The surfaces of film-philosophy

Abstract

Within Film Studies and Philosophy accounts of superficiality and cinema are few and far between. If there is any talk of it at all, more often than not, it is decidedly hostile. A similar sense of skepticism is reserved for superficiality's conceptual relatives: hollowness, depthlessness, slightness, slimness, thinness and, of course, flatness. A superficial reading is one that pays little attention to detail. A slight film is a film without weight. A thin story lacks substance, or worse, conviction, a tale that could not withstand the most cursory analysis. “Flat” is another word for dull. Similarly, in critical theory depthlessness has lately become a byword for a lack of historicity and affect; while shallowness has long been associated with inauthenticity. Indeed, even those scholars who appear to be appreciative of surfaces, foremost among them Gilles Deleuze, turn critical when it concerns the cinematic apparatus: the single, isolated plane is a prison where time is “caught” (2005, p. 105). [...]