Transcendence and Film

In this edited collection of essays, ten experts in film philosophy explore the importance of transcendence for understanding cinema as an art form. They analyze the role of transcendence for some of the most innovative film directors: David Cronenberg, Karl Theodor Dreyer, Federico Fellini, Werner Herzog, Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Terrence Malick, Yasujiro Ozu, and Martin Scorsese. Meanwhile they apply concepts of transcendence from continental philosophers like Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Martin Heidegger, Michel Henry, Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, Søren Kierkegaard, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Each of the ten chapters results in a different perspective about what transcendence means and how it is essential to film as an art medium. Several common threads emerge among the chapters. The contributors find that the limitations of human existence are frequently made evident in moments of transcendence, so as to bring characters to the margins of their assumed world. At other times, transcendence goes immanent, so as to emerge in experiences of the surprising nearness of being, as though for a radical intensification of life. Film can also exhibit “ciphers of transcendence” whereby symbolic events open us to greater realizations about our place in the world. Lastly, the contributors observe that transcendence occurs in film, not simply from isolated moments forced into a storyline, but in a manner rooted within an ontological rhythm peculiar to the film itself.

Transcendence and Film: Cinematic Encounters with the Real offers an engagingly philosophical insight on the thoughtful ways the world of moving images challenges our metaphysical and ontological notions of transcendence. The chapters assembled in this volume launch the reader into an intellectually stimulating, yet comprehensibly enjoyable journey, which unfolds both the experience of viewing transcendence and the charm of philosophizing it. As worded in the introduction, motion picture’s ability to “crack open the sky of our world” and the vast impact motion picture culture has on the way we philosophize our worldly existence, is a timely opportunity to work out what transcendence means and how it is effected by the collision between film and philosophy. The collection at hand makes a convincing case for this collision, and it is surely to become an important landmark in the field., This fascinating collection of essays, focusing on the relationship between cinema and transcendence, opens up new ways of thinking through the film-philosophy relationship. With impressive contributions from noted philosophers and phenomenologists, and dealing with a range of films from Mulholland Drive and Badlands to eXistenZ, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Silence, Transcendence and Film brings questions of film art, existential meaning, and contemplative experience to the forefront of philosophical reflection on cinema today., This is a very fine collection of essays on how, in the hands of gifted artists, transcendence can be brought down to earth and placed before our eyes. Transcendence and Film occasions a truly fruitful encounter between a group of insightful philosophers of film and some of the most philosophically-minded filmmakers that there are., Of all the sub-fields in philosophy, none has greater relevance or urgency than 'philosophy and film.' The primary medium of communication today is visual, and philosophy is above all about communication as Jaspers reminded us. The critical essays in this collection by David Nichols, Transcendence and Film, make a distinctive contribution to this need, and especially to film's ability to speak transcendentally and immanently through a cipher script.

David P. Nichols is associate professor of philosophy at Saginaw Valley State University.