ABSTRACT
Those who have studied fi lm in both academic and non-academic contexts have long engaged in philosophical analysis1 or found themselves appealing to some philosophy or other to give weight to their theories.2 But only recently have there been active calls to move fi lm theorizing toward philosophy, considered as a distinct style of inquiry. In his paper “An Elegy for Theory,” delivered at the 2006 Framework conference, “The Future of Film Theory,” D.N. Rodowick traced the shift in fi lm studies over the last two decades from theory to history to science to philosophy.3 His intriguing account suggested that the Historical Turn, soon manifesting itself as a post-Theory position advocating cognitive science, ultimately resulted in the re-conception of theory through models of philosophizing suggested in late Wittgenstein.4 For Rodowick, this philosophical turn had created a context for investigating the distinction between fi lm theory and fi lm philosophy, the former seeking to explicate the medium qua medium, the latter seeking to engage movies for the new thoughts, concepts, and ways of seeing they proffer. Melinda Szaloky’s appeal to philosophy, on the other hand, concerns itself less with the philosophies to be found in movies
platonicreconstruction,residualkantianism
themselves than with the study of the origins of the fundamental ideas at the root of fi lm theory. Philosophy here constitutes a metacritical endeavor. In “Making New Sense of Film Theory through Kant”5 Szaloky promotes a pedagogical model in which fi lm theories as divergent as Benjaminian historicism, Russian formalism, Deleuzian perspectivism, and Arnheim’s gestalt psychology are studied through their roots in Kantian intuitionist aesthetics. A revival of the “Kantian heritage” of fi lm theorizing, she argues, would expose for the student of fi lm “the largely unexplored historical and intellectual tie between continental aesthetics and fi lm theory.”6
