Film Philosophy at the Margins: Film Philosophy at the Margins

Film Philosophy at the Margins picks up on the burgeoning field of ‘film philosophy’ - the shift from film analysis and explication to bringing together film with philosophy - and coalesces it with films, genres and spectator theory which have received little critical attention. These films could be defined as marginal due to containing marginalizing representations of violence and marginal invocations of sexuality and queer performativity, showing the margins of bodily modification from disability to performance art, being marginal in their abstraction of representative codes or in reference to their address to the politics of social control, spectatorship and cinematic pleasure as marginal due to its unique status and quality, and many other interpretations of extreme.

The film philosophy which underpins the exploration of these films is primarily Continental philosophy, rather than the more dominant field of cognitive film philosophy, utilizing increasingly attractive philosophers for film theory such as Deleuze, Guattari, Ranciere, Foucault, Irigaray and Kristeva. The series ultimately seeks to establish a refined and sophisticated methodology for re-invigorating issues of alterity both in the films chosen and the means by which Continental philosophers of difference can paradigmatically alter ways of address and representation that lifts this kind of theory beyond analysis and criticism to help rethink the terrain of film theory itself.