This edited collection emerged due to a shared sense amongst the editors that more needed to be said about how cinematic ethics is intertwined with the sociopolitical. This sense arose from the observation of a growing focus on this topic within the field, as seen in, for example, recent conference papers and publications in journals focusing on film-philosophy. With the turn to ethics in scholarship at the interdisciplinary intersection of film and philosophy now firmly established, it became clear that we should foreground the complex contextualisations, associations, imbrications, combinations and assemblages combining the ethical with the sociopolitical. Alongside this realisation was the growing awareness that cinematic ethics also requires a broader understanding of screen ethics to include examples of screen media ‘types’ which proliferate in our media-saturated world. Not a provincialising of cinematic ethics, but a recognition of the need to broaden the panorama to include television, digital media, virtual reality technology, and so on.

The contributions in Contemporary Screen Ethics together indicate how political the examination of screen ethics is. The manifestation of such politics, however, typically focus on the sociopolitical as opposed to the political strictly speaking (as in the politics of government, for example). Thus, collected in this anthology are chapters which examine screen ethics in relation to a range of topics which can be understood to be sociopolitical. It is worth outlining a few examples.

Feminist-informed explorations of screen ethics herein lead to three distinct contexts. First, considerations of decolonial analysis of the figure of the housemaid in a range of Brazilian cinematic genres and modes (intersectionally considering gender, race and class), which gesture towards an ethics of relationality that could be more inclusive of such otherwise marginalised figures. Second, the teasing out of what an ethics of care might look like in terms of documentary filmmaking practice, once more recognising of the nuanced intersectional nature of such practices and their subjects. Third, the affective nature of the ethical gaze when films explore sexual and gendered violence in the media and film industries.

We might equally consider the various approaches to race which open up discussion of, for instance, how televised stand-up comedy can make an ethicopolitical intervention into the circulation of stereotypes, or, how popular genre films may encourage people to ethically encounter otherness anew in a context which has normalised alignment with a constructed, racialised gaze.

Contemporary cinema is rife with films dealing with ethical issues, moral problems or cultural-political concerns. This is evident in the rise of new ethically and politically engaged cinema, particularly within diverse cultural traditions and social contexts, amidst the dissemination of what is loosely called ‘world cinemas’ (see Nagib 2011; Chaudhuri 2014; Martin-Jones 2011, 2019). Contemporary documentary, moreover, is where many socially charged ethical problems and cultural-moral debates today are vigorously examined and creatively explored. It is where cultures across the globe can find cinematic ways to address, reflect upon, question, and explore some of the most important moral-ethical and cultural-political issues of our times. Most discussion of the ethical dimensions of documentary, however, has focused on the question of truth and objectivity in relation to documentary presentation (the ethics of representation), or on the question of ethical practices of informed consent and transparent communication in the treatment of documentary subjects (the ethics of production). What of the ethical dimensions of spectatorial experience, the way documentary film can evoke emotional engagement, critical reflection, even social action? How might the medium of documentary be used to solicit ethical experiences in viewers as part of making arguments, presenting claims, or exposing problems? As I explore in what follows, such questions raise the question of documentary cinema's ethical potential, a question I propose to address via the notion of a cinematic ethics: the idea of cinema as a medium of ethical experience (see Sinnerbrink 2016: 3–24).

The idea of cinema as medium of ethical experience offers a way of understanding what cinema can do: its transformative potential to sharpen our moral perception, challenge our beliefs through experiential means, and thus enhance our understanding of moral-social complexity. It can also provoke philosophical thinking through morally confronting or provocative forms of ethical experience conveyed and evoked through film. In this way it can bring together the three important aspects of the cinema-ethics relationship: ethical content in narrative cinema; the ethics of cinematic representation (from filmmaker and spectator perspectives); and the ethics of cinema as symptomatic of broader cultural, social and ideological concerns. To these three dimensions we can add a fourth: the aesthetic dimension of cinema – the role of aesthetic form in intensifying our experience, refining and focusing our attention, and thus of conveying complexity of meaning – as a way of evoking ethical experience and thereby inviting critical reflection.

After the moving image was neglected by much of twentieth- century philosophy, philosophy of film has emerged in recent decades as an independent field of inquiry. Since the decline of so- called Grand Theory (Bordwell and Carroll 1996), film theory has diversified in different directions, from historicism and media theory to phenomenology and cognitivist approaches. One of the most interesting developments – and the subject of this entry – is the philosophical turn in film theory and the rise of what is described as ‘film and philosophy’. The latter comprises a number of strands of philosophical film theory, encompassing both philosophy of film (often indebted to analytic aesthetics and/ or cognitivist approaches) and film- philosophy (often aligned with a range of Continental and post- Continental thinkers, as well as phenomenological and critical theory approaches). In what follows, I explore key elements of the film and philosophy relationship, focusing on the work of Deleuze and Cavell, examining the idea of ‘film as philosophy’, and some concluding reflections on the possibilities of cinematic thinking.

