Alias.
I recently read Dyrk Ashton’s essay “Reflections of Deleuze: An Alias-ed Critique of Truth”, a chapter of Investigating “Alias”: Secrets and Spies, edited by Stacey Abbott and Simon Brown (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007). Ashton uses Gilles Deleuze’s ideas, especially his remarks on reflections and the relativisation of truth, to analyse Alias (2001-6). This allows him to interpret the numerous aliases, many doubles, multiple images, and insistent distrust present in the series as illustrating Deleuze’s ideas. This is symptomatic of a common way of using philosophy (and theory) as something that can be simply exemplified by films and television series. The ideas are as serviceable as the works.
Last week, I finished writing a paper on The Addiction (1995) in which I employ a lot of philosophical references. However, this is a different case and a different use. The references are mentioned in the film or are clearly invited by it. As I argue, they play an essential role in any serious reading of this movie directed by Abel Ferrara. Reading The Addiction demands an engagement with philosophy.
There are other fruitful uses of philosophy. We may use certain concepts developed by philosophers because they clarify what we are studying in a film. See, for instance, how Catherine Grant has been using Henri Bergson’s notion of attentive recognition. In the first post, she declares after having discussed La amiga (1988) that “attentive recognition is, then, in this case, potentially a participatory notion of spectatorship. It requires of the spectator an act of memory, an act of imagination and an act of identification or empathy with a fictional character to ‘work’”. In another post, Grant extends her analysis to Vertigo (1958). This is not a mere application of a concept. Her perceptive analyses invariably result in a rethinking and redefinition of Bergson’s notion that illuminates how different films create moments of recognition and discovery.
