Metaphysics and the Moving Image

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. Trevor Mowchun is Assistant Professor and Director of Film and Media Studies at University of Florida. His essays and criticism have been published in various journals, including Film International, Evental Aesthetics, New Review of Film and Television Studies, CineAction and Senses of Cinema. He also co-wrote and directed World to Come, an experimental drama on the disenchantment that plagues a religious community in the wake of tragedy.