Paisley Livingston

Intentionalism in aesthetics is, quite generally, the thesis that the artist's or artists' intentions have a decisive role in the creation of a work of art, and that knowledge of such intentions is a necessary component of at least some adequate interpretive and evaluative claims. In this paper I develop and defend this thesis. I begin with a discussion of some anti-intentionalist arguments. Surveying a range of intentionalist responses to them, I briefly introduce and criticize a fictionalist version of intentionalism before moving on to an approach I call moderate intentionalism. I consider a salient alternative known as hypothetical intentionalism and try to show why moderate intentionalism should be preferred to it

This article explores basic constraints on the nature and appreciation of cinematic adaptations. An adaptation, it is argued, is a work that has been intentionally based on a source work and that faithfully and overtly imitates many of this source's characteristic features, while diverging from it in other respects. Comparisons between an adaptation and its source are essential to the appreciation of adaptations as such. In spite of many adaptation theorists' claims to the contrary, some of the comparisons essential to the appreciation of adaptations as such pertain to various kinds of fidelity and to the ways in which similar types of artistic goals and problems are taken up in an adaptation and its source.

Samuel Coleridge once noted that very short works of art ease the cognitive burden on poet and reader alike. Limiting the number of lines in a poem, he contends, allows the work 'to acquire, as it were, a Totality' which allows the reader's mind to 'rest satisfied'. Anyone who has strained to grasp the overall pattern of some massive novel, film, or musical work can readily appreciate Coleridge's point. And yet insofar as a film or poem is a temporal work of art, the parts of which are manifested only consecutively, its Totality - be it an ever so small one - is never directly presented to us all at once, and its acquisition, as well as the satisfaction such an acquisition can provide, requires a feat of memory. A film, like a life, may have a brilliant, simple order and a deep and powerful unity, but the presentation and realization of such a totality is something that takes place in time, something that requires an experience of temporal unfolding - something that requires the work of a mind capable of thinking through and recollecting the temporal relations between the parts of the whole. So that while Marianne Olsen Ulrichsen's Come is a perfectly unified gem, a satisfying totality that presents itself to us in just four and a half minutes, we must nonetheless live through its unfolding to discover the coherence of its parts. One of this film's central themes is precisely this kind of process, namely, the constitution of personal identity and togetherness, in and through time and memory. What follows is just one story that may be told about an elusive process that no doubt takes very different forms for different viewers.

Cinematic fictions often depict characters who face a remarkable variety of natural and otherworldly dangers, such as attacks by aliens, dinosaurs, zombies, killer puppets, and swarms of insects. The risk of physical injury and death is the staple of the horror, crime, war, and action genres, while in art films, the focus tends to be on psychological and moral perils. Risk is such a pervasive subject in fi lm that one is tempted to conjecture that this is the main attraction of that seemingly low-risk activity, fi lm spectatorship. In what follows I investigate several issues related to this conjecture, beginning with the problem of identifying and classifying risk, both in the actual world and as it is represented in cinematic works. In my first section I introduce a distinction between taking and running risks and discuss epistemic problems related to the classification of events as risks or rewards. Next I discuss some of the challenges—and artistic risks—that filmmakers confront as they attempt to represent risks in works of fiction. With regard to artistic tradeoff s related to the representation of risk, in the third section I provide a more detailed discussion of two cases: Pleasantville and La visione del sabba. Finally I ask how we might explain why risk is such a pervasive subject in the cinema. What is at stake in the spectator’s seemingly low-risk engagement in spectacles of extreme risk?

Philosophical discussion of emotional responses to fiction has been dominated by work on the paradox of fiction, which is often construed as asking whether and how we can experience genuine emotions in reaction to fiction. One may also ask more generally how we ought to respond to fictional works, a question that has to do both with what we should do when reacting to fiction and with what we should and should not let happen to us. It is possible to delineate any principles regarding the rationality, and more generally, the appropriateness of emotional responses to fiction?

Although the cinematic medium can be used in philosophically valuable ways, bold contentions about how films 'do philosophy' in an independent, innovative and exclusively cinematic manner are highly problematic. Philosophers' interpretations of the stories conveyed in cinematic fictions do not actually support such bold claims about film's independent philosophical value; nor do they offer adequate appreciations of the films' artistic value. Different kinds of interpretations having different goals and conditions of success should be kept in view if we are to take a sufficiently critical perspective on contributions in this area. In particular, 'as if' interpretations in which a philosophical problematic is freely applied to elements of a movie's story are contrasted to interpretations that target a film author's actual philosophizing.

