Because of its automatic way of recording reality, film has a privileged relation to the problem of skepticism. If early film theorists celebrate cinema for overcoming skeptical doubt about the power of human vision, recent film-philosophers argue that our postphotographic, digital cinema is heading toward a general acceptance of skepticism, as though nothing on screen has anything to do with reality any longer. Emerging from the interaction of Stanley Cavell's and Gilles Deleuze's film-philosophies, Cinematic Skepticism challenges both these views. Jeroen Gerrits takes the issue of skepticism beyond concern with knowledge, turning skepticism into an ethical problem that pervades film history and theory. At the same time, he rethinks a Cavello-Deleuzian approach across the digital and global turns in cinema. Combining clear explanations of complex philosophical arguments with in-depth analyses of the contemporary films Grizzly Man, Amélie, Three Monkeys, and The Headless Woman, Gerrits traces how cinema invents ways of dis/connecting to the world.

Skepticism Films: Knowing and Doubting the World in Contemporary Cinema introduces skepticism films as updated configurations of skepticist thought experiments which exemplify the pervasiveness of philosophical ideas in popular culture. Philipp Schmerheim defends a pluralistic film-philosophical position according to which films can be, but need not be, expressions of philosophical thought in their own right. It critically investigates the influence of ideas of skepticism on film-philosophical theories and develops a typology of skepticism films by analyzing The Truman Show, Inception, The Matrix, Vanilla Sky, The Thirteenth Floor, Moon and other contemporary skepticism films. With its focus on skepticism as one of the most significant philosophical problems, Skepticism Films provides a better understanding of the dynamic interplay between film, theories of film and philosophy.

Skepticism Films: Knowing and Doubting the World in Contemporary Cinema introduces skepticism films as updated configurations of skepticist thought experiments which exemplify the pervasiveness of philosophical ideas in popular culture. Philipp Schmerheim defends a pluralistic film-philosophical position according to which films can be, but need not be, expressions of philosophical thought in their own right. It critically investigates the influence of ideas of skepticism on film-philosophical theories and develops a typology of skepticism films by analyzing The Truman Show, Inception, The Matrix, Vanilla Sky, The Thirteenth Floor, Moon and other contemporary skepticism films. With its focus on skepticism as one of the most significant philosophical problems, Skepticism Films provides a better understanding of the dynamic interplay between film, theories of film and philosophy.

Stanley Cavell was, by many accounts, America's greatest philosophical thinker of film. Like Bazin in France and Perkins in England, Cavell did not just transform the American capacity to take film as a subject for philosophical criticism; he had to first invent that legitimacy. Part of that effort involved the creation of several key now-canonical texts in film studies, among them the seminal The World Viewed along with Pursuits of Happiness and Contesting Tears. The present collection offers, for the first time anywhere, a concerted effort mounted by some of today's most compelling writers on film to take careful account of Cavell's legacy. The contributors think anew about what precisely Cavell contributed, what holds up, what is in need to revision or updating, and how his writing continues to be of vital significance and relevance for any contemporary approach to the philosophy of film.

This book challenges the long-standing presumption that serious philosophical engagement with film and television must be theoretical. It demonstrates, by example, how philosophy of film and film studies can move beyond the methodological assumption that understands philosophical to mean theoretical. In seventeen specially commissioned essays, one in-depth interview, and one reprint, leading philosophers and film scholars exploit the approaches, arguments, and insights of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, Iris Murdoch, Augustine, Berys Gaut, Noël Carroll, and Ordinary Language Philosophy, in exploring, amongst others, Gravity, Lone Star, The Handmaid’s Tale, Le notti di Cabiria, Dunkirk, L'Année dernière à Marienbad, Visitors, The Night it Rained, Philadelphia Story, Shoah, Mary Magdalene, Psycho, Blue Jasmine, Three Colours: Red, War Games, and Histoire(s) du Cinéma. In so doing, this collection argues for the power of theory-free philosophy and film studies as a way to expand our humanistic understanding.

World literature, many have stressed, is a systematic category. Both literary scholars and social scientists have argued that the prestige of the major literary languages is key to establishing the shape of the overall system. In order to critically interrogate world literature and cinema, Premises and Problems approaches this system from the perspective of languages and film traditions that do not hold a hegemonic position. This perspective raises new questions about the nature of literary hegemony and the structure of world literature: How is hegemony established? What are the costs of losing it? What does hegemony mask? How is it masked? The contributors focus predominantly on literatures outside the small circle of prestigious modern European languages and on films and film criticism produced outside the best-known centers. The inclusion of this unfamiliar material calls attention to some areas of obscurity that make key features of the system indistinct, or that make it difficult to trace relationships between texts that hold different levels of prestige, such as those of the Global North and the Global South. The book argues that the study of world literature and cinema will profit from a sustained and informed engagement with the body of work produced by historical social scientists committed to the perspective of the world-system.

