The Film-Phil Lisbon Seminars - Robert Sinnerbrink

null, Robert Sinnerbrink (Macquarie University)

The FILM AND DEATH project, hosted by the NOVA University of Lisbon, is happy to announce the Film-Phil Seminar series (2023-2024). The first lecture will be held on November 22, 2023, at 11:00 AM (Lisbon time) / 09:00 PM (Sydney time).

“What is a Philosophical Reading of Film? On Film-Philosophy and Philosophical Film Criticism” by Prof. Robert Sinnerbrink, Philosophy, Macquarie University

Abstract: In this talk I wish to explore the ways in which philosophers of film and film-philosophers write about cinema and examine the kind of critical hermeneutic practices they deploy in various approaches to the idea of “film as philosophy.” As many critics maintain, there are important methodological questions raised by the role of philosophical interpretation of film and more explicit philosophical film criticism (e.g., Stanley Cavell's readings of film) and how these approaches relate to but also differ from more familiar forms of film analysis and interpretation. The question of what makes a particular reading or interpretation of a film “philosophical," however, has received surprisingly little attention within the “film as philosophy” debate. In my talk I shall outline some of the main approaches to this question (illustrative/exemplary interpretations; critical aesthetic interpretations; critical symptomatic interpretations; and dialogical/reflective interpretations), suggesting that one common feature that philosophical readings share - or ought to share - is a concern to stage a mutually reflective or critically transformative encounter between cinema and philosophy. This does not mean reducing film to philosophy or philosophy to film but exploring what I have elsewhere called a “hermeneutic parallelism” between cinematic expression and philosophical reflection.

Robert Sinnerbrink is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Macquarie University, Sydney. He is the author of New Philosophies of Film (Second Edition): An Introduction to Cinema as a Way of Thinking (Bloomsbury, 2022), Terrence Malick: Filmmaker and Philosopher (Bloomsbury, 2019), Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience through Film (Routledge, 2016), New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images (Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2011), and Understanding Hegelianism (Acumen, 2007/Routledge 2014). He is also a member of the editorial boards of the journals Film-Philosophy, Film and Philosophy, and Projections: The Journal of Movies and Mind.

Note that this lecture will be held uniquely online. Please, register in advance: https://videoconf-colibri.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwofuqrqjgrHN2KC6ot4riXwk6tASyNwDWG. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

The series is part of the ERC project FILM AND DEATH - Film-Philosophy as a Meditation on Death. We defend the hypothesis that to film-philosophize is to learn to die. This will be achieved by rethinking the innovations that film brings to recent philosophies of death and the metaphysics of time. A new paradigm for understanding the relationship between film and philosophy is proposed that claims 1) that film-philosophy’s methodology is a meditation on death, and 2) that ‘films think’ and have their own ways of creating novel thoughts that are not our own. One of these thoughts concerns death, a phenomenon of which we have no image but that film renders visible as a death-image (a direct image of passing time, facing the impossibility of any representation). We will assert that the cinematic experience is in itself equal to awareness of one’s own mortality, as a memento mori, without which we would not philosophize at all.

The organizer

Susana Viegas