This article examines Noël Carroll’s theory of solidarity from a critical race theoretical perspective. Using recent work in philosophy of film, philosophy of emotion, and critical philosophy of race, it argues his theory pays insufficient attention to both the role disgust plays in generating solidarity and the role race plays in generating disgust. Numerous and significant examples are cited to support these claims. The article also suggests implicit bias and embodied affect figure into character allegiance more seriously than Carroll’s theory indicates. These weaknesses arguably affect related theories in both philosophy of film and cognitive film theory, such as those advanced by A. W. Eaton, Margrethe Bruun Vaage, Murray Smith, and Carl Plantinga. The result is a call for revision of Carroll’s and these other thinkers’ theories, as well as a call for deeper investigation into disgust, race, and their importance in generating character allegiance.

Critical posthumanists have observed that technoscientific developments are in the process of rewriting human ontology, fundamentally changing what it means to be human. While they argue that the posthuman breaks with the Cartesian liberal subject and embraces a more decentered ontology, their analyses remain firmly situated in a Cartesian world that marginalizes if not completely ignores questions about natality. This essay examines two filmic texts, Blade Runner 2049 and the AMC television show Humans, that are situated firmly in a posthuman environment in which technoscience is seemingly rewriting the conditions of being human and blurring the boundary between human and machine, but which focus on natality and childhood and emphasize themes of parenting and growth and development. In doing so, they disclose shortcomings in critical posthumanism that can only be addressed when we give more serious attention to how natality shapes being human.

Much theorizing on the aesthetics of nature focuses on its uniqueness qua nature. An overly-inflated sense of the ethical and aesthetic normative force of this focus has resulted in a general paucity of philosophical investigation into artified nature. The investigations that do exist typically refuse to or are unable to marshall the theoretical resources of nature aesthetics, which are taken to only apply to live nature. Here, I resist such wing-clipping by taking artified nature–specifically, filmed nature–to deserve its own discrete theorizing while nonetheless insisting upon, and taking full advantage of, a robust connection between filmed and live nature. I do so by arguing that cinema can successfully remediate an important, and unique, element of the aesthetic experience of live nature: namely, its engaged environmental character.

The 2015 film Lost and Beautiful, directed by Pietro Marcello, en­deavors in aesthetically compelling ways to decenter the human in the frame and engage viewers in what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari term becoming animals. Part documentary film, part fairytale, this film tells the story in the nonhuman first person, of the life and journey of a water buffalo calf in the south of Italy and his relationship with the shepherd who saved him from pre­mature death, and later, with Pulcinella, a mythological figure from Neapol­itan folklore, who accompanies him in a journey north. Adopting ecocritical and posthuman perspective and providing elements of environmental cultural history, this article analyses the aesthetic and narrative strategies the film em­ploys to grant subjectivity to a nonhuman protagonist and, in turn, address the viewers. Advocating for the conservation of human artifacts while also posing the question of animal rights and agency, Lost and Beautiful powerfully gestures toward a non-anthropocentric cinema.

This article discusses a relationship between the philosophical praxis of Ọ̀rúnmìlà and aesthetics of Èjìgbèdè Ẹ̀kú (i.e., the costume of the living and the costume of the dead) in Saworoidẹ (dir. Túndé Kèlání’s, 1999). I construct the Yorùbá/Ọ̀rúnmìlà philosophical method of Èjìgbèdè Ẹ̀kú in the contemporary Nigerian narrative film as case study of how contemporary African filmmakers, like their oral artiste counterparts, continue to articulate their inherited traditions via cinematic storytelling. In doing that I draw on what I call the Ọ̀rúnmìliàn “parable of Eégún” (masquerade) to establish what I designate the philosophical/therapeutic questions of Èjìgbèdè Ẹ̀kú; and thus, argue that Èjìgbèdè Ẹ̀kú gives “presence to non-presence” so that the living/present can dialogue with the dead/past as a way of healing, re-moralizing, and/or decolonizing the living through cinematic storytelling. I conclude that Ọ̀rúnmìliàn film does not solely rekindle, and teach us, a valuable aesthetic practice of self-reflection or self-reevaluation but also decolonize and de-westernize film-philosophy

This article contributes to the philosophical debate over whether and how different forms of value interact—more specifically, moral and aesthetic value. Whereas much of the debate has been preoccupied with how moral value might affect aesthetic value, this article explores the interaction from the opposite direction. To consider the plausibility of an interaction in this direction, I first expand upon Robert Stecker’s brief discussion of the reverse affective response argument. Following this, I propose an alternative description of an aesthetic-moral interaction that might be more accurately described as “inverted moderate moralism.” Inverted moderate moralism (an inverted version of Noël Carroll’s moderate moralism) argues that aesthetic value sometimes affects moral value; sometimes aesthetic flaws yield moral flaws in works, and sometimes aesthetic merits yield moral merits. I defend inverted moderate moralism as one plausible account of aesthetic-moral value interaction, but this article hopes to illustrate that an interaction in this direction is not only plausible but warrants further consideration more generally.

This essay explores the underlying connections, through reversals and doubling, in Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth. The film utilizes more than just similar cinematic techniques across its five episodes, it embeds conceptual connections that result in a strong location-expression conveying to the viewer the unique ‘flavor’ of each of the five cities. The essay explores the concepts of reversal, doubling, location-expression, and spectatorship. It elucidates the filmic expressions of place by gesturing toward expression theory and rasa theory. Ultimately, the film’s unity, like that of a rock band’s LP, holds together enough to suggest the peculiar awareness of the filmgoer’s tourist spectatorship.

