Becoming Visionary: Brian De Palma's Cinematic Education of the Senses

by Eyal Peretz

How is one to think the significance of the art of film for philosophy? What would it mean to introduce film as a question into the heart of the philosophical enterprise? How would this transform our understanding of film, on the one hand, and of philosophy and the philosophical tradition, on the other? These are the questions that guide this project on the hitherto critically neglected but seminal film director Brian De Palma. Becoming Visionary: Brian De Palma's Cinematic Education of the Senses is located at the intersection of philosophy and film studies, and makes each of these disciplines productive and useful for each other in a new way. It is a concrete examination of the logic governing the work of a major American artist that is, at the same time, a general philosophical examination of the logic of meaning governing all the major filmic categories and is thus a comprehensive theory of film. Becoming Visionary develops a new matrix for thinking the relations between philosophy and film and, by extension, between philosophy and the arts

Genres: Film

248 pages, Paperback

First published October 10, 2007

About the author

Eyal Peretz works at the intersection of literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and film studies. His work is an attempt to redraw the relations between philosophy and the arts by examining various ways in which works of art and philosophical texts enter into a new type of dialogue in the age that has been defined as post enlightenment. This age, from the point of view of these interests, is characterized by two main intellectual projects: the rise of Aesthetics, thus of the introduction of the question of the significance of art into the heart of philosophy, and what has been called the critique of metaphysics, thus the critique of the logic guiding classical philosophy from Plato to Immanuel Kant.
His first book, Literature, Disaster, and the Enigma of Power: a Reading of Moby-Dick (Stanford UP 2003) examined the relations between literature and philosophy within this context. His second book, Becoming Visionary: Brian De Palma’s Cinematic Education of the Senses (Stanford UP 2008), dealt with philosophy and film. In the meantime, he co-edited with Emily Sun and Ulrich Baer The Claims of Literature: The Shoshana Felman Reader (Fordham University Press, 2007). His book Dramatic Experiments is a reading of various writings by the major enlightenment philosopher and writer, Denis Diderot, a transitional figure between enlightenment thinking and post-enlightenment. He proposes to examine the significance of dramatic theater for the rethinking of philosophy’s relation to the arts. More recently, he has published The Off-Screen: An Investigation of the Cinematic Frame. He is currently finishing a monograph on Leonardo da Vinci. Peretz is also the editor of the Yearbook of Comparative Literature.

Reviews

[NIKOS IKONOMIDIS · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book I have read about Brian De Palma, and I have read all the prominent ones. In fact, I could say it is the only one that does justice to the scope of the director's vision. Some may find it overstuffed with philosophical topics and references, but the discussion here is exciting and not a dull listing of theories (as I have experienced reading other books that apply philosophical jargon on filmmakers, par example a dull book about the Coen cinema I can recall). You may not end up knowing much about the details of De Palma's work, but for this you can look somewhere else. I didn't need that. But this book is full of fresh ideas that give a different perspective to the films o one of the most underrated directors in film history.