A Philosophy of Cinematic Art--The Big Picture

Abstract

A Philosophy of Cinematic Art is a systematic investigation of cinema as an art, examining cinematic expression, realism, authorship, interpretation, narration, emotional engagement and related topics. It argues that appeal to the medium plays an important role in any adequate theory of cinema as an art. Cinema is understood as the medium of the moving image. Like many other media (such as that of prints, which contains the media of etchings, engravings, woodcuts, etc.), the cinematic medium contains other media—not just photochemical (or ‘traditional’) film, which has been the almost exclusive focus of analytic philosophers, but also handmade cinema (such as that of Émile Reynaud in the 1890s) and digital cinema (discussion of which comprises a quarter of the book); and digital cinema in turn has both non-interactive and interactive forms, including videogames. Since the cinematic medium contains other media, which nest within it, explanations and evaluations of cinematic works sometimes appeal to features of the cinematic medium itself and sometimes to those of its nesting media; so the book investigates what makes cinema in general an art as distinct from, for instance, literature; what makes traditional cinema artistically distinct from digital cinema; and what makes cinema’s interactive forms artistically distinct from its non-interactive ones.