-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Mike Wayne, Nico Baumbach, Cinema/Politics/Philosophy, Screen, Volume 61, Issue 3, Autumn 2020, Pages 496–499, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjaa037
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Nico Baumbach’s Cinema/Politics/Philosophy aims to show readers that recent interventions by philosophers into the study of film can play an important role in re-politicizing film theory following the disintegration of the 1970s paradigm – sometimes called, because of the journal’s influence in shaping it – Screen theory. Baumbach’s main point about the dominant paradigm of the 1970s is that it operated with a rigid division (of labour) between theory, which typically unmasks ideology, and art/aesthetics/culture, which typically (it was argued) inhabits ideology but is castigated for not being more like theory. Yet when avant-garde practices performed the ideology critique achieved by theory, it raised questions as to what the role of theory should be when confronted with objects that realized its ‘theory’ in practice.
Even more pertinently, if art could be a form of critique, then could critique be grounded exclusively in rigorously conceptual theory that had expunged all traces of the dreaded ‘subject’ and sense-perception? This was an antinomy between the Symbolic and the Imaginary, with theory championing the former to the detriment of the latter. Behind this antinomy within film studies stood a deeper one that had structured philosophy for several centuries, that between rationalism (mind) and empiricism (sense-perception).
