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Simone Weil describes love as radical attention that suspends egoistic concerns to pursue solely the good of another. Although contemporary communication ethics emphasizes responsiveness and dialogue, it seldom addresses how individuals can entirely overcome self-interest to transparently recognize the other's need. This article proposes that Weil’s concepts (particularly attention, décréation, and metaxu) fill that theoretical gap. Grounding Weil’s ethics in Plato and mysticism, the discussion places her ideas in dialogue with current communication ethics, demonstrating their practical relevance. Weil’s notion of attention provides a profound reinterpretation of ethical listening as a form of selfless presence, while décréation offers a framework for decentering ego-driven speech. Further, metaxu clarifies the ethical role of communication mediators in facilitating genuine understanding rather than superficial engagement or division. Ultimately, Weil's ethics offers a normative criterion for ethical discourse: communication is morally good when it serves as a channel for the genuine well-being of the other.

This paper argues that film form itself embodies a kind of decreation, a self-effacing process in which the ego retreats, leaving the artwork open to the world. Drawing on Simone Weil’s ethics and aesthetics, rooted deeply in Christian mysticism, film is proposed as an art form uniquely capable of depicting a shared understanding of love. According to Weil, authentic love emerges from radical attention, empathy for suffering, and the mediation of metaxu, concepts that films are structurally suited to express. Film transcends individual authorship since it is fundamentally a collective effort rather than the sole product of an auteur or director. While contemporary films often neglect this potential, prioritising self-expression or spectacle, taking Weil’s thought seriously could enable filmmakers to harness film as a spiritual and ethical bridge. Film form, through its inherent multiplicity of contributions, naturally embodies a mediated structure capable of channelling radical attention toward affliction and love. Thus, moving image artworks hold the unique promise of communicating Weil’s profound ethical and mystical insights. This paper suggests that by embracing Weil’s principles, filmmakers and theorists alike could better realise film’s latent power to foster genuine connections, compassion, and ethical communion among audiences.

Short-form moving images such as YouTube shorts, TikTok videos and Instagram reels can be conceptualized as symbiotic parasitic artificial organisms that live only when they occupy a viewer’s attention and otherwise lie dormant in status like viruses or within the unconsciousness of the viewer. This paper presents an argument that these videos exhibit life-like behavior: inert in isolation, but capable of infecting hosts or viewers and propagating by exploiting cognitive and social networks. Drawing on film and media theory, posthumanist philosophy, and empirical scientific studies, the paper explores how viral videos parallel biological viruses or parasites. The discussion is directed towards the life-cycle of a short-form video, from its latent zero-view state to its activation during viewing, during which it affects the host’s cognition and behavior (often leaving an aftereffect or afterglow post-exposure). The paper situates this analogy in broader theoretical contexts including Deleuze’s concepts of the image and network, Michel Serres’s philosophy of the parasite, Nick Land’s concept of hypervirus and examines empirical research on attention and neuropsychology of short-form media.

Steven Moffat is a renowned writer known for his unique approach to character construction. In this chapter, I will focus on three characters in three works that showcase Moffat's conception of the anti-hero trope: Doctor Who (2006), Sherlock (2010), and Inside Man (2022). While the concepts discussed are relevant to many of his works, these examples will help keep the chapter concise and focused. Moffat’s character creation is based on changing the already existing anti-hero archetypes in popular culture. By subverting the tropes of the anti-hero, his depiction of human morality achieves an authenticity that reflects the complexities of human behavior in everyday life. In this way, the characters embody both exceptional abilities and profound flaws. In the traditional sense, the hero and the villain represented the good and the evil respectively. However, as notably laid out by Friedrich Nietzsche, our moral psychology, inherently, is beyond these concepts. The concepts of good and evil have a historical reasoning behind them and do not reflect our immediate experience with the world and others. Moffat’s characters show us this moral psychology quite well and we shall see as we inquire.

This paper explores how the Apple Original Series Severance employs the aesthetics of backrooms and liminal spaces to critique modern office work and the alienation experienced by white-collar employees. Drawing from online liminal aesthetics, video games and theoretical perspectives on capitalism, the show presents a dystopian corporate environment where workers are psychologically and physically severed from their personal identities. Using the poetics of David Bordwell and neoformalist analysis of Kristin Thompson, the study examines Severance’s classical yet subversive narrative structure, its use of restricted narration, and its manipulation of space and time to enhance thematic depth. The paper further explores the show’s visual style, characterized by corporate minimalism, cassette futurism, and geometric compositions that reinforce the sterility and dehumanization of the workplace. Beyond its aesthetic and formal properties, Severance functions as a critique of late-stage capitalism, workplace alienation and ideological control. By severing employees’ identities, the show literalizes the compartmentalization demanded by corporate culture, reflecting the real-world erosion of work-life boundaries. The show’s depiction of arbitrary labor, hierarchical secrecy, and corporate propaganda parallels historical critiques of capitalist labor structures while offering a stark vision of a workforce deprived of agency. Ultimately, the paper argues that Severance is not only a stylistic exercise in liminal mystery but also a powerful cultural reflection on contemporary labor conditions. Its engagement, with both narrative and visual elements, underscores a broader social anxiety about the meaninglessness of work, the psychological toll of corporate control, and the possibility of resistance in an era of pervasive economic alienation.

