“The screen is a magic medium. It has such power that it can retain interest as it conveys emotions and moods that no other art form can ever hope to tackle."
--Stanley Kubrick
“Going to the cinema is like returning to the womb; you sit there still and meditate in the darkness, waiting for life to appear on the screen. One should go to the cinema with the innocence of a fetus.”
Culture critic Walter Benjamin once remarked that the invention of the camera introduced us to unconscious optics, just as Freud’s invention of psychoanalysis did for unconscious impulses, and he knew whereof he spoke. That insight reveals the same prescience that Freud’s chief acolyte and primary competitor Carl Jung also sensed, in a somewhat more refined and spiritual manner: that cinema is the artful language of dreams we speak while we’re still awake. Two insightful books, American Avant-Garde Cinema’s Philosophy of the In-Between by Rebecca Sheehan and Screening Fears: On Protective Media by Francesco Casetti, share an equally insightful exploration of the archetypal and collective mythologies that define classic cinema regardless of its genre. Looking at films through a psychological lens provides us with a valuable map and a discursive language which we can use to orient ourselves within the imaginal landscape of the motion picture art form. These two books, with a kind of cogent synchronicity, also definitely offer a deep dive into cinema as the quintessential art form of the 20th century. They deftly penetrate our shared psychic myths as revealed through the language of films and thus help us to more deeply understand our own hopes and fears while doing so, and as such they supply a kind of primal screen therapy which assists the audience in conversing with our own optical unconscious.
I mention this other Jungian term, synchronicity, a.k.a. meaningful coincidence, due to its nearly perpetual occurrence in my reading life when I encounter, as I so often do, two different books coming to me from different directions and taking often drastically different approaches in exploring singularly shared ideas. And so it is with these two tomes, both of which, while not exactly being overtly academic, are somewhat heady in their intended subject and theme: the liminal or threshold space, a position at or on both sides of a boundary as a transitional stage of a process or condition. While occasional ponderous in tone, they are still easily accessible to any ardent lover of films, especially those that seek to do more than merely entertain or divert (although there’s nothing at all wrong with superbly entertaining movies) and are well worth the effort of concentration occasionally required in order to plumb their depths, or heights. Basically that liminal zone is the very existence of a mediated screen, both as a protective layer or meaning-membrane and also as a void into which we must willingly plunge if we are to access the beauty of a great work of cinema art, whether it be by Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa or Ingmar Bergman, or whoever your favourite director might be. This is so because it’s the actual act of watching that is magical in itself, a priori of the stylistic content per se.
The psychology of viewing, whether Chaplin’s Modern Times of 1936, or Lynch’s Blue Velvet of 1986, is the true object under examination here, with Casetti’s notion of what he calls “protective media” being the ideal point of departure. Casetti is the Sterling Professor of Humanities and Film and Media Studies at Yale University and serves as something of a pathfinder in considering the philosophy of cinema. His groundbreaking earlier books -- Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and its Spectator, Eye of the Century: Film Experience Modernity and especially The Lumiere Galaxy: Seven Key Words for Cinema to Come – are notable landmarks leading to his latest achievement, Screening Fears. Only Jacques Ranciere (The Future of the Image, 2007; The Emancipated Spectator, 2008) has examined the intimate relations between image and spectator quite so deeply. And apart from Casetti’s amazing suggestion that the French Lumière Brothers (who devised the first motion picture camera and projector, the Cinematographe, from which cinema takes its name) were well aware in the very first ever motion picture of workers leaving their factory in 1895 that their gaze at the camera was being aimed at beings who were watching them from 130 years in the future, his notion of the ironic dream sanctuary of the protective movie theatre in Screening Fears is even more startling.
In this case, the provocative idea being explored is an alluring assertion based on his insight that instead of being protheses that expand and extend our perceptions, as per McLuhan, screen-based media are instead apparatuses that shelter us from over-exposure to the real (i.e., unmediated) world. Cinema’s primary function, or one of them, is that of an enclosure protecting us from real or imagined threats that surround us more constantly on a daily basis. Casetti brings us on a guided tour of the historical origins of theatrical environments starting with the phantasmagoria of the 18th century, through the communal interior space of the movie theatre from mid-19th to mid-20th centuries, and finally to the solitary digital screen milieu of the present. Along the way he identifies the protective “bubbles” that help us disconnect from our immediate surroundings. But what if, rather than providing a protective immunity and invulnerability by trying to keep reality at bay or somehow under control, they ensnare us in an isolation zone that is far more dangerous than the initial dangers they were designed to shield us from? The digital world, as many of us have begun to suspect, is far more of a suffocating enclosure than the original phantasmagorias, dream-like movie palaces, or television equipment with which it has inevitably competed and perhaps over which now has triumphed, and Casetti asks us to reconsider our assumptions about how what once was a safety zone has instead become a new danger zone, from which we extract ourselves only with the of greatest withdrawal challenges.
