What is a moving image, and how does it move us? In Thinking In Film, celebrated theorist Mieke Bal engages in an exploration - part dialogue, part voyage - with the video installations of Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila to understand movement as artistic practice and as affect. Through fifteen years of Ahtila's practice, including such seminal works as The Annunciation, Where Is Where? and The House, Bal searches for the places where theoretical and artistic practices intersect, to create radical spaces in which genuinely democratic acts are performed. Bringing together different understandings of 'figure' from form to character, Bal examines the syntax of the exhibition and its ability to bring together installations, the work itself, the physical and ontological thresholds of the installation space and the use of narrative and genre. The double meaning of 'movement', in Bal's unique thought, catalyses anunderstanding of video installation work as inherently plural, heterogenous and possessed of revolutionary political potential. The video image as an art form illuminates the question of what an image is, and the installation binds viewers to their own interactions with the space. In this context Bal argues that the intersection between movement and space creates an openness to difference and doubt. By 'thinking in' art, we find ideas not illustrated by but actualized in artworks. Bal practices this theory in action to demonstrate how the video installation can move us to think beyond ordinary boundaries and venture into new spaces. There is no act more radical than figuring a vision of the 'other' as film allows artto do. Thinking In Film is Mieke Bal ather incisive, innovative best as she opens up the miraculous political potential of the condensed art of the moving image.

A concise but comprehensive student guide to studying Emily Bronte's classic novel Wuthering Heights. It covers adaptations such as film and TV versions of the novel and student-friendly features include discussion points and a comprehensive guide to further reading.

This anthology of philosophical essays explores the interpersonal and political contexts in and against which the films of ten major postwar filmmakers were made.

Over the last few decades, film has increasingly become an issue of philosophical reflection from an ontological and epistemological perspective, and the claim “doing philosophy through film” has raised extensive discussion about its meaning. The mechanical reproduction of reality is one of the most prominent philosophical questions raised by the emergence of film at the end of the nineteenth century, inquiring into the ontological nature of both reality and film. Yet the nature of this audio-photographic and moving reproduction of reality constitutes an ontological puzzle, which has widely been disregarded as a main line of enquiry with direct consequences for philosophy. Regarding this background, this volume brings together the best papers from the Lisbon Conference on Philosophy and Film: Thinking Reality and Time through Film, held in 2014. What they all have in common is the discussion of new aspects and approaches of how philosophy relates to film. Whether by philosophizing through concrete examples of films or whether looking at film’s ontological reliance on time and image, or its intra-active entanglement with reality or truth, this book explores grasp film’s nature philosophically, and provides new insights for the film philosopher and the filmmaker, as well as for the freshman fascinated by film for philosophical reasons.

When Marcel Proust started to work on In Search of Lost Time in 1908, he wrote this question in his notebook: ‘Should I make it a novel, a philosophical study, am I a novelist?’ Throughout his famous multi-volume work, Proust directly engages several philosophers, and few novels are as thoroughly saturated with philosophical themes and concepts as In Search of Lost Time. The Proustian Mind is an outstanding reference source to the rich philosophical range of Proust’s work and the first major volume of its kind. Including 31 chapters by an international team of contributors, the volume is divided into seven clear parts: Proust’s life and works metaphysics and epistemology mind and language aesthetics ethics gender and sexuality predecessors, contemporaries and successors. Within these sections, key Proustian themes are explored from a philosophical standpoint, including time, the self, memory, imagination, jealousy, beauty, love, subjectivity and desire. The final section considers Proust in relation to important philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, de Beauvoir and Deleuze. The Proustian Mind is essential reading for those studying aesthetics, philosophy of literature, phenomenology and ethics, and will also be of interest to those in literature studying modernism, French literature and the relationship between literature and philosophy.

This book aims to redefine the relationship between film and revolution. Starting with Hannah Arendt’s thoughts on the American and French Revolution, it argues that, from a theoretical perspective, revolutions can be understood as describing a relationship between time and movement and that ultimately the spectators and not the actors in a revolution decide its outcome. Focusing on the concepts of ‘time,’ ‘movement,’ and ‘spectators,’ this study develops an understanding of film not as a medium of agitation but as a way of thinking that relates to the idea of historicity that opened up with the American and French Revolution, a way of thinking that can expand our very notion of revolution. The book explores this expansion through an analysis of three audiovisual stagings of revolution: Abel Gance’s epic on the French Revolution Napoléon, Warren Beatty’s essay on the Russian Revolution Reds, and the miniseries John Adams about the American Revolution. The author thereby offers a fresh take on the questions of revolution and historicity from the perspective of film studies.