CINEMA AND PHILOSOPHY

CINEMA THINKS WITH IMAGES: THE CONTINGENCY OF THE WRITTEN TRADITION OF PHILOSOPHY.

Around 1995, I tried for the first time to associate my two earliest passions, cinema and philosophy. Literature served as a mediation. I thought a lot about these relations in the period of my adolescence, when I was attracted by Sartre's philosophical ideas as exposed in his novels and plays. My first access to philosophy had been literary; there should be a dimension of thinking that was possible to be articulated in literature. Why not in cinema?

Literature and cinema help me to focus a life that profoundly disappointed and scared me, but that was fascinating when put into images for contemplation and analysis. Being and Seeing, a crucial ontological difference. Life as a film or a book, life to be seen or read, never to be lived.

A course about semiology of cinema of Christian Metz in Cordoba in the sixties impressed me very much, especially in the possibility of considering cinema as a form of thinking. In our stammering languages (I knew almost nothing of French, and Metz was arduously trying to speak Spanish), his course gave me elements and insights that only decades later I would dare to organize in a personal line of inquiry.

I started to dig in this curious prehistory, in my experience with cinema prior to my systematic philosophical studies at the University. I collected ideas, recalling films that had impressed me, connecting them to philosophical thoughts, ethical and logical, that tormented me from childhood. A book on cinema and philosophy was sent in 1998, after many versions, to the Gedisa publisher in Barcelona, which have already edited my Crítica de la Moral Afirmativa (Critique of Affirmative Morals) in 1996.

Gedisa finally published my book in 1999 under the title: Cine: 100 años de Filosofia. Una Introducción a la filosofía a través del análisis de películas. (Cinema: one hundred years of philosophy. An introduction to philosophy through the analysis of films). The book won immediately a translation into Italian by Mondadori, with the curious title Da Aristotele a Spielberg, and years later a Portuguese translation by Rocco, with the title O cinema pensa (The cinema thinks)).

I think that European philosophers had sustained throughout history one unresolved traumatic relation with images and the sensible exposition of thoughts, from the expulsion of the poets from the Platonic republic to the analyses of Habermas of Italo Calvino’novels. It is amazing to see how twentieth-century philosophers who lived the emergence and first developments of the cinema, did not produce specific careful philosophical reflection on cinema and philosophy up to the works of Deleuze (the previous attempts of Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Benjamin, Adorno, etc. always seem disappointing to me).

As seen above (in the section PHILOSOPHY), I understand philosophical thinking as an oscilating movement between analysis and existence on a two-ways road. Literature and cinema, due to their more fluid forms of expression, seems to be able to challenge the primacy of the traditional written presentation of ideas, as practiced in the our current academic factories of philosophy.

In think that literature and cinema can think the flow of human experiences and historicity without feeling the need to reduce them to intellectual forms of representation. It is precisely in this territory where the cinema can think. A movie like Oliver Stone's “Natural born killers” can explore the Nietzsche’s subject of naturalization of values in unbereable human situations, showing how the impetuous forces of images can generate concepts in an unusual way.

Cinema and literature can be philosophical if we accept that philosophy can move within a very wide spectrum, from the philosophical poem up to the exposition more mathematico, the essay and the aphorism: philosophy is not bound to a single style of presentation. Thinking is only contingently connected to the written tradition, In order to think we only need a mechanism to create concepts and connect them to each other, but this mechanism can be materialized in very diversified media: written texts, verbal transmissions, visual argumentation and images.

A central idea of my 1999 book is that cinema creates concepts not in a purely intellectual way, but intellectually-affective or "logopathic" concepts, as I prefer to say, giving affections and emotions a conceptual role. Logopathic treatment of concepts by the cinema challenges the traditional "apatic" approaches to philosophical problems, that is limited to generate purely intellectual concepts without the impact on the senses. (The photographer Jeffries, the hero of Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear window", would never have discovered the killer had he maintained a Cartesian doubt about the facts).

My notions of “logopathy” and “image-concept” tried to avoid dichotomies between sentiments and rational thinking, revealing the affective nature of intellect and the cognitive import of affection. European philosophy, dominated from Greece until nineteenth century by intellectualism, only recently felt the need to challenge the purely intellectual approach to rationality, when "logopathic thinkers" such as Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger and Sartre arise focusing the complex relations between rationality and will, unconscious, affections and power. 

The emergence of the “logopathic thinkers” in the history of European philosophy seems to me a fact of crucial importance in order to think the relations between cinema and philosophy, showing that the demand for extending the boundaries of thinking responds also to an internal need of the traditional written philosophy, The logopathic 19th century European philosophers were trying to express their ideas pushing the boundaries of written language in their traditional expressive possibilities, as making their thoughts “visual” and “in movement”, avoiding the limitations of linear reasoning and trying to capture the temporality of truth. 

In my book and in further research I have tried to show this double movement of confluence between an increasingly conceptual and philosophical cinema, and an increasingly imaginative and historical philosophy. European philosophy and cinema meet when philosophy becomes logopathic. 

You can see my publications in the area of Cinema and Philosophy in the section "Selected works".

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