Casetti has spent a large portion of his life as a film scholar investigating the optics of viewing itself, as an organism, even almost a sentient being, by studying the connections between the spectator and the cinematic experience we undergo as well as the cultural relevance of this primary mode of both entertainment and edification. He continues his excellent work here by further exploring the persistence of cinema in the face of perpetual technological change and stylistic evolution via his close reading of postmodern digital screen-based media and the unique optical experiences they provoke within what he calls “the processes of mediation.” His recent tome reminds us once again that only a comprehensive genealogy of the screen as a dispositif, as it undergoes the permutations of advanced tech-modes for mediation, can illuminate those inherent questions first posed by the Lumière Brothers so long ago, back when the media landscape was still young. Back before the architecture of development reshaped that innocent and enthralling landscape into the sprawl of solipsistic devices we now use (or are they are they using us) every day of our increasingly solitary lives.
Meanwhile Rebecca Sheehan – an Associate Professor of Cinema Arts at California State University, Fullerton who did postgraduate work at the University of Pennsylvania before taking a teaching post at the Harvard Film Archive while researching and writing American Avant-Garde Cinema’s Philosophy of the In-Between – takes quite a different route to pondering what it is we’re actually doing while watching movies. Her trajectory is decidedly even more heady, perhaps, following an academic’s map of the intersection points between philosophy and cinema, but it’s a cartography solidly grounded in the allure of cinematic magic and its potential meaning in our lives. As long as we’re willing to think deeply about what we’re experiencing in the brilliant darkness where dreams unfold between ourselves and the screen, and to consider carefully the possibility of what she calls "the ethics of perception." Whereas Casetti takes an often avant-garde approach to appreciating the sensory domain of mediation, Sheehan’s is definitively focused on cinema which is already well established within the pantheon of avant-garde art. You don’t need to be a specialist to enjoy her thoroughly well written exploration, and you don’t need to appreciate or even like so-called experimental films (or, as one film-artist friend of mine prefers to call them, experiential).
But it does help if you have the patience to go along for her ride into uncharted territory, once called terra incognita, even if that might mean keeping a notebook handy to jot down the forest of artists, filmmakers, philosophers and psychologists that she points out on the way. Especially if you’re intrigued by the optical unconscious that films help us to uncover in ourselves and are persistent enough in your own wonderment at how and why certain films so subtly operate surgically on our psyches while we’re still awake enough to realize that we’re dreaming. Far be it from me to complain about an author’s title but it might also help readership otherwise slightly daunted by the heavy-duty armature of her fascinating thesis if it were more handily titled Cinema and the In-Between. This might have aligned it, with even more synchronistic charm, with Casetti’s pet obsession with the membrane-screen between image and spectator, but nonetheless the alignment is there in spades, with Sheehan’s leviathan subject, whether films can ‘do philosophy’ being a compelling issue even for non-philosophers and non-filmmakers, not to mention non-academics. Be that as it may, hers is a marvelous excursion across a rugged terrain of artists inspired to bypass the entertainment milieu, or even photographic basis of cinema altogether, to make of cinema something more akin to painting or music perhaps. Yet such films still do still tell us stories, albeit in an arcane and experiential mode of image delivery, one that examines how films can be visual texts for the contemplation of meaning: these are films that meditate on the meaning of mediation itself, the very root mechanisms of cinematic craftsmanship.
In other words, they are films about films, saturated in self-reflexivity, and soaked in the philosophical or ethical claims that some films seem capable of making about the world beyond cinema. One of the best examples, possibly the penultimate example of avant-garde cinema under consideration, is Mothlight, a groundbreaking and mind-bending work from 1963 by American film artist Stan Brakhage. In this seminal cinematic experiment, Brakhage projected semi-transparent insect wings, veiny leaf fragments and plant stems glued straight transparent tape and then printed onto film footage in order to illustrate “what a moth would see from day to night if white were black and black were white.” From its hand-painted titles to its haptic single-image montage sequences, he is showing us not individual frames that flicker past and manifest an illusion of movement and narrative twenty-four times a second, as in conventional ‘movies’, but rather a singular image-duration extended through time and space to quite literally share nature’s already existing temporal narrative of appearance, growth, decay and disappearance. By so doing he also not merely challenges but also radically embodies the means of cinema as a medium transacting exchanges directly related to the politics of perception. He also stylistically shares a sensibility with a film called Fly from 1970 by conceptual artist Yoko Ono, whose camera followed a group of sedated flies sauntering across the landscape of a nude model’s torso.
