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Screenwriting, 1895-1905 Prelude - The Arrival of the Lumière's Train

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  • ItemOpen Access
    Digital Fabrication and its Meaning for Photography and Film
    (2016) Crippen, Matthew; Ingram, Susan
    Bazin, Cavell and other prominent theorists have asserted that movies are essentially photographic with more recent scholars such as Carroll and Gaut protesting. Today CGI stands as a further counter, in addition to past objections such as editing, animation and blue screen. Also central in debates is whether photography is transparent, that is, whether it allows us to see things in other times and places. I maintain photography is transparent, notwithstanding objections citing digital manipulation. However, taking a cue from Cavell—albeit one poorly outlined in his work—I argue this is not so much because of what photography physically is, but because of what “photography” has come to mean. I similarly argue digital technologies have not significantly altered what cinematic media “are” because they have not fundamentally modified what they mean; and that cinema retains a photographic legacy, even when it abandons photographic technologies to digitally manufacture virtual worlds.
  • ItemOpen Access
    KING KONG, Carroll and Currie: Misconstruing Monstrously How We See Things by Means of Movies
    (1998) Cameron, Evan Wm.
    Two confusions have vitiated recent philosophical discussions about filmmaking: the presumption of Nöel Carroll that discrimination entails essentialism and the presumption of both Carroll and Gregory Currie that we cannot be seeing what we commonly speak of seeing when seeing 'fictional things' things by means of movies, monsters like King Kong in particular, for our responses differ from what they would have been had we been in the presence of the things that we are encountering. Fortunately, neither of the confusions need bother us nor need we persist with the authors in misdescribing how we encounter things seen by means of movies.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Kant at the La Ciotat Station: the Arrival of the Lumière's Train
    (1981) Cameron, Evan Wm.
    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.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Santayana's Missing Pages: Learning by Recollecting How We Use Photographs
    (2002) Cameron, Evan Wm.
    Sometime between 1900 and 1907 George Santayana addressed the Harvard Camera Club on 'Photography and the Mental Image', noting that his remarks seemed to him 'of some importance'. They were indeed, for his talk marked the first time that a philosopher of artistic sensibility had drawn attention to how the photographical arts of reappearance, filmmaking among them, are distinguished from others. Santayana's manuscript of his talk remained unpublished until 1967, and few are aware of how prescient was his commentary and how provocative his refusal to publish it. I summarise what he said but only to concentrate better upon how he said it, for how he arrived at his conclusions, foreshadowing the aims and methods of Collingwood, Austin and Wittgenstein, is as remarkable today as when he did it over a century ago.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Filmmaking, Logic and the Historical Reconstruction of the World
    (1995) Cameron, Evan Wm.
    An assessment in historical context of how and what filmmakers, logicians and philosophers could have learned from one another about the rudiments of their crafts.