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Melancholy Emotion in Contemporary Cinema
A Spinozian Analysis of Film Experience
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Book Presentation:
This work outlines a new methodology for film analysis based on the radical materialist thought of Baruch Spinoza, re-evaluating contemporary cognitive media theory and philosophical theories on the emotional and intellectual aspects of film experience.
Sticchi’s exploration of Spinozian philosophy creates an experiential constructive model to blend the affective and intellectual aspects of cognition, and to combine it with different philosophical interpretations of film theory. Spinoza’s embodied philosophy rejected logical and ethical dualisms, and established a perfect parallelism between sensation and reason and provides the opportunity to address negative emotions and sad passions without referring exclusively to traditional notions such as catharsis or sublimation, and to put forth a practical/embodied notion of Film-Philosophy. This new analytical approach is tested on four case studies, films that challenge the viewer’s emotional engagement since they display situations of cosmic failure and depict controversial and damaged characters: A Serious Man (2009); Melancholia (2011); The Act of Killing (2012) and Only Lovers Left Alive (2013).
This book is an important addition to the literature in Film Studies, particularly in Cognitive Film Theory and Philosophy of Film. Its affective and semantic analyses of film experience (studies of embodied conceptualisation), connecting Spinoza’s thought to the analysis of audiovisual media, will also be of interest to Philosophy scholars and in academic courses of film theory, film-philosophy and cognitive film studies.
About the Author:
Francesco Sticchi obtained a Ph.D in Film Studies at Oxford Brookes University under the supervision of Dr Warren Buckland. He works as Associate Lecturer in the same institution, and his research concerns the study of sad passions in audiovisual experience, and the relation between Spinoza’s thought and embodied cognitive theories. He is also interested in an experiential and interactive use of Mikhail Bakhtin's Chronotope, and he is currently working on an affective-ethical approach to analyse how contemporary media culture addresses the concept of precarity.
Press Reviews:
"Sticchi commendably navigates some of the most complex philosophical writings ranging from Spinoza through cognitivism to Gilles Deleuze and back. This, in and of itself, is no mean feat, and the material Sticchi discusses is extraordinarily rich, complex, and open to a variety of interpretations." - Tarja Laine, University of Amsterdam
See the publisher website: Routledge
> From the same author:
The Politics of Monstrous Figures in Contemporary Cinema (2025)
Witches, Zombies, and Cyborgs Re-enchanting the Ends of the World
> On a related topic:
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