Toward a Phenomenological Aesthetic of Cinema

Abstract

It was probably Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s essay, “Le Cinéma et la Nouvelle Psychologie,” which started this train of thoughts some years ago. Although they have led through a good deal of reading and writing on phenomenology and film over the years, the point of departure is still Merleau-Ponty:

Phenomenological or existential philosophy is largely an expression of surprise at... [the] inherence of the self in the world and in others, a description of this paradox and permeation, and an attempt to make us see the bond between subject and world, between subject and others, rather than to explain it as the classical philosophies did by resorting to absolute spirit. Well, the movies are peculiarly suited to make manifest the union of mind and body, mind and world, and the expression of one in the other. ... Contemporary philosophy consists not in stringing concepts together but in describing the mingling of consciousness with the world, its involvement in a body, and its coexistence with others; ... this is movie material par excellence. ... If philosophy is in harmony with the cinema, if thought and technical effort are heading in the same direction, it is because the philosopher and the moviemaker share a certain way of being, a certain view of the world which belongs to a generation. It offers us yet another chance to confirm that modes of thought correspond to technical methods and that, to use Goethe’s phrase, ‘What is inside is also outside.’¹