David Martin-Jones, Cinema Against Doublethink: Ethical Encounters with the Lost Pasts of World History

Abstract

David Martin-Jones commences his ambitious and impressive new book, Cinema Against Doublethink, with a clever but confusing analogy, combining the famous thought experiment concerning Schrödinger’s cat with an imaginary installation of conceptual art. He imagines an art exhibition where world history is like a pair of shoes, or a cat, in a box, where the spectator does not know whether the shoes, or the cat, are there or not; guerrilla filmmakers ‘of a world of cinemas’ (p. xiv) break into the gallery one night and start projecting films through the box, showing that world history is not singular but multiple, screening historical stories of colonialist oppression and political resistance that would otherwise have been lost to the past. Although hard to visualize, Martin-Jones’s playful analogy is intended to convey the central idea behind his book, namely that philosophical film studies needs to focus on stories concerning the ‘lost pasts’...