Mind-game films and other complex narratives have been a prominent phenomenon of the cinematic landscape during the period 1990-2010, when films like The Sixth Sense, Memento, Fight Club and Source Code became critical and commercial successes, often acquiring a cult status with audiences. With their multiple story lines, unreliable narrators, ambiguous twist endings, and paradoxical worlds, these films challenge traditional ways of narrative comprehension and in many cases require and reward multiple viewings. But how can me make sense of films that don't always make sense the way we are used to? While most scholarship has treated these complex films as narrative puzzles that audiences solve with their cognitive skills, Making Sense of Mind-Game Films offers a fresh perspective by suggesting that they appeal to the body and the senses in equal measures. Mind-game films tell stories about crises between body, mind and world, and about embodied forms of knowing and subjective ways of being-in-the-world. Through compelling in-depth case studies of popular mind-game films, the book explores how these complex narratives take their (embodied) spectators with them into such crises. The puzzling effect generated by these films stems from a conflict between what we think and what we experience, between what we know and what we feel to be true, and between what we see and what we sense.

The cinema of Iran is celebrated both locally and internationally, yet elements of this diverse field remain comparatively understudied. This book brings together a diverse range of scholars to explore contemporary Iranian cinema in its local and international contexts from a range of perspectives including aesthetic, socio-political comparative approaches. Its chapters analyse the work of well-known filmmakers on the international film circuit such as Abbas Kiarostami, Mohammad Reza Aslani and Jaffar Panahi, as well as internationally lesser-known domestic films such as those of Kamal Tabrizi and the 'Sacred Defence' films of the Iran-Iraq war. The book further widens its scope with chapters which also examine the material practices of the Iranian film industry itself, including chapters on the process by which Iranian films become 'accessible' to international audience. Finally, it considers, too, representations of Iranians in foreign cinemas, and how these have in turn affected Iranian films.

What is ‘the good’ of the film experience? And how does the budding field of ‘film as philosophy’ answer this question? Charting new routes for film ethics, Martin P. Rossouw develops a critical account of the transformational ethics at work within the ‘film as philosophy’ debate. Whenever philosophers claim that films can do philosophy, they also persistently put forward edifying practical effects – potential transformations of thought and experience – as the benefit of viewing such films. Through rigorous appraisals of key arguments, and with reference to the cinema of Terrence Malick, Rossouw pieces together the idea of an inner makeover through cinema – a cinemakeover – which casts a distinct vision of film spectatorship as a practice of self-transformation. "Recasting much of the existing debate, Martin Rossouw’s [...] emphasis on film’s power for enacting ethical transformation, rather than theoretical insight or discovery, gives a much-needed shot in the arm to a topic whose development has stalled in recent years. [...] This highly original book offers a unique and provocative contribution to the scholarship. Rossouw is a persistent questioner, often demonstrating sharp philosophical instincts." -Shawn Loht, Philosophy in Review, Vol. 43 no. 1 (February 2023). "At once a comprehensive record and a ceaseless meta-critique, Rossouw’s Transformational Ethics of Film is a thorough and bittersweet investigation into the aspiration and limits of this strand of film-philosophy scholarship [...]. [...] Rossouw’s detailed commitment to this critical exercise both provides a bountiful resource for film ethics scholarship, bringing organized clarity to an otherwise scattered but nonetheless commanding school of thought, and presents a potentially radical prospect for the position of meta-hermeneutics in the world of art theory." -Daniel E. Smith, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Vol. 22 no. 2 (July 2024).

With Post-Theory, David Bordwell and Noël Carroll challenge the prevailing practices of film scholarship. Since the 1970s, film scholars have been searching for a unified theory that will explain all sorts of films, their production, and their reception; the field has been dominated by structuralist Marxism, varieties of cultural theory, and the psychoanalytic ideas of Freud and Lacan. Bordwell and Carroll ask, why not employ many theories tailored to specific goals, rather than searching for a unified theory? Post-Theory offers fresh directions for understanding film, presenting new essays by twenty-seven scholars on topics as diverse as film scores, audience response, and the national film industries of Russia, Scandinavia, the U.S., and Japan. They use historical, philosophical, psychological, and feminist methods to tackle such basic issues as: What goes on when viewers perceive a film? How do filmmakers exploit conventions? How do movies create illusions? How does a film arouse emotion? Bordwell and Carroll have given space not only to distinguished film scholars but to non-film specialists as well, ensuring a wide variety of opinions and ideas on virtually every topic on the current agenda of film studies. Full of stimulating essays published here for the first time, Post-Theory promises to redefine the study of cinema.