Film Studies, the Moving Image, and Noël Carroll

ENGAGING THE MOVING IMAGE, by Noël Carroll. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003, 420 pp., $45.00 hardcover.

Noël Carroll is the leading writer today about philosophy and film studies among those with an Anglo-American analytic philosophy emphasis. He needs to be read in a larger intellectual context also, as a leading interdisciplinary writer about film. On the positive side, he has expanded the resources of Anglo-American analytic philosophy (and has at the same time contributed work of distinction to scholarship in related areas). He profits from the virtues of analytic philosophy as well as putting to good use his broad acquaintance with other scholarship. He is refreshingly innovative, sometimes operating with valuable results beyond the current conventional borders of the discipline of philosophy in his choice of topics about film (or better, in his view, about the moving image). A collection of his essays written in the second half of the 1990s, Engaging the Moving Image, is thus very welcome. It is fascinating and often persuasive reading.