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Murray Smith presents an original approach to understanding film. He brings the arts, humanities, and sciences together to illuminate artistic creation and aesthetic experience. His 'third culture' approach roots itself in an appreciation of scientific innovation and how this has shaped the moving media.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Part I - Building the Third Culture
- 1: Aesthetics Naturalized
- 2: Triangulating Aesthetic Experience
- 3: The Engine of Reason and the Pit of Naturalism
- 4: Papaya, Pomegranates, and Green Tea
- Part II - Science and Sentiment
- 5: Who's Afraid of Charles Darwin?
- 6: What Difference Does it Make?
- 7: Empathy, Expansionism, and the Extended Mind
- 8: Feeling Prufish
- Conclusion: The Art and Science of Emotion
About the author
Murray Smith is Professor of Film and co-director of the Aesthetics Research Centre at the University of Kent, and a Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellow at Princeton University's Center for Human Values for 201718. He was President of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image from 201417. He has published widely on film, art, and aesthetics. In addition to the recent Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film (Oxford, 2017), his publications include Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Clarendon); Trainspotting (BFI); Film Theory and Philosophy (co-edited with Richard Allen) (Clarendon); Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (co-edited with Steve Neale) (Routledge); and Thinking through Cinema (co-edited with Tom Wartenberg) (Blackwell).
Summary
Murray Smith presents an original approach to understanding film. He brings the arts, humanities, and sciences together to illuminate artistic creation and aesthetic experience. His 'third culture' approach roots itself in an appreciation of scientific innovation and how this has shaped the moving media.
Additional text
Smith's writing demonstrates considerable skill in its integration of informed scientific explanation, philosophical review, and application of a wide range of film examples — from classical and contemorary Hollywood as well as from European and Asian art cinema — with surprisingly productive comparisons such as between Ozu Yasujiro's The Flavour of Green Tea over Rice (1952) and the works of Stan Brakhage. I cannot tell film theorists what to read, and even if could, why would they listen to a philosopher? But I want film theorists to pick up this book because it offers them new and rich resources for reflecting on their practices and has just the right tone to solicit the reader's collaboration. Film, Art, and the Third Culture initiates a dialogue between natural scientists, philosophers, and film theorists, one that I very much hope will continue.
