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Metaphysics and the Moving Image
"Paradise Exposed"
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Book Presentation:
A metaphysics of film for a post-metaphysical age
• Stages a dialogue between film and philosophy on the question of metaphysics
• Theorizes the workings of a "metaphysical film style" and analyses its varied characteristics through close readings of films
• Situates the moving image in the context of the visual arts (i.e., photography and painting) as part of the history of aesthetic disclosure
• Speculates on the value of a return of metaphysics for a post-metaphysical age
Metaphysics and the Moving Image is an investigation into the medium of film's inheritance of metaphysics – Western philosophy's oldest and most ambitious form of 'truth-seeking.' Why does the moving image of film take up this ancient quest at the very moment when philosophy sought to abandon it once and for all? As the long age of metaphysics comes to a close with the Nietzschean ‘death of God’ and its crisis of nihilism, the emergence of film at the dawn of a new century brings forth a new absolute value, both life-affirming and more-than-human: ‘the world in its own image.’ Film radically transforms the metaphysical paradigm from rational speculation through concepts to mechanical revelation through images and sounds – the ‘dream machine’ at the heart of the medium’s capacity to enlighten and enthrall.
In this book, Trevor Mowchun discusses film theorists and philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Stanley Cavell, Robert Bresson, and Heinrich von Kleist, in relation to films which possess a ‘metaphysical film style,’ including The Thin Red Line and The Turin Horse. Painting and photography are also considered a precursor to the moving image, but it’s a specifically cinematic metaphysics which promises to lead us out of the traps of abstraction and alienation inadvertently set by old metaphysics. Mowchun demonstrates that in a post-metaphysical world, questions about being, value, truth, life and death return with renewed force, finding concrete yet open-ended responses in cinema.
About the Author:
Trevor Mowchun is Assistant Professor and Director of Film and Media Studies at University of Florida. His scholarly essays and criticism have appeared in Film International, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Cineaction, Evental Aesthetics, and Senses of Cinema. He also co-wrote and directed World to Come, an experimental drama on the spiritual disenchantment that plagues a religious community in the wake of tragedy.
Press Reviews:
Mowchun has reawakened my love of philosophy and made me freshly mindful of the high calling of cinema as an art form. He brings the most anti-metaphysical positions and arguments into alignment with his own metaphysical reclamation scheme, demonstrating how inextinguishable metaphysical shadows and hankerings are, and how profitable it is to work against the grain of the thinkers he is exploring, without ever being dismissive of, or out of touch with their own aspirations.
– George Toles, University of Manitoba
Trevor Mowchun's extraordinary new book shines new light on our understanding of things far more basic than film, including experience, consciousness, perception, and reality. An extremely stylish and engaging author, Mowchun takes us on a tour of his own deepest concerns and passions, compels us to share them, and tells us something new about ourselves and the cinematic experiences we have had our whole lives, and which we now see we have failed to examine to their very depths.
– Justin E.H. Smith, University of Paris
See the publisher website: Edinburgh University Press
> On a related topic:
Cinema of/for the Anthropocene (2025)
Affect, Ecology, and More-Than-Human Kinship
Dir. Katarzyna Paszkiewicz and Andrea Ruthven
Subject: Theory
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