Both these film artists, and a host of others exploring that same experiential field of visual interests, exemplified a cogent observation by Ono that although art is a beautiful thing, yes, true enough, it is not just about creating something beautiful; that everything is already created in the world and since nature already created everything we don’t necessarily have to anymore; that art today is more about re-evaluating what is already here. Thus the art produced by so many avant-garde artists, and perhaps especially in the case of filmmakers whose work is about filmmaking, not storytelling, is much more enthralled by the actual process of creating and making than the end cultural products being made, or those manufactured for a consumer-oriented industry. Such filmmakers, and Hollis Frampton comes immediately to mind as a major figure who first switched on the conceptual lights for the Ph.D. thesis of a young Rebecca Sheehan, are much more aligned with the daring visual exploits of painters such as Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt than with any conventional narrative movies, even the very splendid ones like those made by Fellini, Kubrick, Tarkovsky or Bergman.
This is so in the same way that avant-films have more in common with the challenging music of Arnold Schoenberg, Conlon Nancarrow, John Cage, or Steve Reich, all of whose works are inherently about listening itself, just as avant-film artists make works about looking. Also, of course, about thinking about looking. And in her book examining the seductively liminal and illusory threshold in-between space where films prove that they can ‘do philosophy’, sometimes even more effectively than philosophy itself can manage (probably owing to the obvious vagaries of language which so bewitched Ludwig Wittgenstein), Sheehan clearly identifies the primary impulses operating in films which analyze existential puzzles much more than merely telling us captivating stories about various human behaviours, thus returning film to its two main epistemological objects of study: moving pictures and human existence.
This phenomenon, or lack of one, is superbly rectified by Sheehan in her marvelous book, which is all about the marvels of cinema and its ability to ponder the meaning of life. Her accomplished assessment of the work of multiple in-betweens (primarily the zone straddling philosophy and cinema) is astutely celebrated in films by such masters as Phil Solomon’s “nomadic resistance to clarity”; Jonas Mekas’s “ethical aesthetics of the everyday”; Ernie Gehr’s “fragmentary landscapes”; and the beloved Canadian experimenter Michael Snow’s “skeptical use of space and fractal in-betweens.” The core question posed by her book – can films do philosophy rather than simply represent philosophical ideas developed outside of the cinematic medium? – is answered with a resounding “Yes!” in the most elegant way imaginable. It is therefore, for me, the ideal companion volume to Casetti’s Screening Fears, in which he similarly addresses ideas about those psychic/optical in-betweens (primarily the zone straddling psychology and cinema) and resolutely confronts the fetish quality of our watching, in solipsistic safety, those relentlessly shifting digital-screenscapes we have inherited from the historical phantasmagoria, along with all the easily overlooked dangers of its addictive images.
– Donald Brackett is a Vancouver-based popular culture journalist and curator who writes about music, art and films. He has been the Executive Director of both the Professional Art Dealers Association of Canada and The Ontario Association of Art Galleries. He is the author of the recent book Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece (Backbeat Books, 2016). In addition to numerous essays, articles and radio broadcasts, he is also the author of two books on creative collaboration in pop music: Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos, 2007, and Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter, 2008, as well as the biographies Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, 2018, and Tumult!: The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner, 2020, and a book on the life and art of the enigmatic Yoko Ono, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life, released in April 2022. His latest work is a book on family relative Charles Brackett's films made with his partner Billy Wilder, Double Solitaire: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, published in January 2024.
