Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters

Film & Ethics considers a range of films and texts of film criticism alongside disparate philosophical discourses of ethics by Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Lacanian psychoanalysts and postmodern theorists. While an ethics of looking is implicitly posited in most strands of cinema theory, there is no established body of work that might be called ethical film criticism. This book, therefore, redresses the reluctance of many existing works to address cinema from an explicitly ethical perspective. Readings range across popular Hollywood films such as Thelma and Louise, Alfred Hitchcock’s canonical corpus, and films from European and World cinemas, including Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc and the little-known African film Bamako.  The book engages with debates concerning censorship and pornography; the ethical implications of ‘positive representation’; the ethics of making and viewing images of atrocity and suffering; and the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. Lisa Downing and Libby Saxton re-invigorate debates in film studies by foregrounding the ethical dimensions of the moving image, and create dialogues between ostensibly incompatible philosophical and political trends of thought, without seeking to reconcile their differences.