What you will find here considers the following questions: What is the significance of art? What role does it play in our individual and collective lives? Are artworks able to communicate truths, or is truth beside the point when it comes to art? What is the relationship between art and modern capitalism?
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| Below you’ll find collections of my written work related to Art, Cinema & Music. Click on the following to take you to the relevant section or scroll down. |
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| ART & AESTHETICS |
| PHILOSOPHY OF CINEMA |
| PHILOSOPHY OF MUSIC |
| ART & AESTHETICS: Aesthesis is the Greek word for perception. So understood, aesthetics is the science or knowledge of perception. That meaning is part of the modern idea of aesthetics as the branch of philosophy concerned with beauty in nature and art. “Beauty,” said Thomas Aquinas “is that which pleases when seen.” But the relation between art and beauty is problematic. Isn’t ugliness, including torture and death, also a theme of great art? The situation is complicated. Beauty concerns more than art and art includes more than beauty. So what exactly is the relation between beauty, nature, art, and ugliness? And how is this relation connected with our lives as social beings? |
| PHILOSOPHY OF CINEMA: Philosophy is an imperialist discipline. There is no branch of knowledge or sphere of culture that it will not enter. That is probably because it was once “Queen of the Sciences” and now is an elective students take when they complete their important courses. In any event, cinema lends itself to philosophical treatment in a number of ways. It is an aesthetic medium and aesthetics is still a branch of philosophy. It is a medium closely connected with time, and the nature of time is a philosophical theme. It also explores philosophical issues in its own way, including ethical problems, the purpose of human existence, the nature of the universe, and so on. These are my writings on philosophy of cinema, as well as lecture notes I prepared for some of the courses I’ve taught on the subject. I am on the editorial board of the Turkish Journa, SineFilozofi. In this section below you’ll find my written works related to cinema that includes: Marxism In Film Alfred Hitchcock & Orsen Welles Giles Deleuze & Cinema |
| MARXISM AND FILM |
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| These are excepts from Marxism and Film a book I am working on. |
| Cinema of the Soviet Avant-Garde – Chapter 2 : From Marxism and Film by Gary Zabel. |
| Cinema as Ideology: From Marxism and Film by Gary Zabel. |
| Cinema as Dialectic: From Marxism and Film by Gary Zabel. |
| Remarks on the Film Industry (original): Excerpted from Marxism and Film by Gary Zabel. |
| Remarks on the Film Industry: Excerpted from Marxism and Film by Gary Zabel. |
| ALFRED HITCHCOCK AND ORSEN WELLES |
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| The Work of Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles: Notes on the Work of Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles from the Perspectives of Slavoj Zizek and Gilles Deleuze – These are notes that I distributed to students in a class I taught at the University of Massachusetts at Boston during Spring, 2017. The class was titled Philosophy of Film: The Work of Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles. |
| GILES DELEUZE AND CINEMA |
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| It may seem odd to approach film philosophically, but here I take my lead from the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze who says that philosophers and filmmakers do the same things, but philosophers through the medium of concepts and filmmakers through the medium of moving images. |
| Some Themes From Deleuze’s Cinema – Vol 1: |
| Some Themes From Deleuze’s Cinema – Vol 1 – original: |
| Some Themes From Deleuze’s Cinema – Vol 1 — v2: |
| Remarks on the Crisis of the Action (original): |
| Remarks on the Crisis of the Action: |
| Deleuze On Film Course: This is a course I taught online and in class at UMass |
| PHILOSOPHY OF MUSIC Thirty years ago I had the opportunity to write a series of articles and book reviews for a venerable, one-hundred-and-sixty year-old magazine published in London, “The Musical Times.” Two of my articles were translated and republished in Chinese and Spanish journals. My articles are mostly about philosophy of music in the work of Fredrich Nietzsche, Theodore Adorno, and Ernst Bloch. One article is piece about politically radical, avant-garde music in Germany between the two world wars. |
| MUSIC AND COUNTER REVOLUTION: A Review of Stormy Applause: Making Music in a Workers State by Rostislav Dubinsky (Hutchinson, London: 1989); 292pp.; 14.95. ISBN 0 09 174257 9 — Author(s): Gary Zabel Reviewed work(s):Source: Originally published as “Soviet Music” in The Musical Times (London), 1989 |
| ADORNO ON MUSIC: A RECONSIDERATION: Author(s): Gary Zabel Reviewed work(s):Source: The Musical Times, Vol. 130, No. 1754 (Apr., 1989), pp. 198-201 |
| REDIRECTING POWER: A Review of Pianos and Politics in China: Middle Class Ambitions and the Struggle Over Western Music by Richard Curt Kraus — Author(s): Gary Zabel Reviewed work(s):Source: The Musical Times, Vol. 131, No. 1771 (Sep., 1990), pp. 484 |
| POSTSCRIPT TO ADORNO ON MUSIC: Adorno Meets Sun Ra – Twenty-seven years later… |
| WAGNER AND NIETZSCHE: ON THE THRESHOLD OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: Author(s): Gary Zabel Source: The Musical Times, Vol. 131, No. 1770 (Aug., 1990), pp. 407-409 |
| ESCAPING THE DARK TIME: ARE MODERNISM AND POLITICS IRRECONCILABLE? WEILL AND EISLER DIDN’T THINK SO: Author(s): Gary Zabel Source: The Musical Times, Vol. 133, No. 1798 (Dec., 1992), pp. 621-623 |
| THE PROBLEM OF POLITICAL MUSIC IN EISLER AND WEILL: Revisited- Gary Zabel (May 14, 2010) |