Scepticisme du cinéma, scepticisme de Gus Van Sant : étude de la tétralogie de Gus Van Sant à partir de la philosophie de Stanley Cavell
This thesis aims to explore the close ties between philosophical skepticism, the cinematic apparatus and Gus Van Sant's tetralogy of films: Gerry, Elephant, Last Days and Paranoid Park. From Stanley Cavell’s philosophical perspective, we will first address the question of skepticism as a condition of existence rather than a philosophical doctrine. Stanley Cavell redirects the skepticism problem of cognition towards ethics and we will look at how Gus Van Sant meets the ethical dimension of skepticism by offering a cinema of idleness and melancholia in which individuals are at odds with the world. Furthermore, we will study how the cinematic apparatus is the very expression of Cavellian skepticism and how it moves toward moral perfectionism by forcing the recognition of our existence through moral decision-making. Finally, we will look at how Gus Van Sant, in a singular manner, addresses the problem raised by skepticism by reinventing the sequence shot and the slow motion, and therefore reinstates the individual to the world through formal manipulations that respond to modern idleness as an existential condition. The answers Gus Van Sant has found are not solutions, but rather the exploration of the dimensions of a problem he is restating: skepticism.
Cinema Skepticism Gus Van Sant Stanley Cavell Philosophy