--Federico Fellini
Culture critic Walter Benjamin once remarked that the invention of the camera introduced us to unconscious optics, just as Freud’s invention of psychoanalysis did for unconscious impulses, and he knew whereof he spoke. That insight reveals the same prescience that Freud’s chief acolyte and primary competitor Carl Jung also sensed, in a somewhat more refined and spiritual manner: that cinema is the artful language of dreams we speak while we’re still awake. Two insightful books, American Avant-Garde Cinema’s Philosophy of the In-Between by Rebecca Sheehan and Screening Fears: On Protective Media by Francesco Casetti, share an equally insightful exploration of the archetypal and collective mythologies that define classic cinema regardless of its genre. Looking at films through a psychological lens provides us with a valuable map and a discursive language which we can use to orient ourselves within the imaginal landscape of the motion picture art form. These two books, with a kind of cogent synchronicity, also definitely offer a deep dive into cinema as the quintessential art form of the 20th century. They deftly penetrate our shared psychic myths as revealed through the language of films and thus help us to more deeply understand our own hopes and fears while doing so, and as such they supply a kind of primal screen therapy which assists the audience in conversing with our own optical unconscious.
I mention this other Jungian term, synchronicity, a.k.a. meaningful coincidence, due to its nearly perpetual occurrence in my reading life when I encounter, as I so often do, two different books coming to me from different directions and taking often drastically different approaches in exploring singularly shared ideas. And so it is with these two tomes, both of which, while not exactly being overtly academic, are somewhat heady in their intended subject and theme: the liminal or threshold space, a position at or on both sides of a boundary as a transitional stage of a process or condition. While occasional ponderous in tone, they are still easily accessible to any ardent lover of films, especially those that seek to do more than merely entertain or divert (although there’s nothing at all wrong with superbly entertaining movies) and are well worth the effort of concentration occasionally required in order to plumb their depths, or heights. Basically that liminal zone is the very existence of a mediated screen, both as a protective layer or meaning-membrane and also as a void into which we must willingly plunge if we are to access the beauty of a great work of cinema art, whether it be by Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa or Ingmar Bergman, or whoever your favourite director might be. This is so because it’s the actual act of watching that is magical in itself, a priori of the stylistic content per se.
The psychology of viewing, whether Chaplin’s Modern Times of 1936, or Lynch’s Blue Velvet of 1986, is the true object under examination here, with Casetti’s notion of what he calls “protective media” being the ideal point of departure. Casetti is the Sterling Professor of Humanities and Film and Media Studies at Yale University and serves as something of a pathfinder in considering the philosophy of cinema. His groundbreaking earlier books -- Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and its Spectator, Eye of the Century: Film Experience Modernity and especially The Lumiere Galaxy: Seven Key Words for Cinema to Come – are notable landmarks leading to his latest achievement, Screening Fears. Only Jacques Ranciere (The Future of the Image, 2007; The Emancipated Spectator, 2008) has examined the intimate relations between image and spectator quite so deeply. And apart from Casetti’s amazing suggestion that the French Lumière Brothers (who devised the first motion picture camera and projector, the Cinematographe, from which cinema takes its name) were well aware in the very first ever motion picture of workers leaving their factory in 1895 that their gaze at the camera was being aimed at beings who were watching them from 130 years in the future, his notion of the ironic dream sanctuary of the protective movie theatre in Screening Fears is even more startling.
In this case, the provocative idea being explored is an alluring assertion based on his insight that instead of being protheses that expand and extend our perceptions, as per McLuhan, screen-based media are instead apparatuses that shelter us from over-exposure to the real (i.e., unmediated) world. Cinema’s primary function, or one of them, is that of an enclosure protecting us from real or imagined threats that surround us more constantly on a daily basis. Casetti brings us on a guided tour of the historical origins of theatrical environments starting with the phantasmagoria of the 18th century, through the communal interior space of the movie theatre from mid-19th to mid-20th centuries, and finally to the solitary digital screen milieu of the present. Along the way he identifies the protective “bubbles” that help us disconnect from our immediate surroundings. But what if, rather than providing a protective immunity and invulnerability by trying to keep reality at bay or somehow under control, they ensnare us in an isolation zone that is far more dangerous than the initial dangers they were designed to shield us from? The digital world, as many of us have begun to suspect, is far more of a suffocating enclosure than the original phantasmagorias, dream-like movie palaces, or television equipment with which it has inevitably competed and perhaps over which now has triumphed, and Casetti asks us to reconsider our assumptions about how what once was a safety zone has instead become a new danger zone, from which we extract ourselves only with the of greatest withdrawal challenges.
If a projection took place without a screen, onto empty space, where would it end up? The materialization of images is frightening. Cinema is not just a movie; it is an optical-spatial dispositif that couples two fundamental elements --an enclosed space separated from the everyday world, and a screen whose moving images reestablish contact with the reality from which spectators have been severed, or to which they never had access. Conveyed by a powerful beam of light, images acquire unusual intensity and strength. The consequence is that what was lost (direct sight) is given back with interest.
