Robert Sinnerbrink

In his 1979 foreword to The World Viewed, Stanley Cavell remarks on the curiousrelationship between Heidegger and cinema . Cavell is inspired to do so byTerrence Malick's Days of Heaven , a film that not only presents us with images ofpreternatural beauty, but also acknowledges the self-referential character of thecinematic image . For Cavell, Malick's films have a formal radiance thatsuggest something of Heidegger's thinking of the relationship between Being and beings,the radiant self-showing of things in luminous appearance . Days of Heaven doesindeed have a metaphysical vision of the world, but 'one feels that one has never quiteseen the scene of human existence-call it the arena between earth and heavenquite realized this way on film before' . As Cavell observes, however,the relationship between Heidegger's philosophy and Malick's films seems to challengeboth philosophers and film-theorists. The film-theorists struggle to show how Heidegger isrelevant to the experience of cinema, while the philosophers grapple with the question ofcinema and aesthetics, precisely because film puts into question traditional concepts ofvisual art, as Walter Benjamin showed long ago .In what follows, I take up Cavell's invitation to think about the relationshipbetween Heidegger and film by considering Malick's 1998 masterpiece, The Thin Red Line.The question I shall explore is whether we should describe The Thin Red Line as'Heideggerian Cinema'. Along the way I discuss two different approaches to the film: a'Heideggerian' approach that reads the film as exemplifying Heideggerian themes; and a 'film as philosophy' approach arguing that, while the film is philosophical, we should refrain from reading it in relation toany particular philosophical framework. In conclusion, I offer some brief remarks abouthow The Thin Red Line can be regarded as 'Heideggerian cinema,' not because we need toread Heidegger in order to understand it, but because Malick's film performs a cinematicpoesis, a revealing of world through image,sound, and word

This paper develops a genealogical critique of the concepts of biopower and biopolitics in the work of Foucault and Agamben. It shows how Heidegger's reflections on Machenschaft or machination prefigure the concepts of biopower and biopolitics. It develops a critique of Foucault's account of biopolitics as a system of managing the biological life of populations culminating in neo-liberalism, and a critique of Agamben's presentation of biopolitics as the metaphysical foundation of Western political rationality. Foucault's ethical turn within biopolitical governmentality, along with Agamben's messianic gesture towards a utopian community to come, are questioned as political responses to biopower regimes.

How can Benjamin's theses help us to understand the secret architectures of the present? This volume takes up the architectural challenge in a number of innovative ways, collecting essays by both well-known and emerging scholars on time in cinema, the problem of kitsch, the design of graves and tombs, the orders of road-signs, childhood experience in modern cities, and much more. Engaged, interdisciplinary, bristling with insights, the essays in this collection will constitute an indispensable supplement to the work of Walter Benjamin, as well as providing a guide to some of the obscurities of our own present.

Some of the most innovative philosophical engagement with cinema and ethics in recent years has come from phenomenological and cognitivist perspectives. This trend reflects a welcome re-engagement with cinema as a medium with the potential for ethical transformation, that is, with the idea of cinema as a medium of ethical experience. This paper explores the phenomenological turn in film theory, emphasizing the ethical implications of phenomenological approaches to affect and empathy, emotion, and evaluation. I argue that the oft-criticized subjectivism of phenomenological theories can be supplemented by cognitivist approaches that highlight the complex forms of affective response, emotional engagement, and moral allegiance at work in our experience of movies. An empathic ethics or “cinempathy” is at work in many films, I suggest, such as Ashgar Farhadi’s A Separation, which offers a striking case study in cinematic ethics.