One astonishing feature of this volume is the scope of its ambition. To claim to have discovered 'universal and invariant structures of love' which, 2,500 years after Plato, has finally found its ideal embodiment in film, is surely a daring statement. The thesis offered here is a subtle, erudite, and sophisticated analysis substantiating this claim, making it an exciting and challenging text indeed. -- Andrei Zorin, Oxford University This volume presents a philosophical examination of love in cinema. Its claim is that the essence of love consists in an undefinable relation between the lover and the beloved. This free relation can neither be produced nor be controlled by the lovers. Love, however, also needs specific articulation being realized in the cultural world; there is thus an irreducible tension between the freedom of love as a reciprocal relation and the determination of its moral, social, and political manifestations. This tension allows for a challenging reading of classical philosophical conceptions of love as well a stimulating interpretation of love in cinema. -- Ulrich Seeberg, Martin-Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg

This is a book about how film encountered love in the course of its history. It is also a book about the philosophy of love. Since Plato, erotic love has been praised for leading the soul to knowledge. The vast tradition of poetry devoted to love has emphasized that love is a feeling. Love in Motion presents a new metaphysics and ontology of love as a reciprocal erotic relationship. The book argues that film has been particularly well suited for depicting love in this way, in virtue of its special narrative language. This is a language of expression that has developed in the course of film history. The book spans this history from early silent directors such as Joseph von Sternberg to contemporary filmmakers like Sophia Coppola. At the centre of this study is a comparison between Classical French and American love films of the forties and a series of modernist films by Luis Bunuel, Francois Truffaut and Wong Kar Wai.