For Alain Badiou, films think, and it is the task of the philosopher to transcribe that thinking. What is the subject to which the film gives expressive form? This is the question that lies at the heart of Badiou’s account of cinema. He contends that cinema is an art form that bears witness to the Other and renders human presence visible, thus testifying to the universal value of human existence and human freedom. Through the experience of viewing, the movement of thought that constitutes the film is passed on to the viewer, who thereby encounters an aspect of the world and its exaltation and vitality as well as its difficulty and complexity. Cinema is an impure art cannibalizing its times, the other arts, and people – a major art precisely because it is the locus of the indiscernibility between art and non-art. It is this, argues Badiou, that makes cinema the social and political art par excellence, the best indicator of our civilization, in the way that Greek tragedy, the coming-of-age novel and the operetta were in their respective eras.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments viii Foreword ix 1 "Cinema Has Given Me So Much" 1 2 Cinematic Culture 21 3 Revisionist Cinema 34 4 Art and its Criticism 40 5 The Suicide of Grace: Le Diable probablement 48 6 A Man Who Never Gives In 50 7 Is the Orient an Object for the Western Conscience? 54 8 Reference Points for Cinema's Second Modernity 58 9 The Demy Affair 64 10 Switzerland: Cinema as Interpretation 67 11 Interrupted Notes on the French Comedy Film 72 12 Y a tellement de pays pour aller 77 13 Restoring Meaning to Death and Chance 82 14 A Private Industry, Cinema is also a Private Spectacle 86 15 The False Movements of Cinema 88 16 Can a Film Be Spoken About? 94 17 Notes on The Last Laugh 100 18 "Thinking the Emergence of the Event" 105 19 The Divine Comedy and The Convent 129 20 Surplus Seeing: Histoire(s) du cinéma 132 21 Considerations on the Current State of Cinema 138 22 The Cinematic Capture of the Sexes 151 23 An Unqualified Affirmation of Cinema's Enduring Power 162 24 Passion, Jean-Luc Godard 166 25 "Say Yes to Love, or Else be Lonely": Magnolia 176 26 Dialectics of the Fable: The Matrix 193 27 Cinema as Philosophical Experimentation 202 28 On Cinema as a Democratic Emblem 233 29 The End of a Beginning: Tout va bien 242 30 The Dimensions of Art: Forgiveness 252 31 The Perfection of the World, Improbable yet Possible 258 Notes 261