In the foreword to Josette Baer’s essays on politics, philosophy and film, I argue that films should not simply be regarded, as Adorno and Horkheimer do, as products of the culture industry without any aesthetic value, but rather, as I suggest following Hegel, as figures and forms of the spirit, in other words, films reflect what appears important to the people of a certain cultural sphere in a certain epoch, what the great existential and philosophical themes are that concern them. What films p…
Read moreIn the foreword to Josette Baer’s essays on politics, philosophy and film, I argue that films should not simply be regarded, as Adorno and Horkheimer do, as products of the culture industry without any aesthetic value, but rather, as I suggest following Hegel, as figures and forms of the spirit, in other words, films reflect what appears important to the people of a certain cultural sphere in a certain epoch, what the great existential and philosophical themes are that concern them. What films perhaps have in common with philosophy is that they are, to a certain extent, their time captured in thought.
