2023/11/27 by Sheryl Tuttle Ross · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Ethics, Aesthetics, and Art
paper · doi:10.1093/aesthj/ayac037
openalex publication_date 2023/11/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Urban legend has it that when the Lumiere brothers first showed their film L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat in 1896 (which was literally the moving image of a train arriving at the station), the audience was so overwhelmed and afraid that they ran for cover. Some attribute the legend to the Lumiere brothers themselves as a sort of publicity stunt for their new artform. Nevertheless, the notion that film can have an effect on its audience, and sometimes a political effect, arises with the very first exemplars of the moving image. In his Philosophical Theories of Political Cinema, Angelo Emanuele Cioffi endeavours to provide a philosophical analysis of a film genre he dubs ‘political cinema’. The book claims to ‘be of interest not just to film studies, film theory and political philosophy scholars, but to anyone with an interest in political film, aesthetic practice and philosophy of art’ (front materials). I was surprised, given this prediction about the audience, how narrowly focused on analytic philosophy of art and cognitive film studies this volume is. Although Cioffi contends that he engages with continental philosophy by considering political philosophy and the work of Brecht when he defines the term ‘political’ and when he mentions the thought experiments of Rawls and Nozick, the bulk of the book is about rather specific issues within analytic philosophy of art. Given the focus on philosophical issues about art and political art, it is unclear whether, as a result of consuming this book, the reader will be able to classify, analyze and assess the genre of political cinema that Cioffi claims motivates his project of developing a theory of political cinema.