Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema

by Daniel Yacavone

Overview

Film Worlds unpacks the significance of the "worlds" that narrative films create, offering an innovative perspective on cinema as art. Drawing on aesthetics and the philosophy of art in both the continental and analytic traditions, as well as classical and contemporary film theory, it weaves together multiple strands of thought and analysis to provide new understandings of filmic representation, fictionality, expression, self-reflexivity, style, and the full range of cinema's affective and symbolic dimensions.

Always more than "fictional worlds" and "storyworlds" on account of cinema's perceptual, cognitive, and affective nature, film worlds are theorized as immersive and transformative artistic realities. As such, they are capable of fostering novel ways of seeing, feeling, and understanding experience. Engaging with the writings of Jean Mitry, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Christian Metz, David Bordwell, Gilles Deleuze, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, among other thinkers, Film Worlds extends Nelson Goodman's analytic account of symbolic and artistic "worldmaking" to cinema, expands on French philosopher Mikel Dufrenne's phenomenology of aesthetic experience in relation to films and their worlds, and addresses the hermeneutic dimensions of cinematic art. It emphasizes what both celluloid and digital filmmaking and viewing share with the creation and experience of all art, while at the same time recognizing what is unique to the moving image in aesthetic terms. The resulting framework reconciles central aspects of realist and formalist/neo-formalist positions in film theory while also moving beyond them and seeks to open new avenues of exploration in film studies and the philosophy of film.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231157698
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	12/23/2014
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Daniel Yacavone is lecturer in film studies at the University of Edinburgh, where he has been acting director of Film Studies within the School of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures and has held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. Films and Worlds
1. Worlds Within Worlds: Fictions, Narrative, and Aesthetic Enclosure
Part II. Worlds of Symbols
2. The Framework of Worlds: Symbolization, Meaning, and Art
3. Filmmaking as Symbolic Transformation
4. Ways of Cinematic World-Making
5. Representation, Exemplification, and Reflexivity: An Alternative Approach to the Symbolic Dimension of Cinematic Art
Part III. Worlds of Feeling
6. Forms of Feeling: Mapping Affect and Emotions in Films
7. Cineaesthetic World-Feeling and Immersion
Part IV. Worlds of Truth
8. Toward an Existential Hermeneutics of Film Worlds
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Yacavone articulates an approach to cinema that incorporates elements of various tendencies in current film theory—including, chiefly, those of a broadly sociocultural bent, those focused on empirical studies and cognitive science, and those stressing the phenomenological dimension of spectatorship—and to unite them via the concept of cinematic 'worlds.' His command of the theoretical literature is impressive, and his references to analytic and continental philosophy and film theory are wide-ranging and inclusive of most of the approaches adopted over the last century.

Ronald Bogue

A major reconsideration of the nature of aesthetic experience through the medium of cinema. It offers new insights into the hermeneutical and phenomenological perspectives of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Mikel Dufrenne, as well as Nelson Goodman's concept of world-making. It also presents a significant revision of our understanding of modern and contemporary film theory from Mitry and Metz to Bordwell and Deleuze. This brilliant and original work will be of interest to philosophers and film scholars alike.

D. N. Rodowick

[A] notable tour de force across centuries of reflections on the transformative powers of cinematic aesthetics.

New Review of Film and Television Studies - Steffen Hven

A half-century after Jean Mitry's magisterial integration of classical film theory, Daniel Yacavone has done the same for its modern counterpart, managing not just to reconcile, but to recruit the extremes of cognitivism and of phenomenology for his prodigious satellite mapping of the terrae incognitae he rightly calls 'Film Worlds.' Without hyperbole or histrionics, Yacavone delivers a stable and progressive suite of concepts that address films as texts and embodied affect. He has culled these from a balanced review of an impressive roster of film theorists and the twentieth-century thinkers they have drawn on, some of whom have been waiting in the wings to contribute to a compelling vision like Yacavone's. That vision not only illuminates how films work but also how they work on us, and even work for us.

Dudley Andrew

Film Worlds is a synthetic and holistic work, one that seeks to include rather than exclude as many philosophies of film as possible. Yacavone's "aesthetics of cinema" turns out to be a rather wide tent, and almost anybody working at the intersection of film and philosophy can find shelter beneath it somewhere.

Los Angeles Review of Books