Drux Flux

This short animated film hails from Canada and was inspired by Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man. The music and the pace are very engaging, as are the layering of images.

Article Abstract: “Film Art, Argument, and Ambiguity”

Smith, Murray. “Film Art, Argument, and Ambiguity.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64.1 (2006): 33-42. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 5 Mar. 2010.

This essay is a response to the book by Stephen Mulhall, On Film, which argues that popular narrative film can be philosophy (or rather, philosophy in action). Smith finds narrative film to be a poor substitute for philosophical writings, and supports his case through dialectical inquiry. Smith reacts to Mulhall’s argument by re-analyzing the ways in which a narrative film could substantiate the territory of human self-reflection in the same way as a philosophical text. The essay explores the ways in which philosophy may be aligned with film through Mulhall’s use of the reductive strategy, which Smith finds unsatisfactory, as the analogy between narrative and argument is weak. Next, Smith expands on Mulhall’s research by exploring the expansive strategy through the comparison of Bernard William’s thought experiment in personal identity to Carl Reiner’s 1984 film, All Of Me, which tells the story of displaced personality. While the two have similarities, the thought experiment’s primary focus is the philosophical concept, while the film is dualistic and sets the philosophical focus as secondary to the comedic focus. Smith concludes that narrative film may have philosophical concepts, but as it ranks the philosophical concept lower and develops the primary focus (which is usually entertainment), it does not create an understanding of the philosophical concept and subsequent human self-reflection in the same way that written philosophy does. 

Article Abstract: “Sartre, the Philosophy of Nothingness, and Modern Melodrama”

Kovács, András Bálint. "Sartre, the Philosophy of Nothingness, and the Modern Melodrama." Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism 64.1 (2006): 135-145. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 5 Mar. 2010.

This essay proposes that Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophical concept of Nothingness is illustrated in the film genre of modern melodrama. In the first section of the essay, the author analyzes Sartre’s theory of Nothingness as opposed to the German romantic conception of Nothingness from other philosophers, such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. Sartre’s Nothingness is defined as the nonbeing of something that should be, of human expectation for a thing to exist which does not. In the second section, melodrama as a genre of film is explored in it’s various forms (naturalist, classical, and modern) using examples of melodramatic films such as Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette and Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2. The author focuses on modern melodrama, which is characterized by characters who find themselves in situations that they do not understand , and react passively to the situation as opposed to emotionally, which is typical of naturalist and classical melodramatic styles. In the third section, Michelangelo Antonini’s L’eclisse, a modern melodramatic film, is explored as an example of the concept of Nothingness in modern melodrama.  The suffering of the characters of a modern melodrama is a result of their inability to understand the situation, and thus a realization of emptiness, or Nothingness, as the ultimate power of their situation. The essay follows and employs dialectical research to support the argument.