Cinematic Mythmaking. Philosophy in Film

by Irvin Singer
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008
256 pp. Paper, $24.95
ISBN: 978-0-262-19589-8.

Reviewed by Jan Baetens
University of Leuven

jan.baetens@arts.kuleuven.be

Irvin Singer presents himself as neither a film theoretician nor a film historian, and this double warning helpfully suggests that the targeted readership of this new book by this exceptionally successful author (there even exists an “Irvin Singer Library” at the catalogue of The MIT Press) is very broad. This new book addresses more the general audience interested in reading general, very general philosophical –although it would be more precise to call them ‘cultural’ rather than ‘philosophical’– reflections on cinema, which complete one’s own viewing experience in a kind and unproblematic ‘feel-good’ way. Of course there is nothing wrong with this, and Singer demonstrates throughout the whole book a real and profound love of cinema, as well as a sound knowledge of film history. Yet this is not a book intended to be read as scholarly research, and it does not address the scholarly peers (there is hardly any bibliography, and one reference out of two is made to previous publications by the author).

The basic claim of Singer is that film, thanks to its visual editing techniques, is a cultural practice that can, better than other media, open the minds of its spectators in order to confront them with new interpretations of age-old myths. This stance is certainly correct, and the examples given by the author –for instance Preston Sturges’s rereading of the myth of the garden of Eden in The Lady Eve (1941) – demonstrate in a very elegant manner what such a reuse and reshaping of traditional thematic archetypes may signify: a plea against all kinds of binary thinking. Singer also rightfully stresses the social relevance of this type of new mythmaking, by making obvious the necessity for each culture to both restore and reinvent the old myths (which he defines in a very traditional manner as ‘works of art that purvey a significant level of insight about the world and our concrete involvement in it’). Yet it is strange to notice that there no dialogue is to be found with, for instance, Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, whose views on literature as a ‘mythopoietic’ strategy could have given a more academic framework to Singer’s commentaries.

In his preface, Singer announces that this book will be as much on cinema as mythmaking as on the role and place of philosophy in film. And although Cavell is (friendly but hastily mentioned), it does not really become clear what the author is meaning actually by philosophy. The philosophical literature on cinema is simply ignored, as it the philosophical literature in general (except of course the work of those like Plato whose work is at the crossroads of philosophy and mythology). All this does not prevent Cinematic Mythmaking to be pleasant reading, which teaches us a lot on the way the author thinks of life, but in the field of film studies as it is organized today, books like this are a kind of “Fremdkörper”, albeit a kind and gentle one.