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15. One could, I suppose, argue that Jesus – the protagonist of a number of films from Hollywood and elsewhere – was a philosopher. But his thought is not usually a central feature of these films. ) Scorsese’s 1988 The Last Temptation of Christ may be an honourable exception here. 16. McKenna (2002), (accessed on-line 28/7/04). 17. Hence perhaps the novelty of Descartes’ first-person narrative of the Meditations or Hume’s occasional importation of himself into his Treatise (‘when I enter most intimately into what I call my self…’).

Lm(s) as actually doing philosophical work, rather than merely illustrating philosophical theses. If this book succeeds, then, it will succeed among other things in showing that diverse films can be/do philosophy. But why should it be thought that such a task uniquely has to do with Wittgenstein and Cavell? Is it because these two philosophers have a powerful film theory which can reach films – or aspects of those films – beyond the grasp of ‘Psychoanalytical theory’ or ‘Cognitive theory’? 1 It is a striking feature of the essays in this collection, especially evident perhaps in the essay by Critchley, that they do not attempt to apply any film theory, not even an allegedly ‘Wittgensteinian’ one, to the films they discuss.

At times, he is trying to produce order in his own thoughts, to get things clear to himself. But at other times X tries to order the world, to get the events outside of himself to match his mental picture of them. In the most notorious instance of this, what appears cinematically to be leading towards a depiction of X’s rape of A is headed off by a burst of ecstatic music and images while X’s voiceover denies almost hysterically what is being implied. (‘Non, non, non! … Ce n’était pas de force….