Image, Movement, Time: Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze published the first of his two books on film and philosophy in 1983, Cinema 1: The Movement- Image (trans. 1986), followed by the ‘sequel’ in 1985, Cinema 2: The Time- Image (trans. 1989). In their ambitious attempt to conceptualize the ‘essential’ concepts of cinema, Deleuze seeks to respond to problems shared by both film and philosophy. His project begins with a critical commentary on Henri Bergson's metaphysics of movement, which we may summarize in the three theses mentioned below:

Movement is Distinct from the Space Covered

Bergson's first thesis, according to Deleuze, holds that movement as such is qualitative, and so cannot be divided up without changing qualitatively (1986, 1). Space, on the other hand, is quantitative and so can be divided indefinitely. Space is homogeneous, movement heterogeneous (Deleuze 1986, 1). This implies that movement cannot be recomposed out of individual positions in space or instants in time; static sections (positions and instants) can only be synthesized in succession to create an ‘illusory’ movement.

The films of the late Theo Angelopoulos have been praised for their historical ambition, political themes and explorations of memory, but also for their commitment to cinematic modernism. For some critics, like David Bordwell, Angelopoulos is a late modernist auteur whose ‘anachronistic’ cinematic style bears the hallmarks of 1960s and ‘70s ‘political modernism’ (1997: 106; see also Rodowick 1988). For others, like Fredric Jameson, Angelopoulos’ work is best understood as hybrid or transitional: grounded in an aesthetic and historical sensibility that combines progressive elements, which render collective memory through a materialist aesthetic, and regressive elements, which revert to an individualistic, humanistic framing of the post-historical condition of ‘left-wing melancholy’ (Jameson 1997; see also Benjamin [1931] 1974). How do these overlapping readings of Angelopoulos – as late modernist, as historical mythmaker and as ambiguous innovator – hang together? How does Angelopoulos’ aesthetic style express historical experience and cultural memory? How might this project work in an age that remains sceptical about cinema's cultural-historical powers of aesthetic resistance?

Angelopoulos’ ‘trilogy of borders’ – in particular, his best-known film Το Bλέμμα του Οδυσσέα (Ulysses’ Gaze, 1995) – offers a way into addressing these questions, though the memorialisation of collective experience through cinema marks all of his work. In what follows, I shall explore how his films combine history, myth and politics in ways that constitute a cinema of historical experience, collective memory and ethical responsiveness. His films offer striking examples of how cinema can be regarded as philosophical, indeed as cases of a ‘cinematic thinking’: films that explore history, European identity and the crit- ical potential of cinema after the demise of political modernism; films which not only capture historical experience, involuntary memory and duration, but which also articulate thought through images. Angelopoulos’ films reflect upon how this cinematic and historical legacy might be renewed, posing questions concerning the historical and political prospects of the ‘new Europe’.

Dedicated film enthusiasts might imagine that philosophical interest in film is a relatively recent phenomenon, dating back to Stanley Cavell's work in the 1970s or perhaps to the heyday of French film theory in the 1960s. It might be surprising, then, to learn that philosophical reflection on film was flourishing already in the early part of the twentieth century.

One of the most intriguing aspects of French postwar Hegelianism is the way various thinkers critically transformed important Hegelian themes. There are of course many examples one could mention here, such as Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory of the desiring subject. In what follows, however, I shall focus on three important moments in twentieth-century French philosophy: Sartre's critique of Hegel's account of the relation to the Other, de Beauvoir's appropriation of Hegelian themes in her ethics of ambiguity, and Merleau-Ponty's appraisal of the relationship between Hegel and existentialism, along with his attempt to transform Hegelian dialectics into a pluralistic “hyperdialectic”. The basic problem at issue for Sartre and de Beauvoir, I suggest, is to comprehend the relationship between individualism and intersubjectivity: how to reconcile the existentialist emphasis on the individual with the Hegelian emphasis on intersubjectivity. For Merleau-Ponty, by contrast, there is a distinctive Hegelian existentialism that Jean Hyppolite has revealed for contemporary thought; the point is not to rehearse the standard existentialist criticisms of Hegel (subsuming the individual under the universality of the Concept), but rather to rethink dialectic such that it no longer obliterates contingency, singularity and plurality. In this respect, Merleau-Ponty's interesting appropriation of Hegelian thought sets the stage, as I discuss in Chapter 8, for the complex engagement with Hegelian dialectics by poststructuralist philosophers of difference (Deleuze and Derrida).

Sartre's existential critique of Hegel

Jean-Paul Sartre is among the most famous philosophers of the twentieth century.

The major postwar movements of French philosophy (existentialism, phenomenology and Hegelian Marxism) regarded Hegel as one of the key thinkers of the modern age. By the 1960s, however, Hegel's dialectics was the philosophical project most in need of deconstruction and transformation. This chapter thus focuses on two major poststructuralist thinkers: Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) and his critical encounter with, and conceptual transformation of, Hegelian dialectics; and Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) and his Heideggerian-inspired deconstruction of metaphysics, for which Hegelian dialectics is both an essential reference point and primary target. At issue here is the problem of constructing a genuinely post-Hegelian philosophy, a project that presents us with at least three alternatives: (a) can Hegelian dialectics be overcome via Nietzschean anti-dialectics? (b) should Hegelian dialectics be transformed, rather, into an experimental thinking of non-conceptual difference? or (c) should the Hegelian system be submitted to a deconstruction of its limits, confronting it with a radical difference that exceeds its dialectical unity? I shall suggest that Deleuze initially explores the first path (a) before turning to the second (b); Derrida pursues the third path (c), which submits Hegelian dialectics to a radical “displacement” that unravels its metaphysical claims to totality, unity and closure.

In this respect, Deleuze and Derrida both engage in related confrontations with Hegelian thought; but they do not reject or repudiate Hegelian dialectics so much as transform it such that it opens up a different way of thinking – a thinking of difference as such.