In Hipparchia's Choice, Michèle Le Doeuff interrogates the relationship that exists between women and philosophy, accentuating the political significance of Hipparchia's transformative decision. Hipparchia of Maroneia (c. 350–280 bce) was a Greek philosopher, and the audacity of her choice was to determine how she spent her time for her own benefit. Instead of wasting it at the loom, she chose to seek knowledge and realise her epistemophilia. Using Hipparchia's choice as exemplar, Le Doeuff queries the potential and possibility for a feminist philosophy or ‘a philosophy which will allow men and women to come together in a common task’ (2007: xii). She asks how feasible, diverse or successful can such a philosophy be if its foundations are built upon epistemic prejudice? Perhaps unsurprisingly, Le Doeuff singles out existentialism, specifically via an in-depth consideration of Simone de Beauvoir's work and the way in which it subtly transformed the existentialist project: ‘[Beauvoir] explicitly approaches her investigation from the perspective of existentialist morality’ (Le Doeuff 2007: 89). While cinema is not a consideration within Hipparchia's Choice, Le Doeuff's argument about the invocations that exist between women and philosophy, in light of Beauvoir's thought, have propelled the unspoken thrust of Ambiguous Cinema.

At the start of the book, I stated that I would not situate Beauvoir's philosophy of ambiguity within the parameters of Sartre's or Merleau-Ponty's respective philosophical systems. This was, in part, to action one of film-philosophy's core concerns, which seeks to decentre disciplinary binaries and broaden ‘the horizon of where we philosophize, with whom, and in what way, by engaging with a world of philosophies via a world of cinemas’ (Martin-Jones 2016: 8). If Beauvoir's idea of ambiguity is to be argued as a means of disclosing ethical vision and thereby indicate the political and existential significance of emotional turbulence for mental growth and the appeal for freedom, why return to philosophical thinkers whose systems of thought do not propose an existentialist ethics? In bringing Beauvoir's idea of ambiguity within the context of film-philosophy, the aim has been to identify its contours as a phenomenological concept, considered through a specific set of women's films. The speculative nature of the project was not without its obstacles.