Cinema
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
For Alain Badiou, films think, and it is the task of the philosopher to transcribe that thinking. What is the subject to which the film gives expressive form? This is the question that lies at the heart of Badiou’s account of cinema.
He contends that cinema is an art form that bears witness to the Other and renders human presence visible, thus testifying to the universal value of human existence and human freedom. Through the experience of viewing, the movement of thought that constitutes the film is passed on to the viewer, who thereby encounters an aspect of the world and its exaltation and vitality as well as its difficulty and complexity. Cinema is an impure art cannibalizing its times, the other arts, and people – a major art precisely because it is the locus of the indiscernibility between art and non-art. It is this, argues Badiou, that makes cinema the social and political art par excellence, the best indicator of our civilization, in the way that Greek tragedy, the coming-of-age novel and the operetta were in their respective eras.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The best of French philosopher Badiou's over 50 years' worth of writing on cinema is collected in this intriguing volume. It begins with an interview conducted by editor de Baecque in which Badiou considers the role of film in culture as a "school for everyone", his evolving relationship with the cinema, and the radical politics that often inform his work. His 1977 essay "Revisionist Cinema" lays out these politics, decrying the ideals of "new bourgeoisie" directors like Bergman and Kubrick. Badiou posits an "axiomatic" approach to film discussion in which we eschew judgment in favor of asking "how a particular film lets us travel with a particular idea in such a way that we might discover what nothing else could lead us to discover." Badiou describes film as "the seventh art", explaining how it interacts with other media, and provides brilliant, in-depth analyses on the techniques, styles, and themes of several films. His crucial essay is "Cinema as Philosophical Experimentation" in which he explores film as both a "mass art" and a subject worthy of serious philosophical thought. Badiou's writing style may be difficult to those unaccustomed to French philosophy, but the material is worth the effort.
