Nathan T. Andersen

John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934) and R.G. Collingwood’s Principles of Art (1938) both claim that the distinctive work of works of art is to express emotion. That doesn’t just mean that art makes us feel something, but that it generates for both artist and attentive spectator a compelling experience of self-understanding, through which elements of a lived situation are clarified and transformed. My aim here is to examine the potential of an expressive account of art for a film-philosophical approach to drawing out the relevance of films to issues of importance for philosophy, which I will illustrate with a sketch of an expressive “reading” of Jordan Peele’s 2019 film Us.

This was an invited talk for a special Film and Philosophy focused meeting of the Society for the Philosophical Study of Contemporary Visual Arts. The talk focused on some of the challenges of teaching film and philosophy in a period when students "consume" media and watch films primarily online, such that the traditional experience of being together with an audience in a darkened theater when the projector starts is no longer typical. Students who come into such courses often have little experience with philosophy and little experience with film studies or formal film analysis, so the question of how far one can go with the content of the course was also discussed.