"Police Adjective" and Attunement to the Significance of Things

Abstract


 In this paper I consider Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective (Romania, 2009) as an instance of a puzzling work of art. Part of what is puzzling about it is the range of extreme responses to it, both positive and negative. I make sense of this puzzlement and try to alleviate it, while considering the film alongside Ludwig Wittgenstein’s arguably puzzling “Lectures on Aesthetics” (from 1938). I use each work to illuminate possible understandings of the other. The upshot is that it is is plausible to regard both as engaged, in part, in preparing us to make sense both of themselves, and then also of other works.