Martin P. Rossouw. Transformational Ethics of Film. Leiden: Brill, 2021, 316 pp

Abstract

<p>In <i>Transformational Ethics of Film</i>, Martin P. Rossouw airs an implicit claim from the history of film philosophy: that some manner of ethically "good" personal transformation is made possible through cinema. Ethics in film philosophy, he argues, tends to rely upon a notional spectator who will be transformed in encountering a film's conceptual tapestry in the approach laid out by the theorist. Rossouw nominates such a transformation a "cinemakeover," and the endeavor is edifying because there is something important in the silent argument his predecessors have rehearsed. Films can meaningfully transform the way we see the world--its causality, our place within it, and ergo its ethics. Yet there are already so many heteronomous links to this causal chain that it is practically begging for the scrutiny of philosophers, and the most salient moral point to these transformations is so often lost in pursuit of their rationalization: how do we affect other people and living things <i>after</i> transformative change?</p>