- Title
- Experiencing Force Majeure
- Creator
- Falzon, Christopher
- Relation
- Film-Philosophy Vol. 21, Issue 3, p. 281-298
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/film.2017.0052
- Publisher
- Edinburgh University Press Ltd.
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2017
- Description
- This article looks at the 2014 Swedish comedy-drama Force Majeure as a kind of moral thought experiment, but also insofar as it might not fit such a model. The idea of a cinematic ethics, of cinema as providing an avenue for thinking through ethics and exploring ethical questions, finds at least one expression in the idea of film as experimental in this sense. At the same time, simply subsuming film to the philosophical thought experiment risks forgetting what film itself brings to the proceedings; and how the cinematic medium might allow for an experimentation that goes beyond what can be done within the philosophical text. As experimental in a broad sense, Force Majeure evokes an experience, the extraordinary event beyond one’s control, capable of putting a moral agent to the test, challenging one’s sense of who one is and what one stands for. The film unfolds as a reflection on the results of this encounter with experience, and on the kind of moral self this experiment brings to light; and in the course of this reflection, it suggests some general conclusions about the human condition.
- Subject
- Östlund; Force Majeure; ethics; thought experiment; experience
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1350533
- Identifier
- uon:30568
- Identifier
- ISSN:1466-4615
- Rights
- Copyright Christopher Falzon. This article is published as Open Access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial Licence (http://www. creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction provided the original work is cited.
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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