Professor Trevor Mowchun was awarded a Publication Subvention grant for his book, Metaphysics and the Moving Image: Paradise Exposed, published by Edinburgh University Press in 2023. This work is an investigation into the medium of film’s inheritance of metaphysics—Western philosophy’s oldest and most ambitious form of “truth-seeking.” Why does film take up this ancient quest at the very moment when philosophy sought to abandon it once and for all? The book examines the philosophical implications of a cinematic return of metaphysics in what is often described as a post-metaphysical age, and demonstrates how film radically transform the metaphysical paradigm from rational speculation through concepts to mechanical revelation through images and sounds, a revelation at the heart of the medium’s capacity to enlighten and enthrall. Film theorists and philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Stanley Cavell, Robert Bresson, and Heinrich von Kleist are put in dialogue with films possessing a “metaphysical film style,” including The Thin Red Line and The Turin Horse. Painting and photography are also considered as precursors to the moving image, but it’s a specifically cinematic metaphysics which promises to lead us out of the traps of abstraction and alienation inadvertently set by old metaphysics. Mowchun demonstrates that in a post-metaphysical world, questions about being, value, truth, life and death return with renewed force, finding concrete yet open-ended responses in cinema.