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Nonetheless, much discussion of the power of film seeks to explain its power in terms of something unique to the cinema. Perhaps films have a powerful hold over us because they are realistic in a way that other art forms are not. A painting is artificial no matter how realistic a representation it offers, because it is still; it represents a frozen moment, but we don’t experience the world as a succession of frozen moments. It is not possible for a painting not to be artificial in this way. A film, however, depicts a world in what seems like a fundamentally more realistic mode.

Can philosophy change, or has philosophy changed, the nature of film? Can philosophy do film? What are the strongest objections to the claim that it can? The bold thesis claims that a film’s contribution to philosophy, if genuine, must be irreplaceable by or irreducible to any other forms of communication. What is the significance and plausibility of the thesis? ” Are such films suitable for philosophical inquiry? If so, how; if not, why not? “Emotions influence belief, as do desires. This is a fact that cinema often exploits, and one that largely accounts for its ability to engage an audience.

The paradox of fiction can be formulated as follows. 1 2 Emotion requires belief in the reality of its object. When watching a film or reading a book we are aware that the characters do not really exist (except as fictions) and the situations are not really occurring. Philosophy and Film Spectatorship 35 3 Nevertheless, we feel emotion, often strong emotion, when reading a book or watching a movie. Murray Smith (1995a: 56) says: The problem, as Radford (1975; 1977) sees it, “is that people can be moved by fictional suffering given their brute behaviour in other contexts where belief in the reality of the suffering described or witnessed is necessary for the response” (Radford 1975: 72).