Contents Acknowledgments  Foreword by Mike Figgis  Introduction: Film Ethics as Delivering the Goods  Martin P. Rossouw and Julian Hanich PART ONE. ADAPTIVE GOODS 1. . . . A Portal to Another World: On Cinema, Climate Change, and a Good Apocalypse  Jennifer Fay 2. . . . Scaling Down: On the Unsustainable Pleasure of Large-File Streaming  Laura U. Marks 3. . . . It’s Invaluable: On Film Spectatorship in the Era of Covid-19  Sarah Cooper 4. . . . Stabilities and Mobilities: On the Generic Values of Emplacements, Displacements,  and Outplacements  Timothy Corrigan PART TWO. EMPATHETIC GOODS  5. . . . Lies, Loops, or Liberation: On the Dis/Obedience of Feeling More  Michele Aaron 6. . . . Public Engagement: On Postcolonial African Cinema’s Critical Value  Litheko Modisane 7. . . . Shedding Light on Abject Lives: On Global Cinema as Ethical Art  Seung-hoon Jeong 8. . . . Empathy: On Its Limitations and Liabilities  Malcolm Turvey 9. . . . Political Impact: On the Societal Vibrancy of Film  Jens Eder PART THREE. SENSTITIVE GOODS  10. . . . Moral Reflection: On the Reflective Afterlife of Screen Stories  Carl Plantinga and Garrett Strpko 11. . . . Challenge and Discomfort: On Situated Elitist Pleasures in Art and Indie Film  Geoff King 12. . . . Heterocosmic Connections: On the Many Worlds and World Values of Cinema  Daniel Yacavone 13. . . . Depth of Experience: On Early Phenomenology and the Value of Boredom in the Cinema  Christian Ferencz-Flatz 14. . . . Striking Beauty: On Recuperating the Beautiful in Cinema  Julian Hanich PART FOUR. REVIVING GOODS  15. . . . Wondering Offscreen: On Cinema’s Transformations of Our Relation to the Unseen  Jaimie Baron 16. . . . Coming to Wonder: On Cinema’s Renewal of Vision  Catherine Wheatley 17. . . . Moral Improvement: On How Watching Films Might Make Us Better People  Thomas E. Wartenberg 18. . . . Cinematic Ethics: On Film as Transformative Experience  Robert Sinnerbrink 19. . . . Spiritual Exercises Before a Screen: On “Film as Philosophy” and Its Transformational  Ethics  Martin P. Rossouw PART FIVE. COMMUNAL GOODS  20. . . . Remembrance and Reflection: On Social Justice Cinema in the #BlackLivesMatter Era  Maryann Erigha Lawer 21. . . . Making Movie Generations: On the Cultural Work of Hollywood Remaking  Kathleen Loock 22. . . . Reaching Unlettered Audiences: On Global Blockbuster Cinema and Its Oral Affinities  Sheila J. Nayar 23. . . . Love of Community and Reality: On André Bazin and the Good of Cinema  Dudley Andrew PART SIX. MEDIAL GOODS  24. . . . Projection and Protection: On Cinemagoing as Playing Hide-and-Seek with Reality  Francesco Casetti 25. . . . An Animated and Animating Medium: On Hegel,Adorno, and the Good of Film  Nicholas Baer 26. . . . The Bigger Picture: On Watching Films on a Cinema Screen  Martine Beugnet 27. . . . Quality Time: On Resisting What’s Next, or Staying with the Credits  Tiago de Luca PART SEVEN. UNSETTLED GOODS  28. . . . Wanton Destruction: On Cinema’s Antisocial Thrills  Adrian Martin 29. . . . Alienating Interventions: On What the “Bad” in David Lynch’s Films Is “Good” For  Annie van den Oever and Dominique Chateau 30. . . . Dangerous Situations: On Whether Cinema Is Poisonous  Michel Chion 31. . . . Good for Nothing? On How Films Help Us through the Night  Tom Gunning 32. . . . Medium-Sized Matters: On Whether Cinema Has Made Any Difference  Mark Cousins Afterword by Radu Jude  List of Contributors  Index   

"What Film Is Good For is a wonderfully ambitious and timely collection that takes the form, in a sense, of a questionnaire—one that importantly does not seek or need a singular response to the question it asks, as if film could only be good in one way or for one thing, or simply not at all. The diversity of responses collected here is itself a profound lesson in how capacious a moral claim need be if moral it truly is."—Brian Price, author of A Theory of Regret "Whether one agrees with the writers' propositions, the pleasure of thinking through the claims, pondering these questions of worth, value, profit, loss, the many 'good fors' as well as the occasional 'not good for,' is a good, indeed, an excellence in itself, opening to a vast and valuable conversation."—Janet Staiger, author of Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema and Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception "Their volume bookended by two marvelous pieces by filmmakers (Mike Figgis and Radu Jude), Julian Hanich and Martin Rossouw have assembled a peerless group of contributors to explore a wide range of compelling questions about film ethics and the value(s) of spectatorship. The result is a foundational volume for Screen Studies."—Catherine Grant, founding author of Film Studies for Free