European Cinema and Continental Philosophy: Film as Thought Experiment, by Thomas Elsaesser

Abstract

Thomas Elsaesser’s recent scholarship has examined the “mind-game film”, a phenomenon in Hollywood that is broadly characterised by multi-platform storytelling, paratextual narrative feedback loops (“Cinema” 8), nonlinear storytelling, and unreliable character perspectives (Littschwager 21). While “mind-game” or “puzzle” films have become a contentious subject amongst post-cinema scholars concerned with Hollywood storytelling, what is to be said of contemporary European independent cinema? Elsaesser’s timely publication, European Cinema and Continental Philosophy, examines an amalgam of politically inclined European auteurs to resolve this query. Elsaesser concedes that there exists a phenomenological confluence between the mind-game film and contemporary European cinema. For instance, both produce characters afflicted by productive pathologies, designating new socially useful forms of agency and identity.

Keywords

• continental philosophy
• abject spectatorship
• post-cinema
• victimization
• double occupancy