How do movies evoke and express ethical ideas? What role does our emotional involvement play in this process? What makes the aesthetic power of cinema ethically significant?
Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience through Film addresses these questions by examining the idea of cinema as a medium of ethical experience with the power to provoke emotional understanding and philosophical thinking.
In a clear and engaging style, Robert Sinnerbrink examines the key philosophical approaches to ethics in contemporary film theory and philosophy using detailed case studies of cinematic ethics across different genres, styles, and filmic traditions.
Written in a lucid and lively style that will engage both specialist and non-specialist readers, this book is ideal for use in the academic study of philosophy and film. Key features include annotated suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter and a filmography of movies useful for teaching and researching cinematic ethics.
Author(s): Robert Sinnerbrink
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2015
Language: English
Pages: 230
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of figures
Preface
Overview of this book
Part I: Cinema And/As Ethics
1. Cinematic ethics: Film as a medium of ethical experience
Two perspectives on cinema and ethics
The idea of ‘cinematic ethics’
Cinematic ethics: mapping an encounter
Cinematic ethics: key approaches
Cinema as medium of ethical experience
Ulysses’ Gaze: the Blue Ship
Notes
Bibliography
Filmography
Part II: Philosophical Approaches to Cinematic Ethics
2. From scepticism to moral perfectionism (Cavell)
Film as a ‘moving image of scepticism’
Film and moral perfectionism
Moral perfectionism and remarriage comedy
The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday, and Adam’s Rib
Notes
Bibliography
Filmography
3. From cinematic belief to ethics and politics (Deleuze)
Deleuzian cinematic ethics
Crisis of the action-image
Questioning Deleuze’s cinema of belief
Deleuze’s fable: Rancière’s critique
A cinematic critique?
From cinema of belief to minor cinema
Notes
Bibliography
Filmography
4. Cinempathy: phenomenology, cognitivism, and moving images
The affective turn in film theory
The phenomenological-affective turn
A brief history of cognitivism
Affect and emotion
A Brief History of Empathy (‘Einfühlung’)
Empathy and sympathy (‘cinempathy’)
Cinempathy in a Separation
Notes
Bibliography
Filmography
Part III: Performing Cinematic Ethics
5. The moral melodrama ( Stella Dallas, Talk to Her)
The melodramatic imagination
Cavell’s moral perfectionist reading of Stella Dallas
Stella’s ‘Christmas tree’ display
Stella’s class
Talk to Her
Notes
Bibliography
Filmography
6. Melodrama, realism, and ethical experience (
Cinematic ethics as aesthetic understanding
Biutiful
Ethical social realism: The Promise [La promesse]
Cinematic empathy versus ethical proximity
Notes
Bibliography
Filmography
7. Gangster: Cinematic ethics in The Act of Killing
‘A documentary of the imagination’
Framing The Act of Killing
Gangster film
Responses to the film
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Filmography
Conclusion
Bibliography
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Index
