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List of contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Meditations on Externality: Thinking Outside the Screen
Chapter 1: The Eternal Flickering of the Film-Philosophies Quarrel
Chapter 2: Offscreen Cinema: the Aesthetics of the Non-Cinematic
Chapter 3: This is Not a Film You are Watching: The Visceral-Conceptual Response
Chapter 4: A Magical Mystical Tour into the Romanian Cinematic Mind
Epilogue: Rear-view Glances into the Post-Metaphysical Cinema
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Doru Pop is a film and media professor at Babes-Bolyai University, Romania.
Summary
This volume explores the philosophical and metaphysical manifestations of contemporary cinema. Starting with the hypothesis that movies provide an experience that is both a pathway into the thinking mechanisms of modern humans and into our collective psyche, this study focuses on the elements that form the “Romanian cinematic mind” as part of the European cinema-thinking.
While this book is based on specific case studies provided by recent productions in Romanian filmmaking, such as Proroca (2017) and Touch me Not (2018), it also contextualises the national cinema within the larger, European art of making movies. Offering close interpretations of the works of world-renowned directors like Cristi Puiu, Cristian Mungiu, Corneliu Porumboiu or more recently Adina Pintilie and Constantin Popescu, this book questions the “Romanianess” of their cinematic techniques, and places their philosophical roots both in a particular mode of thinking and within continental philosophy.
Foreword
An in-depth analysis of contemporary cinematic practices in European cinema-thinking, with a focus on Romanian filmmaking.
Additional text
Doru Pop's book is subtle, astute, and precise, revealing how the cinematic and the metaphysical rely on the non-cinematic and the post-cinematic and the post-metaphysical to facilitate deep thinking and understanding. Pop offers a generous overview of the main questions and points of debate about how movies facilitate thinking. He not only sharpens the existing theoretical and conceptual toolbox in film studies about the epistemic functions of cinema, but also reveals Romanian New Wave films as inexhausted objects for theorizing and criticism.
