The real of reality : the realist turn in contemporary film theory

Reality has become an increasingly prominent topic in contemporary philosophy. The book’s contributors are responding to the challenge to use the philosophically underexplored potential of film to disclose what the editors propose to call “the real of reality.” Half Title Series Information Title Page Copyright Page Contents Acknowledgements Illustrations Notes on Contributors Introduction References Part 1 The Rise of the Real Chapter 1 The Real in Film: The Historical Real, the Optical Real, and the Material Real 1 The Historical Real: The Dialectical Image 2 The Optical Real: The Optical Unconscious 3 The Material Real: The Light References Chapter 2 The Being of Film 1 The Ontological Puzzle of Being in Reproduction 2 The Being of Reality 3 The Concept of Being without Being References Chapter 3 What It Means to Imagine Imagination: The Derrida–Searle Debate and the Poetic Ontology of Film 1 The Derrida–Searle Debate 2 A Filmic Example: La Grande Bellezza 3 The Poetic Ontology of Film References Chapter 4 Emerging Imaginations: The Relation of Film and Reality from a Literary Perspective 1 Metalepsis or the “Real” Image 2 Pygmalion at the Movies 3 Total Cinema and Literature 4 Barthes and the Emerging Image 5 A Train Crossing Borders 6 Jump-Cut: Virtual Reality or No Man’s Land References Filmography Chapter 5 Animated Visions of Reality: The Real as Experimental Aesthetic in Anca Damian’s Animated Documentaries 1 The Ontology of the Animated Image 2 Inner Realities 3 The Real 4 Experimental Aesthetic in Animated Documentaries References Chapter 6 Pasolini’s Pan-semiology or Reality as Code References Part 2 Experiencing the Real Chapter 7 The Cinematographic Experience: Thinking Cinema through the Philosophy of E. Husserl 1 The Familiar Lifeworld 2 The Framing as Reduction 3 The Montage as Constitution of Sense Conclusion: Cinema is a Phenomenological Art References Chapter 8 Reality Narrated through Time: Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror 1 The Experience of Time and its Narration 1.1 The Aporicity of Time 1.2 Time and Narration: Ricœur’s Answer to the Aporias of Time 2 Film Temporality and Narrated Time 2.1 Narrative Time 2.2 Cinematic Time 3 Mirroring Narrated Past References Chapter 9 Time and Film 1 Time and Duration 2 Temporal Paradoxes 3 Simultaneity and Contemporaneity 4 Time and Cinema References Chapter 10 Mapping Film-World Relations to Reality: A New Conceptual Cartography 1 Enter Warpedness and Enfoldedness 2 Where There Was One, Now There Are Four 3 The Non-enfolded, Non-warped Reality 4 The Warped, Non-enfolded Reality 5 The Non-warped, Enfolded Reality 6 The Warped, Enfolded Reality 7 The Non-warped, Enfolded Reality without Extensity 8 Coda: Onwards to More Filmic Realities! References Chapter 11 The Crisis of the Time-Image: Montage in Postmodern Times 1 Montage, Shock, Realism 2 Bridging the Gap or Ripping It Open? Montage in Benjamin, Adorno, and Deleuze 3 Progress as Regress: The Crisis of Postmodernity and of the Time-Image 4 Conclusion: A Contemporary Shock? Realism and Montage Today References Chapter 12 Think Future Cinema—with Photofilm as Its Basis References Part 3 The Real Unsettling Chapter 13 The Bird’s Eye View—Ornithology and Ontology in Hitchcock’s The Birds 1 Bird’s-Eye View 2 General Semantics (00:45:53–00:47:38) 3 Conclusion References Chapter 14 A Rough Sketch on The Real of Terrorism—Thoughts on Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy 1 The Real of Reality and Fiction—The Irreal of Fantasizing 2 Threefold Terror in Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy 2.1 Anxiety 2.2 Chaos 2.3 Hope References Chapter 15 Justifying a Philosophical Claim: The Act of Killing and the Banality of Evil 1 Can Documentary Films Do Philosophy? 2 Arendt and the Banality of Evil 3 The Act of Killing 4 The Nature of Cinematic Reenactment 5 Arendt and The Act of Killing 6 Conclusion References Chapter 16 Jauja and Meek’s Cutoff: The Parallel American Ways of Rethinking Gilbert Simondon’s Role of Aesthetics in the Configuration of Humanity 1 Parallelism: Jauja and Meek’s Cutoff 2 The American Différend 3 America as a Mirror 4 American Techno-aesthetics 5 America as a Ruin References Filmography Chapter 17 Maya Deren’s Claim for the “Ritualistic” Film or Fusing the Sacred and the Profane for the Sake of the Real 1 Manipulating Time and Space by Film as Art 2 Fostering Evolution of Consciousness by Film as Art 3 The Creative Treatment of Reality 4 Promoting New Modes of Perception/Experiences 5 The “Ritualistic” Approach 6 Transgressions of Consciousness by Ritualistic Dance, Trance—and Film? References This book provides philosophical insight into the nature of reality by reflecting on its ontological qualities through the medium of film. The main question is whether we have access to reality through film that is not based on visual representation or narration: Is film—in spite of its immateriality—a way to directly grasp and reproduce reality? Why do we perceive film as “real” at all? What does it mean to define its own reproducibility as an ontological feature of reality? And what does film as a medium exactly show? The contributions in this book provide, from a cinematic perspective, diverse philosophical analyses to the understanding of the challenging concept of “the real of reality”. "This book provides philosophical insight into the nature of reality by reflecting on its ontological qualities through the medium of film"-- Provided by publisher