This book provides philosophical insight into the nature of reality by reflecting on its ontological qualities through the medium of film. The main question is whether we have access to reality through film that is not based on visual representation or narration: Is film—in spite of its immateriality—a way to directly grasp and reproduce reality? Why do we perceive film as “real” at all? What does it mean to define its own reproducibility as an ontological feature of reality? And what does film as a medium exactly show? The contributions in this book provide, from a cinematic perspective, diverse philosophical analyses to the understanding of the challenging concept of “the real of reality”.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Introduction   Christine Reeh-Peters, Stefan W. Schmidt and Peter Weibel PART 1 The Rise of the Real 1 The Real in Film The Historical Real, the Optical Real, and the Material Real   Hyun Kang Kim 2 The Being of Film   Christine Reeh-Peters 3 What It Means to Imagine Imagination  The Derrida–Searle Debate and the Poetic Ontology of Film   Philip Freytag 4 Emerging Imaginations  The Relation of Film and Reality from a Literary Perspective   Karin Janker 5 Animated Visions of Reality  The Real as Experimental Aesthetic in Anca Damian’s Animated Documentaries   Zsolt Gyenge 6 Pasolini’s Pan-semiology or Reality as Code   Peter Weibel PART 2 Experiencing the Real 7 The Cinematographic Experience  Thinking Cinema through the Philosophy of E. Husserl   Hanna Trindade 8 Reality Narrated through time  Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror   Stefan W. Schmidt 9 Time and Film   Maria-Teresa Teixeira 10 Mapping Film-World Relations to Reality  A New Conceptual Cartography   Atėnė Mendelytė 11 The Crisis of the Time-Image Montage in Postmodern Times   Martin Stefanov 12 Think Future Cinema—with Photofilm as Its Basis   Gusztáv Hámos PART 3 The Real Unsettling 13 The Bird’s Eye View—Ornithology and Ontology in Hitchcock’s The Birds   Markus Gabriel 14 A Rough Sketch on the Real of Terrorism—Thoughts on Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy   Ringo Rösener 15 Justifying a Philosophical Claim  The Act of Killing and the Banality of Evil   Thomas E. Wartenberg 16 Jauja and Meek’s Cutoff  The Parallel American Ways of Rethinking Gilbert Simondon’s Role of Aesthetics in the Configuration of Humanity   Román Domínguez Jiménez 17 Maya Deren’s Claim for the “Ritualistic” Film or Fusing the Sacred and the Profane for the Sake of the Real   Patricia Feise-Mahnkopp