Casetti has spent a large portion of his life as a film scholar investigating the optics of viewing itself, as an organism, even almost a sentient being, by studying the connections between the spectator and the cinematic experience we undergo as well as the cultural relevance of this primary mode of both entertainment and edification. He continues his excellent work here by further exploring the persistence of cinema in the face of perpetual technological change and stylistic evolution via his close reading of postmodern digital screen-based media and the unique optical experiences they provoke within what he calls “the processes of mediation.” His recent tome reminds us once again that only a comprehensive genealogy of the screen as a dispositif, as it undergoes the permutations of advanced tech-modes for mediation, can illuminate those inherent questions first posed by the Lumière Brothers so long ago, back when the media landscape was still young. Back before the architecture of development reshaped that innocent and enthralling landscape into the sprawl of solipsistic devices we now use (or are they are they using us) every day of our increasingly solitary lives.
Meanwhile Rebecca Sheehan – an Associate Professor of Cinema Arts at California State University, Fullerton who did postgraduate work at the University of Pennsylvania before taking a teaching post at the Harvard Film Archive while researching and writing American Avant-Garde Cinema’s Philosophy of the In-Between – takes quite a different route to pondering what it is we’re actually doing while watching movies. Her trajectory is decidedly even more heady, perhaps, following an academic’s map of the intersection points between philosophy and cinema, but it’s a cartography solidly grounded in the allure of cinematic magic and its potential meaning in our lives. As long as we’re willing to think deeply about what we’re experiencing in the brilliant darkness where dreams unfold between ourselves and the screen, and to consider carefully the possibility of what she calls "the ethics of perception." Whereas Casetti takes an often avant-garde approach to appreciating the sensory domain of mediation, Sheehan’s is definitively focused on cinema which is already well established within the pantheon of avant-garde art. You don’t need to be a specialist to enjoy her thoroughly well written exploration, and you don’t need to appreciate or even like so-called experimental films (or, as one film-artist friend of mine prefers to call them, experiential).
But it does help if you have the patience to go along for her ride into uncharted territory, once called terra incognita, even if that might mean keeping a notebook handy to jot down the forest of artists, filmmakers, philosophers and psychologists that she points out on the way. Especially if you’re intrigued by the optical unconscious that films help us to uncover in ourselves and are persistent enough in your own wonderment at how and why certain films so subtly operate surgically on our psyches while we’re still awake enough to realize that we’re dreaming. Far be it from me to complain about an author’s title but it might also help readership otherwise slightly daunted by the heavy-duty armature of her fascinating thesis if it were more handily titled Cinema and the In-Between. This might have aligned it, with even more synchronistic charm, with Casetti’s pet obsession with the membrane-screen between image and spectator, but nonetheless the alignment is there in spades, with Sheehan’s leviathan subject, whether films can ‘do philosophy’ being a compelling issue even for non-philosophers and non-filmmakers, not to mention non-academics. Be that as it may, hers is a marvelous excursion across a rugged terrain of artists inspired to bypass the entertainment milieu, or even photographic basis of cinema altogether, to make of cinema something more akin to painting or music perhaps. Yet such films still do still tell us stories, albeit in an arcane and experiential mode of image delivery, one that examines how films can be visual texts for the contemplation of meaning: these are films that meditate on the meaning of mediation itself, the very root mechanisms of cinematic craftsmanship.
 |
| Mothlight, Stan Brakhage, 1963. |
 |
| Mothlight, Stan Breakage, 1963. |
In other words, they are films about films, saturated in self-reflexivity, and soaked in the philosophical or ethical claims that some films seem capable of making about the world beyond cinema. One of the best examples, possibly the penultimate example of avant-garde cinema under consideration, is Mothlight, a groundbreaking and mind-bending work from 1963 by American film artist Stan Brakhage. In this seminal cinematic experiment, Brakhage projected semi-transparent insect wings, veiny leaf fragments and plant stems glued straight transparent tape and then printed onto film footage in order to illustrate “what a moth would see from day to night if white were black and black were white.” From its hand-painted titles to its haptic single-image montage sequences, he is showing us not individual frames that flicker past and manifest an illusion of movement and narrative twenty-four times a second, as in conventional ‘movies’, but rather a singular image-duration extended through time and space to quite literally share nature’s already existing temporal narrative of appearance, growth, decay and disappearance. By so doing he also not merely challenges but also radically embodies the means of cinema as a medium transacting exchanges directly related to the politics of perception. He also stylistically shares a sensibility with a film called Fly from 1970 by conceptual artist Yoko Ono, whose camera followed a group of sedated flies sauntering across the landscape of a nude model’s torso.
