Abstract

This article reviews some of Alain Badiou’s main ideas about cinema, collected from different texts through his work. The writing is organized in twelve sections: 1) cinema is a new art that was born in the 20th century; 2) cinema is a mass art; 3) cinema is an ontological art; 4) the cinema makes time visible; 5) cinema as the most-one of the other arts; 6) cinema is an impure art; 7) each film is a singular real object, which exposes the passage of an idea according to the shot and the montage; 8) the art of cinema as a visitation of an idea; 9) cinema as an ethical setting; 10) the three ways of talking about a film; 11) a film is a point-subject of an artistic configuration; 12) from tragic cinema to cinema as a moving image of eternity. These ideas are presented in conjunction with various films: The Birth of a Nation (Griffith, 1915), Pasaron las grullas (Kalatozov, 1957), Last Year at Marienbad (Renais, 1961), Death in Venice (Visconti, 1971) , False Movement (Wenders, 1975), Stalker (Tarkovski, 1979), Barton Fink (Coen and Coen, 1991), 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 2001), Joker (Phillips, 2019) and Nomadland (Zhao, 2020).

Keywords: Alain Badiou | Cinema | Philosophy