Movies have a striking aesthetic power: they can draw us in and induce a peculiar mode of involvement in their images – they absorb us. While absorbed in a movie, we lose track both of the passage of time and of the fact that we are sitting in a dark room with other people watching the play of light upon a screen. What is the source of the power of movies? Noël Carroll, who cites Maurice Merleau-Ponty as an influence on (...) his account of the power of movies, agrees with Merleau-Ponty that our perceptual experience of movies draws on many of the capacities at work in our perceptual experience of everyday situations. Yet Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception shows that Carroll’s emphasis on intellectual inference and the entertaining of unasserted thoughts is a distortion of the phenomenology of cinematic absorption. According to Merleau-Ponty, such intellectual operations come into play in cases of breakdown but should not be read back into the primary absorbed experience as being implicitly operative all along. After presenting and criticizing Carroll’s view, I interpret and expand upon Merleau-Ponty’s position, showing that his version of the analogy between cinematic perception and everyday perception is more convincing than Carroll’s. (shrink)

Film critics and theorists often refer to the ‘worlds’ that films create, present, or embody,e.g. the world of Eraserhead or the world in Fanny and Alexander. Like the world of a novel or painting, the world of a film in thisprevalent use of the term denotes its represented content or setting, or whatever formaland thematic aspects distinguish it from other films in a pronounced and oftenimmediately recognisable way. Yet there is much more to be said in philosophical termsabout films as, (...) or as containing, worlds. This paper will argue that pursuing this subjectentails a needed re-evaluation of multi-faceted issues that are of concern to bothcontemporary film theorists and philosophers of film, including the relation betweencinematic representation and expression, reflexivity, the nature of film style andauthorship, and cinema’s relation to, and direct interaction with, other art forms. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's ballet musical The Red Shoes is concerned with topics surrounding phenomenology, action, and embodied agency, and that it exploits resources that are uniquely cinematic in order to “do philosophy.” I argue that the film does philosophy in two ways. First, it explicates a phenomenological model of action and agency. Second, it addresses itself to the philosophical question of whether an individual's non-reflective movements – those that are not the result (...) of deliberation or practical reasoning – are properly understood to be actions attributable to her as her own. (shrink)

This article explores melodrama's capacity to evoke strong emotional responses with a focus on the ending of King Vidor's Stella Dallas. It suggests a consideration of the phenomenological concept of instrument-mediation as coined by Vivian Sobchack as a filmic structure that fosters melodrama's emotional appeal and the spectator's engagement with it. It suggests a self-reflexive element in highly emotional film scenes that inscribes the spectator's subject position into the film, thus enabling the film to impact the spectator's body. This reflection (...) of a spectator's perspective enables and fosters the communication of emotionality. Consequently, instrument-mediation describes one function and strategy of the melodramatic mode. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between the affective intensities of screen media and its potential to serve as an affective force for the transmission of intergenerational trauma. I explore how watching a documentary portraying historical atrocities that preceded the birth of the documentary’s viewers yet affected their lives in profound ways, is one of the manifold engagements in genealogy and memory work that seeks to know the past affectively. My focus is on Indisch viewers whose relatives suffered through various atrocities (...) that took place in Indonesia in the 20th century. By ethnographically exploring Indisch affective engagements with Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary, The Act of Killing, I show how such engagements need to be analysed as occurring across human and non-human interactions and beyond the subject–object distinction. I argue that the affectivity of screen media that showcase instances of historical violence that have never received much public representation needs to be understood with particular historical contingencies. This article alerts us to how processes of getting to know the past affectively reveal the fragility of the embodied self in the wake of cataclysmic violence. (shrink)

In this Introduction to a special section on ‘Visualizing Surfaces, Surfacing Vision’, the authors argue that to conceive vision in the contemporary world it is necessary to examine its embedding within, expression via and organization on the surface. First, they review recent social and cultural theories to demonstrate how and why an attention to surfaces is salient today. Second, they consider how vision may be understood in terms of surfaces, discussing the emergence of the term ‘surface’, and its transhistorical relationship (...) with vision. Third, they introduce the contributions to the special section, which cover written articles and artworks. They make connections between them, including their exploration of reflexivity and recursion, observation, objectivity and agency, ontology and epistemology, relationality, process, and two- and three-dimensionality. Fourth, the authors consider some implications of an understanding of visualizing surfaces/surfacing vision. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to analyse the effects on the everyday world of actual Augmented Reality games which introduce digital objects in our surroundings from a phenomenological point of view. Augmented Reality is a new technology aiming to merge digital and real objects, and it is becoming pervasively used thanks to the application for mobile devices Pokémon Go by Niantic. We will study this game and other similar applications to shed light on their possible effects on our lives (...) and on our everyday world from a phenomenological perspective. In the first part, we will show how these digital objects are visualised as merged in the surroundings. We will point out that even if they are visualised as part of the everyday world, they are not part of it because they are still related to the fictional world generated by the game. In the second part, we will show how the existence of these objects in their fictional world has effects on the everyday world where everybody lives. The goal of Augmented Reality is not reached yet because these objects are not part of the everyday world, but it already makes our lives embedded with digital elements. We will show if these new objects have effects on our world and on how we live our lives. (shrink)

