MAKING NEW SENSE OF FILM THEORY THROUGH KANT

Abstract

‘Film theory’ is often taken to be an obscure, incoherent, and impractical field of study by students. This paper will argue that ‘film theory’ could be taught more effectively if it were systematically considered—as it seldom is—in relation to modern philosophical aesthetics. The rethinking of ‘film theory’ will begin with a fresh look at Kant's conception of aesthetic judgement, which will be considered here as the theoretical model of the modern (Romantic) notion of art as defamiliarization and world‐disclosure. Implications of Kant's ‘formalism’ and his idea of aesthetic disinterestedness will also be discussed. A Kantian reevaluation of ‘film theory’ will reveal hidden (or seemingly inexplicable) affinities among apparently incompatible theories of the cinema, questioning in the process the value of taxonomic truisms, for example, the strict division between ‘formalism’ and ‘realism’. Keeping in mind the key concern of the Kantian aesthetic with the idea of mediation will help reassess the frequently dismissed medium‐specificity argument. Finally, this ‘novel’ approach would resituate Deleuze's puzzling, and often misappropriated, concept of the cinematic ‘time‐image’ as a contemporary answer to the fantasy of immediacy elaborated in Kant's two‐faced aesthetic, the beautiful and the sublime.