 |
| Fly, Yoko Ono, 1970. |
Both these film artists, and a host of others exploring that same experiential field of visual interests, exemplified a cogent observation by Ono that although art is a beautiful thing, yes, true enough, it is not just about creating something beautiful; that everything is already created in the world and since nature already created everything we don’t necessarily have to anymore; that art today is more about re-evaluating what is already here. Thus the art produced by so many avant-garde artists, and perhaps especially in the case of filmmakers whose work is about filmmaking, not storytelling, is much more enthralled by the actual process of creating and making than the end cultural products being made, or those manufactured for a consumer-oriented industry. Such filmmakers, and Hollis Frampton comes immediately to mind as a major figure who first switched on the conceptual lights for the Ph.D. thesis of a young Rebecca Sheehan, are much more aligned with the daring visual exploits of painters such as Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt than with any conventional narrative movies, even the very splendid ones like those made by Fellini, Kubrick, Tarkovsky or Bergman.
This is so in the same way that avant-films have more in common with the challenging music of Arnold Schoenberg, Conlon Nancarrow, John Cage, or Steve Reich, all of whose works are inherently about listening itself, just as avant-film artists make works about looking. Also, of course, about thinking about looking. And in her book examining the seductively liminal and illusory threshold in-between space where films prove that they can ‘do philosophy’, sometimes even more effectively than philosophy itself can manage (probably owing to the obvious vagaries of language which so bewitched Ludwig Wittgenstein), Sheehan clearly identifies the primary impulses operating in films which analyze existential puzzles much more than merely telling us captivating stories about various human behaviours, thus returning film to its two main epistemological objects of study: moving pictures and human existence.
Philosophizing films? How much more epistemological can you get than staging an encounter with the film strip itself? Much of American avant-garde cinema locates meaning as a perpetually transformed and transformative objective. It refuses to content itself with empiricism’s scientific logic. The extent to which filmmakers, from Stan Brakhage to Ken Jacobs, Maya Deren to Pat O’Neill, conceive of cinema as an experience made contingently and renewed continually transforms their self-reflexive commitments into ethical calls for re-evaluation—the same kind we find in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s notion of finding meaning not out there, but here, in what he calls “materials strewn along the ground.” Despite their explicit concern with utilizing cinema to advance conceptual thought, the films of the American avant-garde have been granted very little attention by film scholars such as Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell, perhaps because they were drawn more to European art house and Hollywood filmmaking when it came to cinema’s philosophical prowess.
This phenomenon, or lack of one, is superbly rectified by Sheehan in her marvelous book, which is all about the marvels of cinema and its ability to ponder the meaning of life. Her accomplished assessment of the work of multiple in-betweens (primarily the zone straddling philosophy and cinema) is astutely celebrated in films by such masters as Phil Solomon’s “nomadic resistance to clarity”; Jonas Mekas’s “ethical aesthetics of the everyday”; Ernie Gehr’s “fragmentary landscapes”; and the beloved Canadian experimenter Michael Snow’s “skeptical use of space and fractal in-betweens.” The core question posed by her book – can films do philosophy rather than simply represent philosophical ideas developed outside of the cinematic medium? – is answered with a resounding “Yes!” in the most elegant way imaginable. It is therefore, for me, the ideal companion volume to Casetti’s Screening Fears, in which he similarly addresses ideas about those psychic/optical in-betweens (primarily the zone straddling psychology and cinema) and resolutely confronts the fetish quality of our watching, in solipsistic safety, those relentlessly shifting digital-screenscapes we have inherited from the historical phantasmagoria, along with all the easily overlooked dangers of its addictive images.
– Donald Brackett is a Vancouver-based popular culture journalist and curator who writes about music, art and films. He has been the Executive Director of both the Professional Art Dealers Association of Canada and The Ontario Association of Art Galleries. He is the author of the recent book Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece (Backbeat Books, 2016). In addition to numerous essays, articles and radio broadcasts, he is also the author of two books on creative collaboration in pop music: Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos, 2007, and Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter, 2008, as well as the biographies Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, 2018, and Tumult!: The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner, 2020, and a book on the life and art of the enigmatic Yoko Ono, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life, released in April 2022. His latest work is a book on family relative Charles Brackett's films made with his partner Billy Wilder, Double Solitaire: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, published in January 2024.
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