This special issue of Screenworks explores emerging entanglements between film-philosophy and artistic practice. Each work presented here illustrates or questions how the claim “film as philosophizing” (Mullhall, 2001) might also serve as a premise for practice-based film thinking and/or artistic research through film.

Film-philosophy became a widespread line of thought at the beginning of the millennium and has flourished into numerous strands over the past two decades through a “continuation and radicalization of the ideas of Cavell and Deleuze” (Herzogenrath, 2017). Film-philosophy is based on the differentiation of film from the other arts. Thereby, the technological foundation and time-based nature of film have triggered an ontological and epistemological reflection on the relationship of film to a widespread range of philosophical topics. Film-philosophy ascribes to film the ability to produce its own epistemic knowledge of philosophical significance.

In parallel, the articulation of research through artistic means, such as film practice, has received significant attention and caused considerable debate. Diverse terms such as artistic research, practice-based research, or creative research, are often used to define and identify work in this area. Such practices ultimately strive toward “an aesthetico-epistemic formation process” to generate and embody further understanding in its respective field (Schwab 2023). Although artistic research receives increasing international prominence, its relationship to film-philosophy remains underexplored. Furthermore, artistic research in the medium of film - despite the continuous evolution of the field - has received less attention in the general debate than artistic research in other art forms and media. Artistic research in film means thinking through the practice, knowledge and perspectives of filmmaking and its inherent concepts and language.

The field of film-philosophy differs from other theoretical studies raised by film(s), such as the philosophy of art, film theory and film criticism. The main interest of film-philosophy is not limited to analyzing the various relationships between film and philosophy, as suggested, for example, by the philosophy of film, a more traditional branch (Sinnerbrink 2011/2022). Instead, film-philosophy encourages further and more experimental reflection on topics also “outside” itself. It allows for a critical reconsideration of the very methodologies of philosophy beyond the use of words. Furthermore, film-philosophy offers meta-reflection on artistic film practice as an epistemic process of thinking, as such converging with a topic pivotal for the theory of artistic research. In fact, with this special issue we propose to consider the hypothesis that the parallel development of the discourses on film-philosophy and on artistic research in film could lead to a mutual entanglement of their positions in content and practice.

Thus, this issue seeks to catalyse new entanglements and cross-fertilisation of these related fields by asking: How can artistic research in film enable a mode of thinking in which film engages in philosophically relevant reflection? How does this mode of reflection converge with the discourse surrounding film as philosophy? These two questions formed the basis for an online-symposium entitled “New Entanglements: Philosophy, Aesthetics and Artistic Research in Film” in 2022 and the following international call for submissions. In light of this context, we are pleased to present eight practice-research contributions which engage in explicit dialogue with philosophical topics, expanding and evolving their ideas through filmmaking processes.

Opening the issue, Jimmy Hay’s short fiction film Nothing Echoes Here charts a 36-hour period in the life of a woman and her two children, in the near-aftermath of the death of their husband and father. Informed by phenomenological approaches to grief; Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the time-image and the any-space-whatever, the film and accompanying statement consider whether it is possible to affectively portray the lived experience of grief in fiction cinema.

Several works explore speculative entanglements between place, human and the nonhuman. Kim Munro’s The Futorical Society weaves together precious and curious objects, local wildlife, built and natural landscapes and the story of the little-known agricultural hero, Vera Molnar, who saved the local grain industry. Through an interplay between history and future, and fixed and ephemeral, Munro speculates on ways to reimagine the past, present and future of regional Australia. Christine Rogers’ essay film The Red God emerges from wildlife camera footage of foxes from her backyard in Belfast. Drawing on adoption theory and informed by a decolonising ethos, the film explores the issue of belonging as a new arrival in Belfast, and questions how the filmmaker can express the care and guardianship that her Māori tūpuna (ancestors) showed their non-human cohabitants who were seen as relatives.

Two of the contributions involve unique methodological and disciplinary collaborations, which result in novel applications of philosophical concepts. Kii Nche Ndutsa (Time and the Seashell) goes deep into the interwoven materiality of memory, identity and the landscape, taking into consideration the indigenous knowledge at the site. Itandehui Jansen & Armando Bautista García explore Mixtec conceptions of time, identity, and landscape through film-philosophical contemplations. The writer and the director of the film each examined different research questions through different methods and approaches as part of their practice-reserach investigation. The Covers are the Eyelids is a complex, multi-disciplinary collaboration between five researchers with specialisations including creative writing, visual arts, philosophy, animation, and experimental non-fiction film practices. The collaboration resulted in a layering of images achieved through filming projections and overlaying sound to form the texture of the film. The collective of artistic researchers actualise Alfred North Whitehead’s concept of concrescence through the production of creative events caused through relations between and amongst entities, which, in this case, involves a species of material combination in which creative vectors can be seen to become imbricated in a processual event. 

With an emphasis on technology, the issue includes exciting work that critically reflects on the constitution and mediation of the digital through moving imagery, such as Disintegration Bodies by Szilvia Ruszev. Her film-essay presents the idea of the ‘digital abject’ – a triangulation between body, matter, and the other, in the digital realm. The essay proposes that destructive digital effects such as glitching and data moshing, create a ‘digital abject,’ a specific state of digital materiality. A Practice for Surrender by Tõnis Jürgens is a thoughtful video-essay on sleep and self-surveillance in times of pandemic and techno-capitalism, or, on the impact of a neoliberal digital sphere into our most intimate constitution. How to trust your own shadowy bedroom when sleep becomes annexed by the humans-machines apparatus and contributes to data collection? The video Unlearning Nihilism by Evi Jägle and Chris Müller provides an experimental reflection on the experience of digital immersion into virtual worlds, and how the subject’s consciousness duplicates while entangling the synthetic world’s perception and mind. The research piece floats alongside theoretical statements and negotiates their relation to synthetic images while creating an “intra-consciousnal event.”

This issue builds on an online symposium of the same title organised by Dr Eisabeth Brun and Dr Christine Reeh-Peters who have acted as guest editors alongside Screenworks editors Dr Matthew Hawkins and Dr Alex Nevill. The symposium took place in December 2022 as a collaboration between the Institute for Artistic Research of the Filmuniversität Babelsberg Konrad Wolf, the research group Media Aesthetics at the University of Oslo and the Nordland School of Arts and Film.

References:

Herzogenrath, B. (2017) Film As Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Mulhall, S. (2001) On Film. Abingdon: Routledge.

Sinnerbrink, R. (2011/2022) New Philosophies of Film. London: Bloomsbury.

Schwab, M. (2023) Contemporary Research. Hub: Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society, Issue #0, Spring 2023, https://doi.org/10.22501/hub.2190234