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Dominic Lash: "Intention in Film after Anscombe"
Watch Dominic Lash deliver his talk on "Intention in Film after Anscombe", originally held on 18 February 2026 as part of the work-in-progress series of (women) In Parenhesis. ABSTRACT In the philosophical study of film the dominant view is that intentions are essentially mental states or events; Paisley Livingstone is representative when he describes an intention as “a mental attitude that represents the state of affairs the behavior is meant to realize” (Livingstone 1996: 150). Despite its influence on the work of some important philosophers who have turned their attention to film (chiefly Stanley Cavell, Robert B. Pippin, and James Conant), G.E.M. Anscombe's view that intention is, instead, best thought of as a form of description has not, generally, been given much of a hearing; her work is usually not so much rejected as it is ignored. This paper aims to make a start at rectifying this situation by starting to outline what an Anscombean view of intention in film might look like, using examples from a range of movies by directors including Howard Hawks, David Cronenberg, and Alfred Hitchcock. Such an approach involves a rejection of the idea that it is possible cleanly to separate the description of a film from its interpretation. It also, so I shall argue, helps make the case that film is as rich a field as literature for the investigation of those phenomena – such as “admiration, curiosity, spite, friendship, fear, love of truth, despair” – that Anscombe herself declared to be “extremely complicated” (Anscombe 2000: 21). Bibliography Anscombe, G.E.M. (2000 [1957, 1963]). Intention. Harvard University Press. Livingstone, Paisley. (1996). "Characterization and Fictional Truth in the Cinema". In David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, eds., Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. University of Wisconsin Press.
