Cinema has long compelled moral responses, on both the Left and the Right. The latter is easier to identify in acts of censorship from religious organizations, or the Production Code Administration in Hollywood’s early years. And on the Left, radical political film theory has long condemned the image as a form of alienation, a wrong to be righted; righted, moreover, with calls for and celebrations of images that are crafted expressly to deny sensation and thus, somehow, alienation. This is not the task of moral philosophy, or simply, moral reflection. Rather, in this workshop we will consider morality as way of understanding the increased sensitization to difference as difference; difference not as something to be de-emphasized for the sake of categorical belonging, which is a form of moralism, but as what a moral response worthy of name seeks to protect. We will also consider how the discourse on the image from opposite sides of the political spectrum nevertheless observes the same logic.

Having surveyed the moralistic and technocratic tendencies in the history of film theory, we will consider the implications of a very simple proposal. Namely, that one watches films for the same reasons one typically reads moral philosophy or seeks answers to ethical conundrums: to make sense of the otherness of others, to honor it; to consider how it is that we might act in a way that opposes what we otherwise believe ourselves to value; to reflect on how empathy can shade quickly into forms of narcissistic projection; to discover places and ways of beings that we are unfamiliar with, such that  might begin to reflect on what is required of us to begin knowing something about that place and way, and so on. What such an approach demands of us, among other things, is that we give up our aesthetic categories, which are organized always by a moralistic logic of absolute inclusion or exclusion, and become instead better readers of images and form as something inimitable, despite whatever a film comes to share imperfectly with other images, other forms. One way of understanding the link between aesthetics and moral philosophy, or morality as increased sensitization, then, is to consider, as we will, the relation between the singular and the general.

Readings

Emilie Hache and Bruno Latour, “Morality or Moralism? An Exercise in Sensitization,” trans.    Patrick Camiller, Common Knowledge 16, no. 2 (2010): 311-330.

Brian Price, “Moral Philosophy and the Moving Image,” in The Oxford Handbook of Film Theory,           ed. Kyle Stevens (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), pp. 57-77.

Brian Price, “Why Moral Philosophy?” In Media Res, 2023:             https://mediacommons.org/imr/content/why-moral-philosophy

Brian Price is Professor of Cinema and Visual Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the author of two books, A Theory of Regret (Duke University Press, 2017) and Neither God nor Master: Robert Bresson and Radical Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 2011). He is also a founding co-editor of the journal, World Picture and series editor for Superimpositions: Philosophy and the Moving Image (Northwestern University Press).