The recent two decades have yielded the most uplifting turn in the history of film studies and film theory. This has become an intriguing theoretical reality which was tagged (almost by accident) as film-philosophy. As a challenge to the hegemony of grand theory and to the superiority of verbal (descriptive) discourse of analytic philosophy, film-philosophy rejects the asymmetric relations embedded in “the philosophy of X” paradigm of film theory (a paradigm in which, to quote Robert Sinnerbrink, “philosophy conceptually analyzes and theorizes its object precisely because the latter cannot do so.”) For Sinnerbrink, Film-Philosophy is a most deserving offspring of the pluralistic cultural atmosphere which should not only be noted, but, allegedly, should take the driver’s seat in contemporary approach to film and philosophy. Film-philosophy, as “an alternative approach that combines aesthetic receptivity to film with philosophically informed reflection” (to quote Sinnerbrink again), “is a way of aesthetically disclosing, perhaps also transforming, our experience of the modern world.” Similarly, it is a way, an incentive (one can say), for philosophy itself “to reflect upon its own limits or even to experiment with new forms of philosophical expression.”

The film-philosophy framework has captured the minds and hearts of contemporary scholars. Following Cavell and Deleuze, the “founding fathers” of film-philosophy, Daniel Frampton provides a unique portrayal of cinematic thinking, going so far as to replace the hyphenated relationship between film and philosophy with one unified term, filmosophy, conjoining the attributes of thinking and the aesthetic domain under one conceptual roof. Similarly, Stephen Mulhall, in his groundbreaking On Film, refers to the cinematic domain as “philosophy in action,” thus delineating the aesthetic dimension of the image (to coin the theorist Edgar Morin) as the typological core of a new brand of thinking.