Projections

We are honored and delighted that our journal has won a prestigious “Prose”award for being 2008’s Best New Journal in the Social Sciences and Humanities, an award given by the Association of American Publisher’s Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division. Humility is in order and we will try to find time for it in a later issue of the journal.We are fortunate to have an involved and talented editorial board and submissions from top writers and scholars. All of us are committed to the subject of movies and mind because it opens so many doors for our understanding of art and science, the mind and brain, ourselves and others.

Although the extant scholarly literature on the cinema of the late Michelangelo Antonioni has often valorized his use of images and mise-en-scène to explore themes and reflections on humanism and alienation, few have examined the means by which the director conveyed ideas on psychology and sexuality in modern life and Italian culture. This article considers Antonioni's "trilogy"—L'avventura (The Adventure, 1959), La notte (Night, 1960), and L'eclisse (Eclipse, 1962)—in light of the modernist project, especially with regard to the conjuncture of psychology and sexuality within the historical context of the 1960s and the sexio-psychological discourses of that period. Finally, Antonioni's worldview is investigated, particularly as it pertains to his stated concept of malattia dei sentimenti, or "Sick Eros."

Levin and Simons (2000) argued that perceptual experience in film and the real world share a deep similarity in that both rely on inferences that visual properties are stable across views. This article argues that the perception and representation of visual space also reveal deep commonalities between film and the real world. The article reviews psychological research on visual space that suggests that we not only attend to similar spatial cues both in film and in nonmediated settings, but also that the rules for combining and selecting among these cues are similar. In exploring these links, it becomes clear that there is a bidirectional relationship between cognitive psychology and film editing that allows each to provide important insights about the other.

What facilitates the psychic process of grieving a traumatic loss, and what happens when that process is blocked? Forbidden Games is, on one level, an intimate film about childhood trauma. When viewed from a psychoanalytic perspective informed by concepts such as introjection and pathological mourning, however, it emerges as a complex allegory that reflects, through its narrative and filmic elements, on the sociocultural and historical dynamics of France's troubled response to the loss of its identity as a democracy during World War II. The film also reflects on the even more shameful history of the rise of French anti-Semitism under the Vichy regime and France's history of silencing or repressing the drama of its willing collaboration with the Nazis' Final Solution. Private trauma thus screens public, political trauma as Clément's film becomes both a medium for sociocultural commentary and a memorial to loss that could not be buried or mourned.

Evolution has equipped us with the ability to conceive of people and their actions in hypothetical, purely fictional, and fantastic scenarios. The way we conceive of real people, the way we make sense of fictional character, and the way we process needs and desires related to other people in our fantasies are all interconnected with one another. These are all instances of blending, often based on rather minimal direct information but supported by shared character-related schemata and mental simulation, the latter typically eliciting a degree of partial identification. The structural relationships and interconnectedness between these three processes can be examined in terms of the formalist notion of motivation.

The following three talks were originally delivered as part of the “Author Meets Critic” session on Thomas E. Wartenberg’s Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy (2007)* at the American Philosophical Association Central Division Meeting in Chicago. The session was sponsored by the Society for the Philosophical Study of the Contemporary Visual Arts on 17 April 2008.

This review essay’s title is partly in homage to Arthur Danto’s well-known essay “Philosophy As/And/Of Literature” (Danto 1984). But this title also helps to organize my comments, both appreciative and critical, and it does so by pointing toward a range of issues about philosophy and film that is similar to a range of issues that have been raised about philosophy and literature. Specifically, I would have liked more attention to philosophy and film. But I am quite ready to admit that my own sensibility here may be extremely idiosyncratic and may present nothing that Thomas Wartenberg needs to or even does disagree with. This suggestion about philosophy and film comes at the end of the essay.

I would like to begin my “response” to my “critics” by acknowledging my sense that they are less critics than fellow travelers in a joint project of understanding the philosophical significance of film. Each of them has provided me with help and support over the years. My own attempt to think philosophically about film was aided substantially by my discovery that Cynthia Freeland was also engaged in the same line of inquiry, and this, in turn, resulted in our collaborating on the first anthology about film written exclusively by philosophers, Philosophy and Film, published in 1995. Richard Eldridge and I have also maintained an ongoing if somewhat episodic discussion over the years about my understanding of film and the significance of Stanley Cavell’s account of the cinema, a conversation that has helped me refine my own thinking even as the conversation challenged it. So I would like to begin, then, by thanking rather than responding to these two friends and colleagues.