Abstract
Thinking in the Dark (Pomerance and Palmer 2015), the excellent new anthology edited by Murray Pomerance and B. Barton Palmer, is a collection of lucid essays, each about a thinker whose theory of film the writer finds particularly enlightening. It is striking, though, that virtually every one of these thinkers is or was an outsider to academic film study. The field of film study, when it searches for theoretical insights, continues to look past its own members, including more than a few powerful thinkers whose achievements as theorists are rarely acknowledged. Indeed, a number of the writers who contributed essays to Thinking in the Dark are worthy of inclusion as theorists in their own right. I'm not thinking only of myself, but I am thinking of myself. After all, during the Film Philosophy workshop at the 2016 SCMS Conference, my friend David Rodowick called me “the John the Baptist of film philosophy.” I trust that he didn't have in mind the ending to the Biblical story, but simply the fact that I began thinking philosophically about film — about the ways films think philosophically — before there was a field or subfield that could be called “film philosophy.” I've perhaps earned the right, while I still have my head, to recount, however sketchily, my half- century of writing film criticism that is also philosophy.It was in the late 1960s when I began writing the dissertation I was finally to submit to the Harvard Philosophy Department in 1973. It consisted of three interrelated essays: “A Theory of Artistic Expression,” “Toward a Theory of Narrative Film,” and “An Analytical Description of the Film Notorious”(Rothman 1973). That year, I began teaching in the NYU Cinema Studies Department, cutting my ties with academic philosophy and casting my lot with a field that was just starting — when will it finish? — to establish a legitimate place within American universities. In the decades since, I have sometimes felt that I was, like John the Baptist, “crying in the wilderness.” But that's as far as the parallel goes.