The Tragedy of the Knight of Faith
Sticchi, Francesco and Angeli, Silvia 2024. The Tragedy of the Knight of Faith. Film and Philosophy. 28, pp. 91-110. https://doi.org/10.5840/filmphil202382124
Sticchi, Francesco and Angeli, Silvia 2024. The Tragedy of the Knight of Faith. Film and Philosophy. 28, pp. 91-110. https://doi.org/10.5840/filmphil202382124
Title | The Tragedy of the Knight of Faith |
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Type | Journal article |
Authors | Sticchi, Francesco and Angeli, Silvia |
Abstract | The cinema of Martin Scorsese has been analysed in connection with a wide range of themes and issues. In this paper, through a film-philosophical analysis, we aim to demonstrate how his filmography produces storyworlds pervaded by a tension similar to the one Søren Kierkegaard expressed in his existentialist writings. Indeed, one of the tenets of film-philosophy is that audio-visual media generate, in an affective and experiential manner, complex moral and ethical systems and existential viewpoints with which viewers interact in a direct and creative way. Empathising with the self-sacrifice of the unlikely martyr played by Jake LaMotta or feeling the collapsing certainties of a missionary in seventeenth-century Japan are thus occasions to encounter particular conceptual personae. These characters embody specific iterations of Kierkegaardian knights of faith: existentialist figures whose doom takes in ambiguous film ecologies where the desire for wholesomeness constantly clashes with mortality and finitude. |
Journal | Film and Philosophy |
Journal citation | 28, pp. 91-110 |
ISSN | 1073-0427 |
Year | 2024 |
Publisher | Philosophy Documentation Center |
Digital Object Identifier (DOI) | https://doi.org/10.5840/filmphil202382124 |
Web address (URL) | http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/filmphil202382124 |
Publication dates | |
Published online | 07 Sep 2023 |
Published in print | 2024 |