Att närma film Heideggers senare tänkande och poetisk film

Abstract

The aim of this master’s thesis is to mediate a thinking between film and Martin Heidegger’s later (post-)philosophical writings. This period, although not easily pinpointed in term of an inception date, has been characterized as the Turn [die Kehre] and implies Heidegger’s critical rethinking of systematic philosophy and his earlier fundamental ontological position. By examining his thoughts on poetry, art and the Being-question I am trying to locate a place for the poetic film. I argue that the poetic film, unlike any particular style of film, can’t be conceptually bracketed and therefore also refuses application to any specific theory and method. In this regard my intention is more evocative than demonstrative, or for that matter critical; by following Heidegger thoughts on the appropriating event [Ereignis], his writings on human dwelling and dwellings vicinity to the Fourfold I read through particular films that seem to evoke the mythical poetic spirit that characterizes Heidegger’s later thinking: The Turin Horse (2011), Dog Star Man (1961-1964) and Stalker (1979) are just some of the films that appear on this road, but their appearance is also a hiding meaning that they appropriate the nature of truth by way of the Greek term a-lethia, signifying a concealed-unconcealement. These films stand apart from what can be characterized as experimental cinema in that the later is focused on the technical while the former are more akin to the essential mystery of language – which is also why language has a precedence in this thesis – a mystery that speaks the thinging of the thing and the worlding of world. I argue therefore that particular films can point, essentially as a hinting, to the appropriating event that is the coming to be of the world in the word. They allow a dwelling place when dwelling is thought as the particular stay that defines man’s being in the Fourfold; on the earth, beneath the sky, before the divinities, as mortals.