From: <kenneth.mackendrick-AT-utoronto.ca>
Subject: Re: Intelligent readings...
Date: Wed, 3 Jan 2001 11:25:12 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time)



I might not qualify these as 'intelligent' ... more like free associative... 
but... anyway... I teach a course Religion, Morality and Law and I try to draw 
on film to "make a point." I'm not a film theorist by any stretch of the 
imagination, I know nothing about editing, sound, effects, technique... but 
here are some of the examples I've used:

When Harry Met Sally - Locke, property rights
Bi-Centennial Man - Hegel, struggle for recognition
eXistenZ - paranoia, psychosis
Thirteen Floor- perversion
Martrix, perversion, or, Plato's cave
Titus - Hegel, philosophy of right
Pulp Fiction - Machiavelli, I'm trying to be the good shepherd
A Few Good Men - Hobbes, Leviathan
Alien - Machiavelli, purity
Like Water for Chocolate - Marx, material reproduction, spectres
Face/Off - dialectics
The Haunting (b/w & colour), modernity / postmodernity
Hurly Burly, communicative misrecognition
Kafka, postmodernism
Fight Club, everything Lacan
Name of the Rose, Aquinas
Breaking the Waves, critique of feminine mystique
What Dreams May Come, sexuality
Dangerous Liaisons, Kant
Rear Window, fantasy-screen
Dark City, Freud, phallus
Twin Peaks, the Real
Dracula, logic of late capitalism / fantasy
Terminator II, Alien III, suicide
Runaway Bride, mimesis
Ravenous, imperialism

.... off the top of my head. Truly, I'm not sure I've ever seen a film that 
doesn't somehow take up one kind of 'subjective' or 'philosophical' attitude or 
another... 

ken





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