Kirjahaku

Unbecoming Cinema explores the notion of cinema as a living, active agent, capable of unsettling and reconfiguring a person’s thoughts, senses, and ethics. Film, according to David H. Fleming, is a dynamic force, arming audiences with the ability to see and make a difference in the world. Drawing heavily on Deleuze’s philosophical insights, as well as those of Guattari and Badiou, the book critically examines unsettling and taboo footage, from suicide documentaries to art therapy films, from portrayals of mental health and autism to torture porn. In investigating the effect of film on the mind and body, Fleming’s shrewd analysis unites transgressive cinema with metaphysical concepts of the body and mind. A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via the OAPEN Library platform, Unbecoming Cinema. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License and is part of Knowledge Unlatched.

Cinematically Rendering Confucius marks the first book-length enquiry into China’s first two big screen treatments of arguably the best-known and most influential thinker in world history: Confucius. By interweaving methods drawn from Film Studies, Comparative Philosophy, and Media Archaeology in response to broader calls to deepen and thicken the scope and purview of film philosophical enquiry, this trailblazing book grounds Fei Mu’s 1940 patriotic art film Kong Fuzi and Hu Mei's 2010 “Huallywood” blockbuster Kongzi as pre- and postsocialist examples of Chinese politico-philosophical filmmaking that straddle the PRC’s revolutionary Marxist socio-political experiment. After exploring the geopolitics surrounding why Confucius has been historically included and excluded from the European classification of “philosopher” and addressing the difficulties that entering into “Chinese Thought” presents to non-natives, the book’s first half undertakes a deep dive into the history of (re)mediating the Confucian image-imagination. Arguing that Confucius might be a form of film philosopher avant la lettre, we thereafter explore repetitions and differences surrounding the ever-changing treatment and representation of Confucius on-screen—concluding with a look at the latest AI-infused theory-film When Marx Met Confucius (2023).