Filmmaking with Artificial Intelligence Image Generation Models In just about one year, OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT 4 has caused panic in our daily lives. After a year, OpenAI introduced Sora, a moving image-generating model from text, similar to DALL-E for still images. Even though Sora is not yet available to the public, the very potential itself has raised issues in film production from the perspectives of producers and studios, as well as directors, actors, writers, and editors. In this chapter, the role and expected impact of AI video generation technologies, such as OpenAI Sora and Stable Diffusion 3, will be considered in regard to filmmaking. To discuss these issues, it is necessary to further analyze the concept of artificial intelligence, what it means, and how it is misunderstood by the general public. These misunderstandings also lead to sci-fi fantasy and doomsday talk, adding nothing valuable to the debate. Once this concept is defined, the argument of why an artificial general intelligence akin to a human being is unlikely will be set, mostly referring to Hubert Dreyfus and David Chalmers. However, even though the good old-fashioned AI seems impossible, the AI tools we have now seem to be enough to cause many of the problems that the thought of a complete artificial intelligence also brings forth. It is important to treat these tools as tools and not entities in their current forms to focus on the more practical problems regarding human labor, interaction, and experience in the world. In this regard, it is important to look back in history to see how technology has shifted ways of making films. When thought of as such, it becomes clearer that these tools will likely not end human involvement in the practice of creating art but transform the methods and aesthetics of film production, challenging conventions in both artistic and commercial works in some ways and exaggerating them in others. Furthermore, the chapter will consist of the investigation of the impact of various AI tools on human creativity. Regarding human creativity, commercial films will most likely go through a paradigm shift. Production companies will most likely regard this shift as a way of improving performance and production. However, this advancement poses dire questions in the field and pursuit of creating art. AI tools help automate and accelerate the filmmaking process at the cost of filmmaking as an art form. The discussion will address why commercial filmmaking will see a paradigm shift and loss of some human labor, but in an optimistic world of philosophical thought, film as fine art will gain much in return. This is because AI tools in their current and foreseeable state are not capable of willing to make art due to their limitations regarding embodied cognition, experience, unconsciousness, and intuition. These things make us what we are more than we think. There is no better way to explain why human beings make art than to show how tools do not matter but the ideas and the will to do it.

The aim in this chapter is to explore the similarities and differences between the city symphony film genre of the 1920s and 1930s and the contemporary virtual city walking tours that are popular on YouTube these days, eventually discussing the change in representation of the individual in daily life over a century. The city symphony was born with modernism in the early 20th century initially to present an interpretation of the city with daily activities, human beings, their interaction with industrial technology and the urban environment. A significant and pioneering film of the genre is by Walter Ruttmann titled Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927) which I will try to analyze its filmic elements in order to draft a summary of the style and vision of the director and his contemporaries. On the other hand, the virtual city walking tours on YouTube represent a very different representation of urban exploration. These videos show various cities through the act of simple walking recorded in a long one-take POV shot with a gimbal-camera. Despite minor differences in terms of commentary and music use, these videos are quite similar to each other when compared to city symphony films in general. The methodological approach for analyzing and interpreting these films and videos is guided by the neoformalist approach proposed by Bordwell and Thompson in the 1980s, along with Noël Carroll’s view on critical evaluation. Since this post-theoretical approach is non-formulaic in terms of its methodology, it fits the two examples I will provide that are stylistically very distant. After establishing the form and style of the works, I will try to follow Carroll’s suggestions in order to critically interpret, analyze and evaluate the works. The comparison between the city symphony film and virtual city walking tour reveals a complex interplay between continuity and change in regards to the individual. While both share a rather common goal of capturing the essence of urban life their differences are to be found in their stylistic choices and their interpretations of the goal itself. The city films of the 1920s and 30s were avant-garde expressions that combined artistic innovation with socio-political commentary. They were often experimental, using montage sequences, juxtaposition and abstract imagery to convey the ever changing industrialized modern city life. Ruttmann’s Berlin is emblematic of this approach, offering a poetic and critical reflection on urban existence. In contrast, the virtual city walking tours on YouTube are more accessible and immediate. They provide a first-person perspective that allows viewers to virtually traverse different cities, experiencing sights and sounds without the mediation of artistic abstraction. The similarity in these videos suggests a standardized format that prioritizes immersion over critique. This article offers a valuable contribution to the understanding of urban representation of the individual in film and digital media. By comparing the city symphony film with virtual city walking tours, I try to illuminate the evolving relationship between art, technology and urban life. I argue that not only is there a completely different representation of the individual within the frame, but there is also ethical considerations to be put forth regarding the one that makes the frame, or the camera. In the end I argue that the human-ness of a work of art or any type of video is more important than immersiveness.

