Questions after Wartenberg

These seem like questions that need to be answered, at least eventually:

1) What does it mean to say, as Wartenberg does, that film "does philosophy" "in something like the sense we think of the classical texts of the Western tradition--such as Plato's Republic and Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy--doing philosophy" (Thinking on Screen, 2)?

2) We didn't discuss this in class, but it seems like an aspect of Wartenberg's argument not to be dismissed: namely, that we must reject any essentialist claims about the relation of film and philosophy, such as that of Stanley Cavell and the (dreaded, to be sure) grand theorists (i.e. the Francophone psychoanalytic tradition)?  What are Wartenberg's ground for this rejection?  What does he mean by "essentialism"?

3) How does Wartenberg fail to question or even discuss the visual aspect of a film, the editing of a film, the function of the soundtrack within a film, in approaching an an answer to the question of how film "does philosophy"?  What might be his reasons for neglecting this aspect of the problem?