Download or read book Fatalism in American Film Noir written by Robert B. Pippin and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reveals the ways in which American film noir explore the declining credibility of individuals as causal centers of agency, and how we live with the acknowledgment of such limitations.
Download or read book Filmed Thought written by Robert B. Pippin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-12-16 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the rise of review sites and social media, films today, as soon as they are shown, immediately become the topic of debates on their merits not only as entertainment, but also as serious forms of artistic expression. Philosopher Robert B. Pippin, however, wants us to consider a more radical proposition: film as thought, as a reflective form. Pippin explores this idea through a series of perceptive analyses of cinematic masterpieces, revealing how films can illuminate, in a concrete manner, core features and problems of shared human life. Filmed Thought examines questions of morality in Almodóvar’s Talk to Her, goodness and naïveté in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, love and fantasy in Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, politics and society in Polanski’s Chinatown and Malick’s The Thin Red Line, and self-understanding and understanding others in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place and in the Dardennes brothers' oeuvre. In each reading, Pippin pays close attention to what makes these films exceptional as technical works of art (paying special attention to the role of cinematic irony) and as intellectual and philosophical achievements. Throughout, he shows how films offer a view of basic problems of human agency from the inside and allow viewers to think with and through them. Captivating and insightful, Filmed Thought shows us what it means to take cinema seriously not just as art, but as thought, and how this medium provides a singular form of reflection on what it is to be human.
Download or read book Hollywood Westerns and American Myth written by Robert B. Pippin and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-22 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this pathbreaking book one of America’s most distinguished philosophers brilliantly explores the status and authority of law and the nature of political allegiance through close readings of three classic Hollywood Westerns: Howard Hawks’ Red River and John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Searchers.Robert Pippin treats these films as sophisticated mythic accounts of a key moment in American history: its “second founding,” or the western expansion. His central question concerns how these films explore classical problems in political psychology, especially how the virtues of a commercial republic gained some hold on individuals at a time when the heroic and martial virtues were so important. Westerns, Pippin shows, raise central questions about the difference between private violence and revenge and the state’s claim to a legitimate monopoly on violence, and they show how these claims come to be experienced and accepted or rejected.Pippin’s account of the best Hollywood Westerns brings this genre into the center of the tradition of political thought, and his readings raise questions about political psychology and the political passions that have been neglected in contemporary political thought in favor of a limited concern with the question of legitimacy.
Download or read book The Philosophical Hitchcock written by Robert B. Pippin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-12-21 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the surface, The Philosophical Hitchcock: Vertigo and the Anxieties of Unknowingness, is a close reading of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece Vertigo. This, however, is a book by Robert B. Pippin, one of our most penetrating and creative philosophers, and so it is also much more. Even as he provides detailed readings of each scene in the film, and its story of obsession and fantasy, Pippin reflects more broadly on the modern world depicted in Hitchcock’s films. Hitchcock’s characters, Pippin shows us, repeatedly face problems and dangers rooted in our general failure to understand others—or even ourselves—very well, or to make effective use of what little we do understand. Vertigo, with its impersonations, deceptions, and fantasies, embodies a general, common struggle for mutual understanding in the late modern social world of ever more complex dependencies. By treating this problem through a filmed fictional narrative, rather than discursively, Pippin argues, Hitchcock is able to help us see the systematic and deep mutual misunderstanding and self-deceit that we are subject to when we try to establish the knowledge necessary for love, trust, and commitment, and what it might be to live in such a state of unknowingness. A bold, brilliant exploration of one of the most admired works of cinema, The Philosophical Hitchcock will lead philosophers and cinephiles alike to a new appreciation of Vertigo and its meanings.
