“The Active Eye” (Revisited): Toward a Phenomenology of Cinematic Movement" (original) (raw)
Related papers
Vision and Its Double. Cinema and the Revelation of Movement
Vision and Its Double. Cinema and the Revelation of Movement Merleau-Ponty’s Course at the Collège the France in 1953 In this paper, I will try to demonstrate, through the analysis of several films realized between 1920 and 2000 and of a few significant essays from important film theorists, that a phenomenology of movement and space tacitly appears in films, as cinema is the art of motion on screen and so the art of intersubjectivity par excellence. Moreover, I shall try to show that an ontological conception of the chiasm between the Visible and the Invisible (Merleau-Ponty) and of the world as that “something else” that is simultaneously present and absent in every apparition (Patočka), in cinema corresponds to the “présence in absentia” (Bergala) of the off-screen on the screen, that is to say to the opening up of off-screen space by means of eyeline match and by characters exiting and entering the frame. I will finally claim that the use of sequence shot (or long take), of depth of field and of specific camera movements allows to preserve the continuity of reality, and gives the impression that the film is a perceptual experience that happens within reality’s space-time continuum. Keywords: Phenomenology of Movement, Phenomenology of Cinema, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, André Bazin, Erwin Panofsky
New Literary History, 2016
n his prescient 1978 essay "The Neglected Tradition of Phenomenology in Film Theory," cinema scholar Dudley Andrew anticipates the renewed interest in phenomenology within film studies that was to come to full flower some three decades later. Echoing Andrew's title and theme, at the start of that major revival in the early 1990s, Vivian Sobchack also wrote of a "general neglect and particular ignorance of phenomenology" in then contemporary film theory. 1 Today, however, as a result of Andrew's, Sobchack's, and other theorists' advocacy, phenomenology-more specifically its existential version associated with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's philosophy-is no longer at the margins of film theory but close to its center. Indeed, within this context the word "phenomenology" has become a generally recognized shorthand expression for attention to more immediate sensory and expressive features of films, and to films as perceptual objects instead of, or in addition to, cognitive, narrative, and cultural-ideological ones. Now that by general consensus phenomenological and related affectand sensation-based paradigms have largely supplanted structuralistsemiotic, psychoanalytic, and Marxist-ideological ones in the mainstream of film theory, my present concern in this essay is with another related "neglect": that of phenomenological aesthetics. In the midst of the current phenomenological and more broadly philosophical turn in film theory, this rich tradition of thought has received comparatively little attention from theorists and philosophers of film. Yet it played an important if still largely unanalyzed role in the development of modern film theory (having notably influenced the ideas of such prominent theorists as Jean Mitry and Christian Metz) and is still highly relevant, including in the present digital cinema environment. 2 Elsewhere I have traced the outlines of one phenomenological approach to cinematic art indebted to French philosopher Mikel Dufrenne's ideas concerning the created and experienced "worlds" of films as aesthetic objects. 3 Here I wish to focus on Merleau-Ponty's new literary history 160 chronologically earlier understanding of phenomenology and cinema. Also focused on aesthetic perception and expression, it not only departs in significant respects from what I will call first-generation phenomenological film theory and criticism, but differs even more markedly (and perhaps ironically) from some contemporary phenomenological accounts of film rooted in Merleau-Ponty's general philosophy of perception. Most notable among the latter is Sobchack's phenomenology of film, as articulated in her influential study The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Sobchack's overriding focus on what are presented as fundamental visual, spatial, and affective features of all live-action films, as tied to perceptual conditions of the film medium and its technology, stands in sharp contrast to Merleau-Ponty's emphasis on variable artistic form, style, and expression in cinema, together with temporality and rhythm. The reasons for this seldom-noted discrepancy are complex, bound to the evolution of both film theory and film practice from the 1940s onward. Yet, and as I hope to show, the differences in question are of much more than historical interest alone and go to the heart of how the phenomenological aspects of cinema and of individual films may be best understood. While I have framed the situation in terms of a general neglect, or omission, it must be acknowledged at the outset that the orientations of at least some contemporary, post-Address of the Eye accounts of film experience are relatively closer to the concerns of Merleau-Ponty's writings on cinema and art, as well as Dufrenne's. 4 Sobchack's own later film critical and theoretical reflections fall into this category, as partly informed by attention to artistic realities explicitly bracketed from her general phenomenology of film, such as the "cinematic vision" and "world view" of filmmakers embedded in their recognizable personal styles. 5 Yet the particular dynamics I wish to focus upon, as prompted by Merleau-Ponty's observations on cinema and art and the typical concerns of phenomenological aesthetics (as also applied to literature in the work of Roman Ingarden, Wolfgang Iser, and Hans Robert Jauss, for instance), are not widely represented in contemporary anglophone film and phenomenology discourse. The alternative, equally phenomenological and aesthetic approach that I am concerned with explicating and offering qualified support for via Merleau-Ponty's writing clearly dovetails, however, with more recent developments in French phenomenology. Specifically, its notable "return" to aesthetics that Julien Guillemet has traced with reference to cinema and the work of philosophers such as
As a scholar of film, I am constantly torn in two different directions when I use my eyes. I am trained to read. I sift through written material quickly to find the nuggets of information or analysis that will help me to make sense of something else. But I am also trained to look – and looking isn’t always reading. Looking is as much to do with observation, as it is to do with analysis. It is as much about understanding how to describe what I see, as it is about interpreting those things that I see. Fittingly, one of the dominant paradigms of Film Studies lies in the textual analysis of films. This is the one that I was initially trained in. For the purpose of textual analysis, our powers of observation and informed scrutiny enable us to ‘read’ films as flat, legible surfaces. Characters reveal ethical, behavioural or narrative features of the film. Mise-en-scène can be decoded for political or aesthetic means. But how does one ‘read’ an image floating on a screen, when the screen itself is different every time? Is a moving image the same moving image if we’ve seen it on a tablet, or as a massive immersive multi-screen installation? How do we account for the differences between experiencing moving images in a cinema auditorium, versus the experience of moving image projection in a gallery, or in another site-specific installation? All of these seem like logical and valid questions. But perhaps in the rush to distinguish what we ‘read’ into a film from the individual acts of looking that we each commit when viewing the moving image, there is something of an artificial barrier put in place. If films are flat ‘texts’, then they can only be read in certain lights and from certain angles. What becomes legible – eligible even – as ‘film’ stays firmly in the realm of screen images that can be sustained in an upright manner in a fairly limited set of circumstances: in a cinema auditorium, on a television screen or more likely, on a portable computing device. So where does that situate all the marginal, evanescent examples of moving images, that still have an extremely powerful effect on the ways that we look at and experience screen media?
