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Exciting Life Updates

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I know I haven’t been updating this blog because I’m too lazy. Years 2 and 3 have been an exciting flurry of business (both work and busy-ness). I constantly spew bite-sized thoughts that stream into my mind on Instagram Stories anyway, and I am remarkably easily bored and excitable, so longer, more considered pieces on Blogger aren’t sustainable. I digress. Many exciting life updates! I’m now officially done with my undergraduate PPE programme at King’s College London. I loved every bit of it: the depth, rigour and intellectual intensity of the course, the international student community, the bustling city of London and all the travel opportunities around Europe. Words can’t do justice to the profundity of the experience. In typical Quincean fashion, I milked everything I could out of the three years: went to Cumberland Lodge (for free) as a photographer with the Philosophy Department in Years 1 and 3, clinched the Principal’s Global Leadership Award (PGLA) in my second year (spending
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Review of “Moving Audiovisual Pictures” by Jason P. Leddington (Bucknell University)

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I am honoured to be able to contribute an article review to the Sound Pictures Conference organised by the Centre for Philosophy and Visual Arts (CPVA) at King’s College London even before I matriculate! It felt great to continue doing what was essentially a KI Paper 2 analysis three years after I left Hwa Chong. The review is capped at 200 words and is appended here. ∎

In “Moving Audiovisual Pictures”, Jason P. Leddington argues that film is an essentially audiovisual art using a Heidegger-inspired Event-Property View (EPV) of diegetic (“in-scene”) sound in film. He rebuts yet develops the rival predominant Berkeleyan view of sound to show that it is a troubled albeit plausible alternative foundation of the same thesis. Marshalling the voices of other philosophers, psychologists, film theorists and editors, Leddington levels criticism against the visuocentric paradigm in analytic aesthetics, which insists that film is essentially visual and nothing more. Indeed, the inclusion of voices outside philosophy makes this piece engaging beyond the academy. Leddington’s parallel treatment of both Berkeleyan and Heideggerian positions also makes this piece appealing to people from both camps. However, I felt that his discussions of the bearing the nature of film has on film’s legitimacy as an art form were distractions from his main philosophical exposition. More clarity regarding the relationship between “pictorial”/”imagistic” and “visual” could be added in the introduction to highlight the gist of his thesis. If silent and sound film are essentially different artistic media, one wonders about the extent to which they should be critiqued differently, and if film theory as it stands can meet this challenge.

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