Kant at the La Ciotat Station: the Arrival of the Lumière's Train

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Date

1981

Authors

Cameron, Evan Wm.

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Abstract

In 1787 Immanuel Kant published a second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason. Within a new preface he reaffirmed an identity that his critics had failed to comprehend: we and God encounter things differently rather than different things. A century later Louis Lumière, by the first public screening of a movie, exemplified a comparable identity that a good many nonfilmmakers have ever since failed to comprehend: we see differently by means of movies the same things that stood before the camera as the film was exposed rather than different things. I sketch within this essay the consequences of those identities for logic and filmmaking, foremost among them that identity claims, carefully construed, are irrefutable, disposing of impotent counterarguments.

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Berkeley, George, Bazin, Andre, Cavell, Stanley, Eastman Kodak Company, Filmmaking, Gregory, Richard, History, Philosophy of, Hochberg, J. E., Identity, Kant, Immanuel, Kracauer, Siegfried, Logic, Lumière, Louis, Negation, Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Philosophy, Philosophy, History of, Photography, Quine, Willard van Orman, Realism, Scruton, Roger, Seeing Movies, Sesonske, Alexander, Walton, Kendall, Cameron, Evan

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