What is ‘the good’ of the film experience? This book examines one significant answer that emerges from the contemporary debate on ‘film-philosophy’; the notion that film can be a form of philosophy. My central claim about film-philosophy is that, as a theoretical project, it amounts to more than addressing only the philosophical potentials of film. In taking its course, it expresses also the prominent ethical motive, often unacknowledged, of wanting to find in film a means to personal transformation. Whenever philosophers claim that films ‘do philosophy’ or ‘think’ in a cinematic way, they persistently also put forward edifying practical effects – potential transformations of thought, perception, and experience – as ‘the good’ of viewing such films. In essence, much like people would customarily look towards practices of reading, writing, or meditation, these philosophers recommend film-viewing as a novel practice of self-transformation.
This motive at work within film-philosophy calls for critical elaboration as ‘transformational ethics’ – a strand of ethics that deals with aspirations of personal transformation, ranging from the spiritual exercises of ancient Greek philosophy or later Christian monasticism, to the current popularity of Eastern-philosophical contemplative techniques. Inevitably, even if unwittingly, film-philosophy presents us with conceptions of why and how films can help viewers realize self-change. These conceptions, in short, are what I call ‘transformational ethics of film’. And with a series of case studies – dedicated to film philosophers such as Stephen Mulhall, Thomas Wartenberg, Robert Sinnerbrink, Vivian Sobchack, Noël Carrol, as well the film-philosophy forerunners, Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell – I demonstrate how different approaches to film-philosophy each casts a distinct vision and version of such transformational ethics. With my analysis I aim to show how a seemingly abstract debate about films-as-philosophy sets a definite agenda for the everyday, ethical significance that viewers may attach to viewing films. For it unearths from film-philosophy the raw material with which to piece together an intriguing mosaic of what we may think of as an inner makeover through cinema – a ‘cinemakeover’.
The triad of concepts featuring in the title of the book – film-philosophy, transformational ethics, and the cinemakeover – might raise some further questions that I would like to address straightaway.
First, a word on my neologism, ‘cinemakeover’. My initial motivation for creating the term was purely pragmatic. Since this book is an exploration of transformational ethics of film, I needed an economical placeholder-term for
The ostensible weak link in my lexical concoction is of course the ‘makeover’ part. Rooted in the fashion and cosmetics industry, the word admittedly connotes superficial, external change – not the inward, subjective kind of change that normally goes under the banner of transformational ethics. Moreover, makeovers suggest reasonably quick and easy operations that can produce radical, albeit superficial, transformations overnight.
However, as it turns out, these connotations of the ‘cine-makeover’ help to underline the critical agenda that I bring to the film-philosophy debate. The term injects a dose of irony into proceedings, as I am perfectly aware that the makeovers inherent to the idea of film-philosophy concern transformations of the deeper, ethically weighty kind. Part of the irony, then, lies in the ease with which philosophers in the field seem to assume self-transformation through films possible. Surely, such assumptions can do with greater theoretical grounding, since – given the many potential factors at stake – these transformations cannot be remotely as easy and straightforward as the full makeovers found in ‘reality’ television shows. This has always been the project that I envisioned for myself: to clarify and add depth to an ethical theme that in the context of film-philosophy remains (often) implicit and (always) undertheorized – a theme treated in a somewhat superficial, ‘television-makeover’ kind of way, if you like. Of course, having said that, the other part of the irony is that my envisioned intervention in the cinemakeover was never going to be all that easy and straightforward either. Not least because I remain sympathetic to the understandable and often compelling wishful thinking that inhabits this idea: to achieve an ethical ‘makeover’ through one of my great passions, film.
Next, a word on the particular transformational ethics from which I derive my notion of the cinemakeover. I have adopted both the term and my understanding of transformational ethics from the South African philosopher Johann Visagie, who sadly passed away in 2019. The bulk of Visagie’s thinking on transformational ethics, as I present it in this book, is concentrated in a single manuscript, titled Transformational Ethics: The Structures of Self-Creation (1999) – a project that he abandoned after completing a sole, unedited draft. Although this and other manuscripts of his are unavailable to the broader public, it has been at the disposal of Visagie’s students, and has featured also in recent post-graduate research projects such as my own, Rossouw (2011), as
Then, a brief word on the theoretical site from which I will excavate my picture of the cinemakeover. As a work of ethical meta-criticism, this book addresses, within the field of philosophy of film (or ‘film philosophy’, without the hyphen), the concept of film as philosophy. Some prefer the hyphenated shorthand, ‘film-philosophy’ – but since it is too easily confused with the general field, I will abandon the term for the remainder of the book. I take ‘film as philosophy’ to designate a more exact subject matter and corpus of writers: as a debate, it refers to acknowledged arguments and theories that deal with how films may be said to ‘do’ or ‘be’ philosophy; and, construed more broadly as a theoretical project orbiting the debate, it embraces any related conception, interpretation, or approach that ambitions to treat film as a form of philosophy. The notion of film as philosophy can of course be traced back to numerous roots. But for the purposes of this book, I identify the contemporary film as philosophy debate, as many others do, with those philosophers who share the provocative claims of Stephen Mulhall (2002) as a common, agenda-setting reference point. The claims and analyses of this book are thus directed, not at the entire field, but primarily at this circle of philosopher-theorists, along with an outer ring of non-participants – ranging from Stanley Cavell to Bersani and Dutoit – who are frequently drawn into the circle even though they themselves have not actively taken part in the debates ensuing from Mulhall’s work. It is true that this group of philosophers becomes more diffuse and difficult to define when I turn to specific philosophical readings of Terrence Malick’s cinema in Chapter 4. Nevertheless, I still try to work with volumes, chapters, and essays that either treat Malick’s films ‘as philosophy’ or, at least, not unlike the Mulhall-outlook, ‘as a form of thinking’.
To make Mulhall my guideline for delimiting film as philosophy may well be questioned, and importantly so, for undue canonization and the underrepresentation that it may promote. My response would however be this: given the majority of similar assessments of the debate out there, my choice of Mulhall as a defining reference point, as much as it is a choice, is notably not
Yet, to finish off: why launch an inquiry into the cinemakeover within the film as philosophy debate, of all places, to begin with? Happenstance, for one thing. Philosophy of film simply happened to be my disciplinary home; the film as philosophy debate is where I first stumbled upon the idea of the cimemakeover – and that is where I kept on digging. As I acknowledge in the book’s conclusion, there are many disciplinary sites where one can likely dig up cinemakeovers of all shapes and sizes. In addition to places like early film theory, fan culture, or the religious study of film, one could simply start with the growing philosophical literature on ‘film as ethics’, which explicitly positions film as fostering our encounter with the other in a just, empathetic, or otherwise ethical way (Sinnerbrink 2016a: 3–24). But, in this regard, I feel drawn to the site of film as philosophy also for the specific countenance that it endows the cinemakeover with: self-transformation envisioned, in numerous ways, as a deeply contemplative encounter between viewers and films. And perhaps most attractive about the film as philosophy debate for my purposes is this: how clear it makes that philosophers do not have to consciously entertain the concept of the cinemakeover – considering that most don’t – to nevertheless contribute to a captivating picture of what it could be.