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

TitleThe Tragedy of the Knight of Faith
TypeJournal article
AuthorsSticchi, 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.

JournalFilm and Philosophy
Journal citation28, pp. 91-110
ISSN1073-0427
Year2024
PublisherPhilosophy 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 online07 Sep 2023
Published in print2024

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