ABSTRACT
An increasingly popular claim amongst fi lm-philosophers is that fi lm is no mere handmaiden to philosophy, that it does more than simply illustrate philosophical texts: rather, fi lm itself can also think. Film can philosophize. Approaches that purport to be less textual and illustrative can be found in the subtractive ontology of Alain Badiou, the Wittgensteinian analyses of Stanley Cavell, and the materialist rhizomatics of Gilles Deleuze, so it is said. In each case there is a claim that fi lm can think in its own way. A very recent case in point would be Daniel Frampton’s Filmosophy, which claims for fi lm the faculty of a new kind of thought all its own, the “affective thinking of fi lm.”1 Similar claims have been made for Cavell’s Wittgensteinian approach, it being one that lets us appreciate how “fi lms can philosophize.”2 The argument of this chapter, however, is that, given the transcendent, all-encompassing nature of such philosophies of fi lmwhich tell us “what fi lm is” and so also “what fi lm does”—even those who seemingly allow fi lm its own mind and thought cannot avoid reducing it
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to illustrations of extant philosophy. If fi lm thinks, it is not in its own way but Philosophy’s way. Even Frampton-who is highly sensitive to the abuse of fi lm by Theory-begins with a defi nition of thinking in terms of “problems and ideas” and what “creates pure concepts” that is already reliant upon a pre-existing philosophical model, in this case, Deleuze’s.3 Likewise, it is Cavell’s Wittgenstein who is said to “clear the way” for seeing fi lm as philosophy because he forwards a therapeutic model of philosophizing that can be likened to the experience of watching a fi lm.4 So far, so illustrative. Film philosophizes here because it accords with a favored kind of philosophy. What begins as an attempt at seeing fi lm as (its own) model of philosophy and thought, fi nds itself closer than anticipated to the use of fi lms to teach and illustrate philosophy (as explicitly forwarded in the work of such as Christopher Falzon, Mary Litch, or Mark Rowlands) on account of the fact that that there is always a philosophy of fi lm underlying the approach.5 There is always a totalizing theory of what fi lm is, one that rejects other approaches in favor of its own.
