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So What, or How to Make Films with Words
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Book Presentation:
A series of philosophical meditations on the nature of aesthetics across a wide array of filmmaking styles
Images, whether filmic or not, cannot be replaced by words. Yet words can make images. This is the general thesis underlying So What, a collection of essays on canonical filmmakers like Luchino Visconti and Orson Welles; more experimental directors, such as Marguerite Duras and Albert Serra; and visual artists, including Hollis Frampton and Agnes Martin. Alexander García Düttmann aims to make their films as if they did not precede his text, capturing their idea and experience.
If the relationship between filmic image and text is a heterogeneous one, then this heterogeneity must leave a trace. This is why the book’s chapters are organized not according to historical periods or on the basis of film theories but rather by single concepts that function like dictionary entries. The chapters adopt different forms, blurring the lines between art and philosophy. So What is a practical exercise in “making films with words,” inviting readers to draw out insights from its conceptual play.
So What compiles previously untranslated and hard-to-find essays into a single volume, one that represents the absorbing and singular thought process of a major contemporary philosopher.
About the Author:
ALEXANDER GARCÍA DÜTTMANN teaches philosophy at Berlin University of the Arts. His many books include Visconti: Insights into Flesh and Blood, Between Cultures: Tensions in the Struggle for Recognition, What Is Contemporary Art?, and most recently, In Praise of Youth (Lob der Jugend) and The Hopeless (Die Hoffnungslosen).
Press Reviews:
"‘Thought-provoking’ is such an overused, underread phrase. As if thought could be induced medicinally, like sleep, vomit, contractions. What of all the other ways thought might appear: as seduction, submission, dedition, delay, interruption, interference, a prankish delight? In So What Garcia Düttmann reworks the very question of how thought might appear in relation to art. Its terrain is the crossroads of films and words but its stakes include participation in politics, the aspectual, aesthetic seriousness, repetition, form, imagination, perversion, exaggeration, friendship, idea and experience, and a thousand other problems that—and this is the point—appear spontaneously, impulsively, unpredictably. This book will make permanent demands on any who would claim to work in film and philosophy." —Eugenie Brinkema, author of Life-Destroying Diagrams
"García Düttmann poses questions that others would regard as too simple to ask. His style of thinking and of writing make this book unlike anything else in film studies or philosophy . . . unique and compelling." —John David Rhodes, author of Spectacle of Property: The House in American Film
See the publisher website: Northwestern University Press
> From the same author:
> 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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