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Nora Fernandez Fernandez
The Arjé Philosophy Association inaugurates a cineforum-seminar to comment, from a philosophical perspective, on several notable films. The first of the sessions will be this Friday, February 10, at the Fuenlabrada campus.
The specific objective of this cineforum, as explained by the professors and organizers of the event, Marcos Jiménez and Pablo Alzola, "is to take a tour of some of the essential movements in the history of cinema and reflect on the films that have been a point of turning point in the development and evolution of cinema”.
To do this, the paradigms that underlie the films will be addressed, thus uniting the fields of cinema and thought, something that Philosophy students usually do in the Aesthetics of Cinema course. In addition, "we hope that it will serve to bring attendees closer to some cinematographic currents, such as Italian neorealism, for example, which are increasingly distant from our daily lives, having, nevertheless, a great weight in the imaginary with which we manage ourselves”, say the teachers.
For the first session of the cineforum, which will take place on Friday, February 10, The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920) will be screened. To analyze it, it will be essential to address the German expressionist movement, as well as its political, social, philosophical or artistic implications, such as the influence of art and nineteenth-century thought on it.
In the second session, the United States sitcom genre of the 30s and 40s will be analyzed, and this will allow us to understand The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940), the film that will be discussed in the second session.
“With the other three sessions we intend to do the same: a commentary on the social context of post-war Italy for Ladrón de Bicicletas (Vittorio De Sica, 1948); the reflection on the grotesque as a current of Spanish identity in the session on El verdugo (Luis G. Berlanga, 1963) and, finally, the great influence of the film Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) in the science fiction genre, as a popular genre today, interspersed with the overexposure of dystopias”, commented Jiménez and Alzola.
Both teachers will be in charge of directing the seminar that will precede the viewing of each film. As they explain, “we both dedicate our research to philosophical aesthetics and cinema, and this affinity is what allows us to organize the cinefórum together”. More specifically, Marcos Jiménez wrote his doctoral thesis on the German filmmaker Fritz Lang and Pablo Alzola oriented his thesis to study the American Terrence Malick. Currently, Jiménez teaches the subject of Film Aesthetics and Alzola, Theory of Art and Aesthetic Ideas.
This is not the first time that the two young teachers have organized something together. During the past academic year, they held four sessions on cinema and philosophy and analyzed films such as ¡Qué bello es vivir! (Frank Capra, 1946), Hidden Life (Terrence Malick, 2019) and Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977).
This connection between cinema and philosophy can be understood in many ways, but one of the most obvious is that some films serve to illustrate philosophical questions or concepts. Here the maximum exponent is Matrix, interpreted as an allegory of Plato's cave.
However, Jiménez and Alzola point out that this relationship can go beyond the simple illustration of ideas, since it poses, "in a different way from the conceptual language of philosophy, questions about the reality of the world, the identity of the human being , relationships with others or the existence of God. The American philosopher Stanley Cavell, one of the great defenders of the relationship between cinema and philosophy, said that cinema has inherited the original, Socratic vocation of philosophy, at a time when philosophy has become too academic and He has dealt with issues that are too erudite and perhaps far from life”. The cinema, then, would be a way of bringing them closer.