Description:
Iris Murdoch was not only one of post-war Britain's most celebrated and prolific novelists - she was also an influential philosopher, whose work was concerned with the question of the good and how we can see our moral worlds more clearly.
Murdoch believed that paying attention to art is a way for us to become less self-centred, and this book argues that cinema is the perfect form of art to enable us to do this. Bringing together Murdoch's moral philosophy and contemporary cinema to build a dialogue about vision, ethics and love, author Lucy Bolton encourages us to view cinema as a way of studying other worlds and moral journeys, and to reflect upon their ethical significance in the world of the film and in our daily lives.
Brief description: Lucy Bolton is Professor of Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema and Thinking Women (2011) and Contemporary Cinema and the Philosophy of Iris Murdoch (2019, EUP) as well as the co-editor of' Lasting Screen Stars: Images that Fade and Personas that Endure (2016) and Contemporary Screen Ethics (2023, EUP). She is co-series editor of EUP's Visionaries series.
Review Quotes: Bolton's work inspires further viewings of the films she discusses, but perhaps its chief quality is that it not only raises questions about spectatorship now altered by the Murdochian vision she embellishes, but it also prompts a great deal of questioning about oneself as a viewer, as well as about the conditions of contemporary culture.--Davina Quinlivan, Kingston University "Film-Philosophy Volume 25, Issue 2"