Gene Rosow, “Dirt!: The Movie,” 2009 (documentary on humanity’s relation to dirt screened at Sundance 09, currently unknown distribution)
Fernando Meirelles, “The Constant Gardener,: 2005 (British diplomat in Kenya tries to uncover his activist wife’s murder)
Steven Soderbergh, “Erin Brockovich,” 2000 (woman’s fight vs. energy company polluting water)
Bill Kroyer, “FernGully: The Last Rainforest,” 1992 (animated film of good fairies against polluting evil forces; human race presumed extinct come to cut down the rainforest or something like that)
Werner Herzog, “Lessons of Darkness,” 1992 (documentary on Kuwait’s oil fields on fire post war)
---, “Grizzly Man,” 2005 (documentary on man who tries to live with bears which ultimately results in his and partner’s death; good commentary on social exclusion and broad environmental themes)
---, “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” 2010 (documentary on ancient cave paintings)
“I think you should defend to the death
their [the KKK’s] right to march,
and then go down and meet them with baseball bats.”
--Woody Allen
Suspicion:
Hitchcock, “Rear Window,” 1954 (man with broken leg watches his neighbors out his window, suspects a murder)
Woody Allen, “Manhattan Murder Mystery,” 1993 (a neighbor dies and others do not think it natural)
––, “Shadows and Fog,” 1993 (vigilantes seek serial killer, circus performer leaves her husband and ends up in a whorehouse, Jewish prejudice)
George Clooney, “Good Night, and Good Luck,” 2005 (Murrow’s toppling of McCarthy’s communist scare)
Michelangelo Antonioni, “Blow-Up,” 1966 (photographer captures, he thinks, a murder and cover up on film)
Peter Weir, “The Truman Show,” 1998
Álex de la Iglesia, “The Oxford Murders,” 2008 (Spanish director, set in England, English-language)
David Cronenberg, “Spider,” Canadian, 2002
“Just as the libido must renounce its perverse overflow to propagate the species ... so the film produced by an artist working in capitalist industry ... springs from the effort to eliminate aberrant movements, useless expenditures, differences of pure consumption. This film is composed like a unified and propagating body, a fecund and assembled whole transmitting instead of losing what it carries.”
--Jean-François Lyotard, “Acinema,” in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 172.
The Self and Other: Relations:
Alejandro Gonzàlez Iñárritu, “Babel,” Mexican, but film predominately in English, 2006
Akira Kurosawa, “Ikiru,” Japanese, 1952
David Cronenberg, “Spider,” Canadian, 2002
David Lynch, “Lost Highway,” American, 1997
---, “Inland Empire,” 2006
---, “Mulholland Drive,” 2001
Woody Allen, “Hannah and her Sisters,” American, 1986
––, “September,” 1987
––, “Interiors,” 1978
––, “Sleeper,” 1973
––, “Zelig,” 1983
“…I swear as a director to refrain from personal taste!
I am no longer an artist.
I swear to refrain from creating a ‘work,’
as I regard the instant as more important than the whole.
My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings.
I swear to do so by all the means available
and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations…”
–Conclusion of the Dogme95 Manifesto,
co-signed by Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg on behalf of the organization,
Copenhagen, Monday 13 March 1995
Violence, Justice, Retribution, etc.:
Alejandro Gonzàlez Iñárritu, “Babel,” Mexican, but film predominately in English, 2006
Francis Ford Coppola, “The Godfather,” 1971
Stanley Kubrick, “A Clockwork Orange,” 1971
Martin Scorsese, “Taxi Driver,” 1976
Clint Eastwood, “Unforgiven,” 1992
Lars von Trier, “Dogville,” 2003
---, “Manderlay,” 2005
Luc Besson, “Léon: The Professional,” 1994 (English language; a young girl is the sole survivor of a drug-related murder of her whole family; narrowly escaping, the girl seeks shelter with a neighbor who turns out to be a hit-man, whom she desperately seeks to employ for retribution)
Fernando Meirelles, “The Constant Gardener,: 2005 (British diplomat in Kenya tries to uncover his activist wife’s murder)
II. Essays and Reflections
on Film
Herzog’s “Woyzeck” and Husserl’s
Natural and Phenomenological Attitudes
Hegel’s Lordship and Bondage read through Woody Allen’s
“Crimes and Misdemeanors”
Challenges between the Sexes in Woody Allen’s
“Another Woman” and “Alice”
Nietzsche’s Genealogy and Teshigahara’s “Face of Another”
The Post-Apocalyptic Paradise in Michael Haneke’s “Le Temps du Loup”
Cronenberg’s “Spider:” the Morality of a Child
Repetition and Difference in David Lynch’s “Inland Empire”
Doppelgängers: Bunuel’s Conchita (“That Obscure Object of Desire”)
and Fassbinder’s Hermann Hermann (“Despair”)
Two Existential Portraits: Robert Bresson’s “Diary of a Country Priest”
and Woody Allen’s “Shadows and Fog”
“Hardly Black and White:
Racial and Sexual Stereotypes in Manderlay and Black Snake Moan”
(chapter published in Race, Philosophy, and Film, eds. Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo and Dan Flory (New York: Routledge, Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy, 2013 {here]).
“Beauty, Monstrosity, Sublimity: Classical and Kantian Dichotomies
in Cocteau’s La Belle et La Bête”
(presented at the Society for the Philosophical Study of the Contemporary Visual Arts Panel at the American Philosophical Association Annual Meeting of the Central Division, Minneapolis, Minnesota, March 30-April 2, 2011).
“... the director and cameraman condemn the image of film
to the sacred task
of making itself recognizable to the eye.”
--Jean-François Lyotard, “Acinema,” in The Lyotard Reader,
ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 173-4.
III. Links to Directors, Criticism, Film Journals
David Lynch Woody Allen Ingmar Bergman Krzysztof Kieslowski
Luis Bunuel Carl Theodor Dreyer Federico Fellini Michelangelo Antonioni Robert Altman David Cronenberg
Kon Ichikawa Akira Kurosawa
Werner Herzog Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Jean Renoir Jean Cocteau Eric Rohmer Wim Wenders
Andrei Tarkovsky Alain Resnais
Hiroshi Teshigahara Japan Times on Teshigahara
Mike Leigh British Counsel on Leigh
Michael Haneke MoMA.org on Haneke Kinoeye on Haneke
Senses of Cinema (On-line Journal of Film)
Surreal Films](18_Film_files/shapeimage_1.png)
