Film and the Phenomenology of Art: Reappraising Merleau-Ponty on Cinema as Form, Medium, and Expression

Abstract

In 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