Films entertain us, shake us, inspire us – but can film be seen as a genuine source of knowledge, and potentially, a contributor to humanity’s understanding of the world? That's the question that I've asked myself in my latest video.
What's interesting is that historically, long before the dawn of what we now call the “seventh artform”, the general answer in philosophy would be negative. In his Republic, Plato discusses the nature of an ideal state, and curiously, argues that such a state should banish all poets.
Plato saw philosophy and art as rival ways in which we form beliefs. Philosophy follows arguments and reason, while the arts establish truth through emotion. In Book X of The Republic, we read that:
“… poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up; she lets them rule, although they ought to be controlled, if mankind are ever to increase in happiness and virtue.”
Through history, most philosophers, like Plato, maintained the exclusivity of truth in philosophy and science, so they mostly dismissed the arts as poor pretenders to the title of purveyors of truth. Hence, in their view, art should have no role in guiding our belief, and certainly has no part in rational thinking. This view came to be less and less prevalent after the enlightenment period gave way to romantic philosophies, when philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche argued that art nonetheless captures a deeper truth, one that often remains unseen in everyday life.
By the time cinema emerged, different artforms generally established themselves as purveyors of philosophical ideas, but this new artform, cinema, as seen by many, was nothing more than new entertainment for the masses.
Not to mention the ready-made analogy between the cinema hall and Plato’s cave, since in both people are immersed in shadows on a wall, an imitation of life, but essentially a lie. If one wants to understand life, one needs to study life, not through the observation of an imitation of it, but observing true life. In this view, cinema is nothing but a distraction from life, a form of escapism. Which, to a large extend, rings true, since people do largely use film as a way of distraction from life.
And yet, to many, films were an entry point into several philosophical ways of thinking. We could say that while films establish their own story, they also act as general thought experiments, what-if situations that face us with some of life’s biggest questions. As I ask in the video:
How would I look at my life, if I just found out that I have a couple of months left to live? What would it mean to me, if the world would present me with increasing amounts of anomalies, leading me into a radical sort of skepticism? What is the moral value of my memories? And what part do those memories play in making up my identity? What is the nature of time? What is the nature of consciousness? What is the most important thing about death?
The answer to the latter is implied in my analysis of After Yang, a 2021 film by Kogonada:
I think that this quality alone, that of being a thought-experiment, enables film to become a valid way of doing philosophy. The emotional investment in those thought-experiments can be argued to be a hindrance to our rationality, and yet these emotional stakes are always present in life, which is a type of restraint that every philosopher has to be aware of. Films don’t present problems abstractly, as seen in academic articles; they make us live through them in all of their complexities.
Anyhow, here's some movies I watched in January and Febraury:
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