Overview

Can films philosophize rather than simply represent philosophical ideas developed outside of the cinematic medium? Taking up this crucial question for the emergent field of film philosophy, American Avant-Garde Cinema's Philosophy of the In-Between argues that the films of the American avant-garde do in fact do philosophy and illuminates the ethical stakes of their aesthetic interventions. Author Rebecca A. Sheehan contends that American avant-garde cinema's characteristic self-reflexivity is an interrogation of the modes and stakes of our engagement with the world on and beyond the screen. The book demonstrates this with the theory of the in-between: a pervasive figure that helps clarify how avant-garde cinema's reflections on the creation of images construct an ethics of perception itself, a responsibility to perpetuate thought in an enduring re-encounter with the world and with meaning's unfinished production. The book is structured by a taxonomy of the multiple in-betweens evident in American avant-garde filmmaking. Rather than systematically seeking reproductions of particular philosophers' ideas in avant-garde films, Sheehan derives categories of analysis and the philosophical claims they disclose from close readings of the films themselves. This methodology opposes mapping preconfigured philosophical concepts and values onto these films, as too many philosophical approaches to cinema have done, silencing the philosophies uniquely articulated by these films in the interest of making them ventriloquize philosophies advanced elsewhere. The chapters of this book trace three modes of the in-between that function philosophically in American avant-garde cinema: the material, the dimensional, and the conceptual. Although the chapters are organized around discrete aesthetic and philosophical preoccupations that unify several filmmakers, these three presentations of the in-between cut through all the chapters, allowing the subjects of each to converse over the course of the book.

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9780190949716

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Reviews

In this exciting and essential new book, Sheehan presents a completely new reconsideration, both historical and philosophical, of North American experimental film. Sheehan's book is also an important intervention in current debates about 'film philosophy,' as she draws out with precision and depth the philosophical interest of filmmakers such as Maya Deren, Michael Snow, Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Phil Solomon, James Benning, Sharon Lockhart, David Gatten, Marie Menken, Pat O'Neill, Ray and Charles Eames, Ernie Gehr, Ken Jacobs, and Hollis Frampton. This book will appeal to scholars of experimental cinema, to that growing audience working at the intersection of philosophy and cinema, and perhaps more broadly to researchers in the philosophy of art, Continental philosophy, and art criticism. -- D. N. Rodowick, University of Chicago American Avant-Garde Cinema's Philosophy of the In-Between is a stunning achievement, a true gift for those of us who value-and for those who need to learn to better appreciate-the aesthetic dimension of ethical experience. Sheehan's pragmatic account of American avant-garde filmmaking so beautifully situates the work in relation to the complexity of ordinary experience, where others have been content to lift the films from the lives and worlds that brought them into existence in the first place. In showing us what pragmatists and ordinary language philosophers share with the cinematic avant-garde-namely, a concern with contingent and pluralistic conceptions of self and world, none of which can be separated from the challenges of aesthetic experience-Sheehan has opened a whole new world for film philosophy. -- Brian Price, University of Toronto

Author Information

Rebecca A. Sheehan is Associate Professor of Cinema and Television Arts at California State University, Fullerton. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from University of Pennsylvania and has been a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Haverford College, and a Visiting Associate Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. She is the co-editor of Border Cinema: Reimagining Identity Through Aesthetics (2019). Her work on topics ranging from experimental cinema, sculpture and cinema, epistolary cinema, the biopic and border cinema has appeared in edited book collections and various journals including Discourse, Screen, and Screening the Past.

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