Download or read book Philosophy by Other Means written by Robert B. Pippin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-05-26 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The relationship between philosophy and aesthetic criticism has occupied Robert Pippin throughout his illustrious career. Whether discussing film, literature, or modern and contemporary art, Pippin's claim is that we cannot understand aesthetic objects unless we reckon with the fact that some distinct philosophical issue is integral to their meaning. In his latest offering, Philosophy by Other Means, we are treated to a collection of essays that builds on this larger project, offering profound ruminations on philosophical issues in aesthetics along with revelatory readings of Henry James, Marcel Proust, and J. M. Coetzee"--
Download or read book The Philosophy of War Films written by David LaRocca and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2015-01-06 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wars have played a momentous role in shaping the course of human history. The ever-present specter of conflict has made it an enduring topic of interest in popular culture, and many movies, from Hollywood blockbusters to independent films, have sought to show the complexities and horrors of war on-screen. In The Philosophy of War Films, David LaRocca compiles a series of essays by prominent scholars that examine the impact of representing war in film and the influence that cinematic images of battle have on human consciousness, belief, and action. The contributors explore a variety of topics, including the aesthetics of war as portrayed on-screen, the effect war has on personal identity, and the ethical problems presented by war. Drawing upon analyses of iconic and critically acclaimed war films such as Saving Private Ryan (1998), The Thin Red Line (1998), Rescue Dawn (2006), Restrepo (2010), and Zero Dark Thirty (2012), this volume's examination of the genre creates new ways of thinking about the philosophy of war. A fascinating look at the manner in which combat and its aftermath are depicted cinematically, The Philosophy of War Films is a timely and engaging read for any philosopher, filmmaker, reader, or viewer who desires a deeper understanding of war and its representation in popular culture.
Download or read book Douglas Sirk written by Robert B. Pippin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-04-08 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It would be easy to dismiss the films of Douglas Sirk (1897-1987) as brilliant examples of mid-century melodrama with little to say to the contemporary world. Yet Robert Pippin argues that, far from being marginal pieces of sentimentality, Sirk's films are rich with irony, insight and depth. Indeed Sirk's films, often celebrated as classics of the genre, are attempts to subvert rather than conform to rules of conventional melodrama. The visual style, story and characters of films like All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind and Imitation of Life are explored to argue for Sirk as an incredibly nuanced moral thinker. Instead of imposing moralising judgements on his characters, Sirk presents them as people who do 'wrong' things often without understanding why or how, creating a complex and unsettling ethics. Pippin argues that it this moral ambiguity and ironic richness enables Sirk to produce films that grapple with important themes such as race, class and gender with real force and political urgency. Douglas Sirk: Filmmaker and Philosopher argues for a filmmaker who was a 'disruptive not restorative' auteur and one who broke the rules in the most interesting and subtle of ways.
Download or read book When the Movies Mattered written by Jonathan Kirshner and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-15 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In When the Movies Mattered Jonathan Kirshner and Jon Lewis gather a remarkable collection of authors to revisit the unique era in American cinema that was New Hollywood. Ten eminent contributors, some of whom wrote about the New Hollywood movement as it unfolded across the 1960s and 1970s, assess the convergence of film-industry developments and momentous social and political changes that created a new type of commercial film that reflected those revolutionary influences in American life. Even as New Hollywood first took shape, film industry insiders and commentators alike realized its significance. At the time, Pauline Kael compared the New Hollywood to the "tangled, bitter flowering of American letters in the 1850s" and David Thomson dubbed the era "the decade when movies mattered." Thomson's words provide the impetus for this volume in which a cohort of seasoned film critics and scholars who came of age watching the movies of this era reflect upon and reconsider this golden age in American filmmaking. Contributors: Molly Haskell, Heather Hendershot, J. Hoberman, George Kouvaros, Phillip Lopate, Robert Pippin, David Sterritt, David Thomson
Download or read book Reinventing Hollywood written by David Bordwell and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 583 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction: the way Hollywood told it -- The frenzy of five fat years; Interlude: Spring 1940: lessons from our town
Download or read book Seeing Fictions in Film written by George M. Wilson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-27 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens when we view a movie? Do we actually see the fiction, and if so how? Literary fiction is recounted by a voice of some sort--the narrator. George M. Wilson explores the strategies of cinematic narration, and argues that this prompts viewers to imagine seeing and hearing events in the fictional world.
Download or read book Hegel on Philosophy in History written by Rachel Zuckert and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-26 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates Hegel's historical conception of philosophy: as built upon and reviving prior views, and as speaking to its historical context.
