“Kira Muratova: Epistemology of Self-Knowledge on the Cinema Screen” engages in a philosophical reading of the cinematic opus of Romanian born Soviet/Ukrainian filmmaker Kira Muratova (née Korotkova, 1934-2018) focusing, in particular, on the way in which her characters shed light on the logic that underlies our failures to understand ourselves and others. After offering a panoramic view of deceit and self-deceit in disciplinary philosophy, the dissertation’s opening chapter argues that Muratova’s cinema can be thought to articulate coherent responses to such philosophical problems as the logic of paradigmatic deceit, the relationship between truth-warranty and self-presentation, and the ties between fraudulence and social context. If in “Ophelia,” the second part of her triptych Three Stories (1997), Muratova challenges the primacy of the deceiver in situations of mistaken self-representation by offering a view of deception that is primarily “second-order,” namely, in which the burden of falsity lies with an interlocutor who “opens themselves up” to manipulation through poor reasoning, in The Tuner (2004) the relationship between deceit and art is mixed, leading viewers to question the ways in which standard features of filmmaking, such as soundtrack and genre attribution, can lead to mistaken interpretations. Finally, in Change of Fate (1987), Muratova explores the ontology of the cinematic image by presenting viewers with scenes that never happen, that is, that are heavily distorted by the subjective experience of the film’s protagonist, Maria. These force us – like the jurors in the criminal trial that lies at the heart of the work – to consider how we ourselves might be deceived by the film and to examine the importance of ethical life in providing an apt context for deceit to thrive. The second chapter addresses self-opacity as individual and social pathology in Muratova’s work. In Passions (1994), individuals exhibit a prima facie commitment to dialogue through incessant communication but are ultimately shown to speak only in the service of their own hobbyhorses. In Melody for a Street Organ (2008), however, Muratova violates the genre expectations of the Christmas film to underscore the self-deceptiveness of holiday spirit, which obscures conspicuous consumption and a selective adherence to Christian values. Before turning to such examples, nevertheless, the chapter engages in systematic reading of individual self-opacity in what is perhaps the most psychological of Muratova’s films: Long Farewells (1971). In a philosophical borrowing from Flaubert studies, the final chapter of the work is devoted to the epistemological problem of “bovarism” in Muratova’s film-philosophy. There, I argue that one of the extraordinary features of Muratova’s cinema is that it provides a sophisticated account of the way in which literary and cinematic scripts impinge upon our attempts to know ourselves and others. As early as her first independent film Brief Encounters, from 1967, Muratova’s films constantly portray situations in which gazing at the world through literary or cinematic archetypes can lead to harmful idealization, ignorance, blindness, and manipulation. Beside Brief Encounters, the chapter explores Muratova’s 1999 short Letter to America and the second half of her 2007 feature Two in One.