Sogo/Gakuryu Ishii is one of the pioneers of the punk/cyberpunk movement in Japanese cinema. Though his style changed throughout his career, his early films have been a great influence to filmmakers around the world. His unique filmic style presents questions, observations and interpretations regarding the role of violence as normalized in the daily lives of heavily marginalized punk youth portrayed in an amplified and stylized cyberpunk Japan. What is so captivating about Ishii's style and motivation is that he was not only a filmmaker interested in making embellished political or social commentary, Ishii was also part of the emerging punk movement in Japan and several musicians of punk rock bands were also involved in his films. My main aim in my inquiry into Ishil's early films involves two parts regarding the same concept. The first is the ethical issues that arise both with portrayal of violence in films as well as the intention of such an endeavor in general. The second part is the way in which violence is made to be part of the film in terms of form and style. This may be interpreted as either glorifying and stylizing violence or showing that violence is nothing but a destructive force that the outcasts of society may not be able to escape. To the last statement Ishii seems to be silent but very active. What I mean by this is that the simplistic plot-lines of his early films are contrasted by heavy punk music, fast editing, constant moving camera and rage, fear and disappointment in the faces of the anti-heroes.

When we think of diegesis and diegetic in film studies, we know what the words refer to within the confines of the traditional scholarly definition of film in the 20th and 21st centuries. This understanding comes from a certain ontological common sense that narratologically film has a dual nature that consists of mimesis and diegesis. Thinking about narration through images and sound, as opposed to the live-acted or read drama or epos in the times of Plato and Aristotle, has given birth to a synthetic view of the poet’s voice and the characters. In fiction films, mimesis and diegesis are so symbiotic that it is often difficult to distinguish between them. However, is it possible to think of films that are non-mimetic? In other words: is it possible for a film to be completely diegetic in the sense of Plato’s understanding of the word diegesis? Plato was against mimetic arts because they were so far removed from the eidos of what they were that there was no explicable use in presenting them. On the other hand, he very much approved or at least perhaps tolerated and recognized the importance of non-mimetic art forms such as music with specific modes of harmony or poetry that only contained the poet’s words where no characters were represented. With this view in mind, two steps will be taken in this paper: the first is questioning the possibility of a purely diegetic film, and the second is the significance of inquiring about such a work.

The TikTok experience refers to a user’s interaction with the platform while scrolling through various videos. The user can change what they are viewing instantly on one screen much like a TV viewer, the only difference being that whatever is being watched is in the form of short videos made specifically for the platform. These videos vary in style and form and are made to be viewed within the platform itself. All the content that a user watches within the mobile application, in the end, forms a longer, theoretically never-ending, video that is sometimes completely unrelated but more often similar through shared jokes, memes, and visual filters. This way of producing and viewing short-form videos as a whole is reminiscent of the way Everything Everywhere All At Once feels to the audience which is no surprise as many other forms of media and artworks are inspired by internet short-form video platforms such as TikTok.

A phenomenological look on film editing through Merleau-Ponty’s ideas opens up a new way of seeing what editing is and how it affects the spectator. In the classical sense, editing is looked at technically where certain aspects of its use in the film’s language are interpreted and analyzed to understand why and how something is done. In this thesis, the aim is to not dwell on understanding the why and the how. The aim is to view film editing from a different perspective that might lead to another type of thinking outside the limitations of empirical and intellectualist approaches. While the classical approach is able to satisfy most of what a spectator would need to understand, it falls short on what the spectator feels and experiences. In order to try to grasp how Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach could be adapted to film editing. First we have to start from the beginning to see how editing came to be and what ideas, approaches and techniques it brought with it. As all the approaches have their own uses; we have to consider them as such and lay out what could be with Merleau-Ponty’s way and see how all the approaches compare in the end. Of course, this does not mean erasing all of film history and disregarding the classical way; it means that we can look at films from a perspective that the classical approach may not be able to see.

Simone Weil (1909-1943) is a French philosopher who is also a prominent figure in the tradition of Christian mysticism. In her early philosophical writings and lectures, she describes her understanding of the aim of philosophy as “the Search for the Good”. Very much influenced by Plato, Descartes and Kant, Weil states that God as the absolute Good is beyond known truths and can only be reached through Love. This treatment of love as a destructive power whereby the Self effaces itself in order to get closer to God, echoes a somewhat mystical scheme. Weil believes that the only way to reach such knowledge and therefore God, which in her view is the sole purpose of life and should also be the purpose of philosophy. This dissertation focuses on the grounds that bring her to such conclusions as well as providing an analysis of whether Weil’s philosophical approach as an alternative to metaphysical and ethical problems in philosophy is able to stand firm on its own.