Filmed Thought

With the rise of review sites and social media, films today, as soon as they are shown, immediately become the topic of debates on their merits not only as entertainment, but also as serious forms of artistic expression. Philosopher Robert B. Pippin, however, wants us to consider a more radical proposition: film as thought, as a reflective form. Pippin explores this idea through a series of perceptive analyses of cinematic masterpieces, revealing how films can illuminate, in a concrete manner, core features and problems of shared human life.

Filmed Thought examines questions of morality in Almodóvar's Talk to Her, goodness and naïveté in Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, love and fantasy in Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, politics and society in Polanski's Chinatown and Malick's The Thin Red Line, and self-understanding and understanding others in Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place and in the Dardennes brothers' oeuvre. In…