Download or read book Metaphysical Exile written by Robert Pippin and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Pippin presents here the first detailed interpretation of J.M. Coetzee's "Jesus" trilogy as a whole. Pippin treats the three fictions as a philosophical fable. Everyone in the mythical land explored by Coetzee is an exile, removed from their homeland and transported to a strange new place. While discussing the social and psychological dimensions of the fable, Pippin also treats the literary aspects of the fictions as philosophical explorations of theimplications of a deeper kind of homelessness--a version that characterizes late modern life itself--and he treats the theme of forgetting as a figure for modern historical amnesia and indifference to reflection and self-knowledge.
Download or read book Fire and Desire written by Jane Gaines and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2001-02 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsNote on Film DatesIntroduction - The "Race" in Race Movies1. "Green Like Me"2. Desiring Others3. Race Movies: All-Black Everything4. World-Improving Desires5. Fire and Desire6. The Body's Story7. Race/Riot/CinemaConclusion - Mixed-Race MoviesNotesIndex Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
Download or read book Representing Talent written by Violaine Roussel and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-08-28 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prologue: an agent at work -- Introduction -- The invention of agenting -- Filling a lacuna in the sociology of Hollywood -- Facing stereotypes -- In the field with Hollywood agents -- What this book unveils: agents and (e)valuation communities -- Mapping Hollywood -- Agenting in big versus little Hollywood -- "The other side": interdependent transformations of studios and agencies -- The new reality of agenting in big Hollywood -- The making of professionals in talent agencies -- "Fulfilling somebody else's dreams"--An agent's initiatory path -- Under the wing of a mentor -- Forming "generations" in Hollywood -- Agenting as relationship work -- The meaning of relationships -- The definition of an agent's style -- "Trust" between agents and production professionals -- Agents and artists: enchanted bonds and power relations -- Agents' emotional competence -- Controlling talent? -- Embedded identities and hierarchies -- Naming quality and pricing talent -- Agents in Hollywood's evaluation communities -- "What it takes to get a movie made?" -- Pricing the unique -- Agents of change: the formation of new evaluation communities
Download or read book After the Beautiful written by Robert B. Pippin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-12-23 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his Berlin lectures on fine art, Hegel argued that art involves a unique form of aesthetic intelligibility—the expression of a distinct collective self-understanding that develops through historical time. Hegel’s approach to art has been influential in a number of different contexts, but in a twist of historical irony Hegel would die just before the most radical artistic revolution in history: modernism. In After the Beautiful, Robert B. Pippin, looking at modernist paintings by artists such as Édouard Manet and Paul Cézanne through Hegel’s lens, does what Hegel never had the chance to do. While Hegel could never engage modernist painting, he did have an understanding of modernity, and in it, art—he famously asserted—was “a thing of the past,” no longer an important vehicle of self-understanding and no longer an indispensable expression of human meaning. Pippin offers a sophisticated exploration of Hegel’s position and its implications. He also shows that had Hegel known how the social institutions of his day would ultimately fail to achieve his own version of genuine equality, a mutuality of recognition, he would have had to explore a different, new role for art in modernity. After laying this groundwork, Pippin goes on to illuminate the dimensions of Hegel’s aesthetic approach in the path-breaking works of Manet, the “grandfather of modernism,” drawing on art historians T. J. Clark and Michael Fried to do so. He concludes with a look at Cézanne, the “father of modernism,” this time as his works illuminate the relationship between Hegel and the philosopher who would challenge Hegel’s account of both modernity and art—Martin Heidegger. Elegantly inter-weaving philosophy and art history, After the Beautiful is a stunning reassessment of the modernist project. It gets at the core of the significance of modernism itself and what it means in general for art to have a history. Ultimately, it is a testament, via Hegel, to the distinctive philosophical achievements of modernist art in the unsettled, tumultuous era we have inherited.
Download or read book Idealism as Modernism written by Robert B. Pippin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-01-28 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume Robert Pippin disputes many traditional characterisations of the distinctiveness of modern philosophy.
Download or read book The World Viewed written by Stanley Cavell and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1979-01-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stanley Cavell looks closely at America's most popular art and our perceptions of it. His explorations of Hollywood's stars, directors, and most famous films—as well as his fresh look at Godard, Bergman, and other great European directors—will be of lasting interest to movie-viewers and intelligent people everywhere.
