This volume of new essays energizes a growing movement in film theory which questions and seeks to overturn many of the assumptions that have governed film theory for the last twenty years. The book brings together film scholars and philosophers in a united commitment to the standards of argumentation that characterize analytic philosophy rather than a single doctrinal approach. The essays address such topics as authorship, emotion, ideology, representation, and expression in film.

• Introduction: Film Theory and Philosophy


• PART 1 What is Cinematic Representation


• 1: Gregory Currie: The Film Theory that Never Was: A Nervous Manifesto


• 2: Kendall L. Walton: On Pictures and Photographs: Objections Answered


• 3: Richard Allen: Looking at Motion Pictures


• 4: Edward Branigan: Sound, Epistemology, Film


• PART 2 Meaning, Authorship, and Intention


• 5: Paisley Livingston: Cinematic Authorship


• 6: Berys Gaut: Film Authorship and Collaboration


• 7: Noel Carroll: Fiction, Non-Fiction, and the Film of Presumptive Assertion: A Conceptual Analysis


• 8: Trevor Ponech: What is Non-Fiction Cinema?


• 9: George Wilson: On Film Narrative and Narrative Meaning


• PART 3 Ideology and Ethics


• 10: Jennifer Hammett: The Ideological Impediment: Epistemology, Feminism, and Film Theory


• 11: Hector Rodriguez: Ideology and Film Culture


• 12: Tommy Lott: Aesthetics and Politics in Contemporary Black Film Theory


• PART 4 Aesthetics


• 13: Peter Kivy: Music in the Movies: A Philosophical Enquiry


• 14: Flo Leibowitz: Personal Agency Theories of Expressiveness and the Movies


• 15: Deborah Knight: Aristotelians on Speed: Paradoxes of Genre in the Context of Cinema


• PART 5 Emotional Response


• 16: Carl Plantinga: Notes on Spectator Emotion and Ideological Film Criticism


• 17: Dirk Eitzen: Comedy and Criticism


• 18: Murray Smith: Imagining from the Inside: POV, Imagining Seeing, and Empathy


• 19: Malcolm Turvey: Seeing Theory: On Perception and Emotional Response in Current Film Theory


• Select Bibliography


• Index

Richard Allen is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies, New York University
Murray Smith is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury