Introduction: Film-Philosophy and a World of Cinemas David Martin-Jones, University of Glasgow (
[email protected]) This Special Section arose out of the 2014 Film-Philosophy conference, held at the University of Glasgow, which took as its theme: A World of Cinemas. The aim of both the conference theme and this resulting Special Section is to broaden the debate in film-philosophy, both in terms of a world of cinemas and a world of philosophies. This introduction considers the reasons why such an intervention is worthwhile. Inter-disciplinary Pulls Within the discipline of Film Studies, since the mid-1990s film- philosophy scholarship has come to take the place once held by film theory in the 1970s and 1980s. The exact meaning of this hyphenated term typically depends on who you speak to about it, but one popular and broad definition would be the consideration of how films philosophise (or ‘do philosophy’). A clear example of which might be Gilles Deleuze’s Bergsonian exploration of how films can be said to demonstrate different understandings of space (albeit through movement) or time. But there are numerous others areas that might be considered. With the discipline of Film Studies’ famous turn to history in the 1980s bringing the historical to the forefront of research in the field, things theoretical – whilst never really going away – may not now always be addressed directly as such. For instance, it would not be uncommon for historically engaged work on a Film-Philosophy 20 (2016): 6–23 DOI: 10.3366/film.2016.0002 f David Martin-Jones.