The lived experience of motion pictures: A phenomenological approach to cinema
Philosophy and Film: Bridging Divides, 2019
Husserl’s phenomenology proposes a method through which a structural analysis of experience is performed, questioning how reality appears to consciousness. What cinema attempts is precisely to recreate human experiences, visually expressing the relation we entertain with our reality. If we take films to be an expression of experience (of the filmmaker) through experience (of the spectator), then phenomenology becomes a particularly suitable perspective for understanding cinema, for it enables the understanding of how a film, as an expression of life, is grasped by consciousness, creating a specific type of experience for the viewer. Consequently, a Husserlian approach allows us to grasp the universality of filmic experience: it is always and for every possible film a matter of a consciousness engaged in an act of apprehension of an object with a specific form and content. How is this relationship constituted? The aim of this chapter is to propose an answer to this question from a Husserlian perspective, by means of close analysis of two acts of our consciousness that make our access to films possible in the first place: perception and imagination.
Bodies and Screens: Aspects for a Phenomenology of Moving Image Installations
Interfaces, 2022
The article argues for a phenomenology of moving image installations in three steps. First, I present Vivian Sobchack’s central concept of the film’s body in the context of the cinematic apparatus, paying special attention to aspects that concern non-cinematic projection and differences between film projection in the movie theater and the gallery space. Secondly, I develop Juhani Pallasmaa’s ideas about the phenomenology of architecture to bring into focus the spatial and structural aspects of moving image installations. Then I argue for the concept of “embodied self-reflexivity”, which could quite accurately describe the spectators’ experience of a film exhibited in a gallery or museum. Finally, I provide a brief description and interpretation of two panoramic video installations where the embodied self-reflexivity experienced by the viewers seems to be central to understanding the artworks. Corps et écrans. Considérations autour d'une phénoménologie de l'installation des images en mouvement Zsolt Gyenge Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/interfaces/6218
New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation (Johns Hopkins UP), vol. 47, no.1, Winter 2016
This essay argues that the most influential strand of contemporary phenomenological film theory, indebted to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of perception and embodiment, has tended to under-emphasize or distort the specifically aesthetic dimension of cinematic experience. This stems, in part, from a neglect of the rich tradition of phenomenological aesthetics - including (ironically) certain of Merleau-Ponty’s own writings on art and cinema - which may be persuasively seen to challenge the medium essentialism, anti-intentionalism, and disproportionate privileging of vision and space (e.g. over time) in some contemporary film theory that invokes phenomenology. A fresh and largely sympathetic analysis of Merleau-Ponty’s essay “Film and the New Psychology” and related writings (alongside Mikel Dufrenne’s phenomenology of aesthetic experience) helps to differentiate between an existential phenomenology of the film medium and an existential phenomenology of film art. The latter is rooted in cinematic form and aesthetic perception as distinct from ordinary or non-aesthetic perception. In addition to explaining why the two are distinct, the essay indicates some of the ways in which a phenomenology of film art, as seldom pursued, has much to offer to film theory and the philosophy of film.
Observational cinema and embodied vision / Gözlem Sineması ve Bedenlenmiş Biliş
Bilkent University - MA Thesis, 2011
This study aims to discuss the notion of embodiment concerning Merleau Ponty’s phenomenology and its relation to observational cinema. To this end, this thesis dwells on the embodied nature of perception of seeing and its relation to epistemological approaches that understand the process of thinking and knowing either based on dualisms of body and mind, subject and object, or their interdependency. It is argued that phenomenological understanding of bodily experience provides a basis for the constitution of knowledge without the separation of thought and sensuous experience, self, and others. Thus, when cinema is considered a way of thinking through images or producing knowledge via images, phenomenological perspectives allow us to understand filmmaking, film viewing, and film experience in general, considering embodied reciprocity between images of others’ bodies and our own bodily experiences in the world. The underlying idea is that language and body are involved in each other within experience as being in the world, and the body as the house of the language is the structuring structure of it by preceding it.
A Phenomenological Aesthetic of Cinematic 'Worlds'
Contemporary Aesthetics
Contemporary film aesthetics is beset by difficulties arising from the medium itself and the bewildering itinerary of film theory. Inspired by Martin Heidegger's hermeneutical vision in "On the Origin of the Work of Art" (1935), my essay seeks to overcome this paralysis by grounding the aesthetic value of cinematic art in its ability to "disclose the world" through a convergence of artist and viewer intentionalities. Stanley Cavell has gone far by exploring a corresponding "natural relation" between philosophy and cinema, but his work assumes an ontological discourse without an appropriate phenomenological method. I contend that Mikel Dufrenne's phenomenology of aesthetic experience provides the formal structure necessary for speaking of film's ontological possibilities. Terrence Malick's cinematic and narrative uses of point-of-view illustrate one such experience of world-disclosure.