Paisley Livingston here addresses contemporary controversies over the role of "theory" within the humanistic disciplines. In the process, he suggests ways in which significant modern texts in the philosophy of science relate to the study of literature. Livingston first surveys prevalent views of theory, and then proposes an alternative: theory, an indispensable element in the study of literature, should be understood as a Cogently argued and informed in its judgments, this book points the way to a fuller understanding of the special contribution that literary knowledge may make within the human sciences.

The increasingly popular idea that cinematic fictions can "do" philosophy raises some difficult questions. Who is actually doing the philosophizing? Is it the philosophical commentator who reads general arguments or theories into the stories conveyed by a film? Could it be the film-maker, or a group of collaborating film-makers, who raise and try to answer philosophical questions with a film? Is there something about the experience of films that is especially suited to the stimulation of worthwhile philosophical reflections? In the first part of this book, Paisley Livingston surveys positions and arguments surrounding the cinema's philosophical value. He raises criticisms of bold theses in this area and defends a moderate view of film's possible contributions to philosophy. In the second part of the book he defends an intentionalist approach that focuses on the film-makers' philosophical background assumptions, sources, and aims. Livingston outlines intentionalist interpretative principles as well as an account of authorship in cinema. The third part of the book exemplifies this intentionalist approach with reference to the work of Ingmar Bergman. Livingston explores the connection between Bergman's work and the Swedish director's primary philosophical source-a treatise in philosophical psychology authored by the Finnish philosopher, Eino Kaila. Bergman proclaimed that reading this book was a tremendous philosophical experience for him and that he "built on this ground." With reference to materials in the newly created Ingmar Bergman archive, Livingston shows how Bergman took up Kaila's topics in his cinematic explorations of motivated irrationality, inauthenticity, and the problem of self-knowledge

In his little-known essay published posthumously in 1849, Über die Eintheilung der schönen Künste, Bernard Bolzano proposes an explication of the concept of beautiful art as well as a classification of these arts. Bolzano’s divisions allowed him not only to provide a principled and comprehensive classification of actual, well-established arts, but also to anticipate kinds of beautiful art that would not exist or be widely recognized until decades after his death, such as moving pictures, abstract paintings, and what he called ‘the arts of pure thought’.

The idea that films can be philosophical, or in some sense ‘do’ philosophy, has recently found a number of prominent proponents. What is at stake here is generally more than the tepid claim that some documentaries about philosophy and related topics convey philosophically relevant content. Instead, the contention is that cinematic fictions, including popular movies such as The Matrix, make significant contributions to philosophy. Various more specific claims are linked to this basic idea. One, relatively weak, but pedagogically important observation is that some films can be used to provide philosophy students with vivid and thought-provoking illustrations of philosophical issues. Film screenings stimulate discussion and may motivate renewed engagement with difficult philosophical texts. A stronger contention, however, seeks to link innovative and philosophically valuable thinking to ‘the film itself’ or to the ‘specificity of the cinematic medium’. Such claims raise interesting questions, including questions about the status of the increasingly prevalent philosophically motivated interpretations of particular movies. Who is actually doing the philosophizing in such cases? Is it the audio-visual display, the film-maker, or the philosopher who devises an interpretation of the work? What is the role of specifically cinematic devices in the philosophical points made in such interpretations? Is there any tension between the goal of appreciating a film as a work of art and the goal of arguing that a film has significant implications for a position on a problem in philosophy? A course in the general area of cinema as philosophy can focus on issues related to the locus and status of cinematic philosophizing. It can also delve into specific films and film-makers and philosophically oriented interpretations of specific philosophical topics, such as personal identity. Issues pertaining to interpretation, meaning, and authorship can be usefully investigated in this connection, as can topics in meta-philosophy related to the very nature of philosophical insight or knowledge

The word ‘genius’ is often associated with the idea that artistic creativity is entirely a matter of an involuntary sort of inspiration visited upon the individual artist. My aim in referring to cinematic genius is not, however, to defend that dubious thesis, but to direct attention to the remarkable artistic achievements that some film-makers, working individually or in collaborative teams, have managed to bring about in their intentional and often painstaking creation of cinematic works. Genius, as I understand it, is the exceptional ability to do something difficult, such as the intentional making of an innovative and valuable work of art. My central claim in what follows is that our longstanding and legitimate interest in manifestations of this kind of skill has important implications for a number of interrelated issues in the philosophy of art, and in particular, for some of the questions taken up in the ever-expanding literature on the ontology of works of art.