Hidden Life: Aesthetic Dimensions of Cinematic Ethics

Robert Sinnerbrink (Macquarie University)

Abstract: One striking feature of contemporary philosophy of film has been the increasing interest in the relationship between cinema and ethics. This work encompasses explorations of the ethical dimensions of spectatorship, emotional engagement and moral evaluation, and the idea of cinema as a medium of ethical experience (see Choi and Frey 2014, Plantinga 2018, Sinnerbrink 2016, 2022). At the same time, we have seen the return of explicitly political approaches to cinema, which emphasise questions of identity, gender, race/ethnicity, nationalism, Eurocentrism, decolonisation, and so on (Brown 2023, Chauduri 2014). Many of these approaches implicitly assume that cinematic aesthetics – encompassing not only cinematic design but aesthetic pleasure in film - play a key role in emotional engagement, moral evaluation, and ideological positioning. There are few theoretical attempts, however, to articulate explicitly how film aesthetics contributes to cinema’s ethical potential and ideological effects. In this talk I challenge these assumptions by examining the aesthetic dimension of cinematic ethics. The aesthetic dimensions of cinema contribute to effective world-building, the setting of mood, and affective-cognitive directing in ways that are essential to understanding cinema as a medium of ethical experience. I explore these claims in relation to Terrence Malick’s historical biopic, A Hidden Life (2019), based on the life of conscientious objector Franz Jägerstätter, exploring how the aesthetic experience afforded by this film – not only its extraordinary presentation of landscape, family, and suffering, but the affectively charged manner in which it depicts ethical resistance - helps explain cinema’s power to morally engage and ethically inspire.

Bio: Robert Sinnerbrink is 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/Routledge, 2007/2014). He is also the editor of Emotion, Ethics, and Cinematic Experience: New Phenomenological and Cognitivist Perspectives (Berghahn, 2021) and a co-editor of Contemporary Screen Ethics: Absences, Identities, Belonging, Looking Anew (Edinburgh UP, 2023).

Zoom link available on request to Sean Bowden ([email protected])