Introduction: What is film-philosophy?
Summary
What is film-philosophy? Film-philosophy begins with the moving sound-image. Definitions of the topic require more than academic and mechanical experience. The moving image generates screen forms and cinematic conditions for things outside those forms. Screen-based forms provide an everyday medium for information retrieval, communication, distraction and entertainment. Film, television, Web services, data repositories, gaming screens, mobile screens and art-based and non-commercial screen-related forms materialize the issues and ideas of the content provided in their situated medium and in the mediation of the content they produce: global news, sports events, the natural world, imaginative worlds and so on. Whether commercial or alternative, all of these forms pass through mediating distributive networks (communities of all kinds, human and non-human), and produce different kinds of knowledge forms. Further, screen-based content – ideas, histories, empirical data – generate different types of cinematic conditions. Engaging with this screen vernacular in academic terms requires that practitioners of film-philosophy are not just experiencing, speaking and writing about screen forms as passive observers, but are aware of their participation in screen cultures and their mediation through distributive networks. What participants have access to will determine the type of conceptualization they have about a particular issue. Screen forms are thus contentious and complex media that format and challenge the participant's perceptual capacities. In these terms, film-philosophy is a study of dynamic forms and conditions. This book offers examples of thinkers who engage in the processes and conceptualization of cinematic values and discourses, as they relate or develop philosophical and theoretical ideas.
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- Information
- Film, Theory and PhilosophyThe Key Thinkers, pp. 1 - 16Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2009