Emerald Fennell’s debut feature Promising Young Woman (2020) incisively examines sexual assault, misogyny, and the culture of complicity that continues to perpetuate `violence against women. This article will establish Fennell’s aptitude as a filmmaker in condemning the pervasive forces of patriarchal social order in harmony with Kate Manne’s account of structural misogyny analyzed in Down Girl (2017) and Entitled (2020). Fennell’s subversion of genre standards demonstrates how the actions of individuals, separate from the perpetrator, lead to additional acts of harm, and addresses the ever-present reality of male violence which the feminist-hero is, ultimately, unable to surmount. Despite arguments that Promising Young Woman has not met the expectations for change the me-too movement inspired, Fennell challenges conventions to expose misogyny and male violence asking that future feminist filmgoers consider a new way forward.

In this essay, I sketch a preliminary, phenomenological definition of black horror cinema. I argue that black horror films are films in which blackness and antiblackness are depicted as unintelligible. I build this definition first by arguing that horror films generally evoke a mood of Heideggerian uncanniness, by which I mean that they create a global affective state in which the world is experienced as unintelligible. I then turn to the Afropessimist theorizing of Frank B. Wilderson, who proposes both that blackness and antiblackness are phenomenologically graspable as unintelligible, and that cinema resists this unintelligibility by warping blackness and antiblackness. However, I thus contend that black horror is an exception to this rule. Black horror films take advantage of horror’s uncanny mood to craft a filmic world in which blackness and anti blackness are unintelligible.

The Black Mirror episode “Arkangel” tells a disturbing story of over-parenting driven by technology. The single mother Marie’s adoption of the Arkangel system has invited overwhelmingly negative moral evaluation from philosophers. But what accounts for the moral failure of a loving and concerned parent? Is it all about her flawed character, or are there situational factors at work? In the article, I first foreground the slipperiness of technology implicated in Albert Borgmann’s notion of the “device paradigm” and Hans Jonas’s analysis of modern technology. Then I analyze the character of the Arkangel system in the light of the two philosophers’ works and show how the technology turns Marie into a failing parent. In the end, I offer tentative answers to the two questions; the answers shall also shed light on the problem of under-parenting driven by digital technology.

This paper casts the television series BoJack Horseman as a challenge to the genre that Stanley Cavell calls “the comedy of remarriage.” First, it is argued that the last season of the series explicitly suggests but finally contradicts the narrative pattern of the comedy of remarriage. Then, the impossibility of remarriage in BoJack Horseman is traced back to some structural features of the medium of television and its relationship to time. Finally, the impossibility of remarriage in BoJack Horseman is related to the capacity of the medium of television to enable self-defeating fictions which challenge fiction as a cultural institution.

Whit Stillman’s films depict characters attempting to gain relevant knowledge of their historical situation so that they can shape their lives. Through an analysis of scenes from each of Stillman’s films, this essay demonstrates that historical knowledge is presented as a kind of self-understanding in the films. That historical knowledge is useful for gaining control over one’s future as well as for properly evaluating one’s life reveals a philosophically interesting approach to self-knowledge. Stillman’s complex approach of layering contexts further suggests an elusive account of the self.

Christopher Nolan’s seems a spy thriller in which a government operative saves the world. As others have noted, it is in a larger sense about climate change—even though it mentions it but once. Where the film has been dismissed as not saying anything substantial, or even read as promoting an activist message, I argue it is most coherently interpreted as a reactionary defense of the status quo. The film is about a war between the present and future, its heroes those who beat back time travelers trying to prevent us from destroying the planet. If audiences are not passive recipients of propaganda, but critical and cognitive, then blockbusters need to distract them from unavowable larger meanings by redirecting interpretive energies into the details; plot holes are not a bug, but a feature. The meticulous, puzzle-box construction of Nolan’s films, which encourages elaborate fan theorizing, distracts both viewers and Nolan himself from their ideological content.

This article addresses recent science fiction films about the colonization of outer worlds, or space-steading, in the context of the longer colonial history of the frontier. Paying particular attention to Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014), Serenity (Joss Whedon, 2005) and The Wild Blue Yonder (Werner Herzog, 2005), I argue that colonizing outer space is not only a race to the new frontier, but that this takes place because technologies that picture space have quickened the pulse. Through its imagining of the end of times as a reiteration of colonizing adventure, and the emptying of people from their place, the technology of film has itself produced the accident (Virilio, 2007) of an uninhabited earth. As suggested by the cinematically derived kinesis of wormholes, space wrinkles, and warp speeds, what might be left as a form of life is none other than film itself. The hyper-kinesis of film spectacle takes on a non-human life of its own, which, in science fiction film, constitutes a form of self-alienation, removing viewers from the places they actually inhabit and displacing the histories they unfold. In this way, I address what is truly cinematic about the film frontier traversed by the new space of uber-masculine adventurer-settlers.

In this essay, I argue that the distinction between film gris and film noir, introduced by Jon Tuska in his 1984 book Dark Cinema, enhances our appreciation of the philosophical attributes of such films. For Tuska, there are important differences between a film gris and a film noir. While a film gris may have a number of noir attributes (a shadowy noir visual style, a gritty urban setting, cynical characters, etc.) a genuine film noir is not merely a police procedural and must not have a happy ending, I will also argue that a film’s narrative perspective plays a vital role in determining whether its status is that of a film noir. I will make these arguments by examining a wide variety of films including The Maltese Falcon (1941), Out of the Past (1947), He Walks by Night (1948), The Narrow Margin (1952), Double Indemnity (1944), Repeat Performance (1947), and The Wrong Man (1956).