Most of us have grown up with faces on television that look back at us, talk to us, even whenwe ignore them. They smile at us, and seem to address us personally. But they cannot seeor hear us, and we may or may not know who they are. Increasingly, in societies wherescreens are prevalent , our encounters with fellow humanbeings are mediated in ways such as this. Has the ubiquitous intervention of screens in ourlives thus made it harder to understand (...) and communicate directly with one another? Or,have screens extended our capacity to empathise and ‘socialise’, bringing us face-to-facewith people and points of view that we otherwise would never have encountered? In thisessay, I examine the idea that cinematic perception enables us to see the social world froma radically different perspective, and that an experience of this perspective may in itself beethical. I focus on the use of ‘direct address’, and discuss two documentaries by Errol Morriswhere the technique of direct address is used in ways that complicate ideas of mediationand empathy: Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. and The Fog of War:Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara . I also draw on the philosophyof Emmanuel Levinas, particularly his work on ethics and the face, to analyse the effects ofMorris’s techniques. The essay highlights the importance of responsibility in human communication, and maintains that by reflecting on the viewing situation we are betterpositioned to empathise with Morris’s controversial subjects. (shrink)

Through a discussion of Agnès Varda's career from 1954 to 2008 that focuses particularly on La Pointe Courte (1954), L'Opéra-Mouffe (1958), The Gleaners and I (2000), and The Beaches of Agnes (2008), this article considers the connections between Varda's filmmaking and her femaleness. It proposes that two aspects of Varda's cinema—her particularly perceptive portrayal of a set of geographical locations, and her visual and verbal emphasis on female embodiment—make a feminist existential-phenomenological approach to her films particularly fruitful. Drawing both directly (...) on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and on some recent film- and feminist-theoretical texts that have employed his insights, it explores haptic imagery and feminist strategy in The Gleaners and I, the materialization of space characterizing Varda's blurring of fiction and documentary, and the dialectical relationship of people with their environment often observed in her cinema. It concludes that both Varda's female protagonists and the director herself may be said to perform feminist phenomenology in her films, in their actions, movement, and relationship to space, and in the carnality of voice and vision with which Varda's own subjectivity is registered within her film-texts. (shrink)

Philosophical and technoculture studies surrounding the existential understanding of the human–technology–world experience have seen a slow but steady increase that makes a turn to material hermeneutics in the second decade of the twenty-first century (Ihde in Postphenomenology: essays in the postmodern context. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1993; Capurro in AI Soc 25(1):35–42, 2010; Romele in Digital hermeneutics: philosophical investigations in new media and technologies. Routledge, Abingdon, 2020; among others). This renewed focus makes sense because human–technology–world experiences need to be interpreted. (...) And many of these are more complicated to study, precisely because technology is at the root of the experiences. One interesting subset of technologies is media technologies, also called digital media, which intertwines the device and the content to mediate together in the world (Irwin in Digital media: human-technology connection. Lexington Books, Lanham, 2016). Visual media technologies and media content, together, through what is called moving image technologies, create virtual role-playing, virtual and augmented reality, video games, and social media focused worlds that have become central experiences in contemporary culture. Just as image-based scientific instruments read the world in different ways, so to do these visual mediated experiences. How might this comingled “reading” of technology explain the digital film language and experience? I contend that understanding the existential “early” film experience helps understand the new age of cinema, with implications for digital media, digital representation of the visual, and technoscience and technoculture studies. The material hermeneutics perspective called postphenomenology is one way to study these visually focused human–technology–world perceptual and interpretive experiences. Don Ihde’s methodological framework (1990, 1993, 1996, 2002, 2010, 2012, 2016, 2019) is both an idea from technoscience studies and a set of nuanced vocabulary that helps to explore and reveal variations, patterns, and trajectories of the whole-body experience of technology. This use case will first explore traditional cinema and then the “new age” term “moving image”, to learn more about this complicated and radically transforming technological experience. Work by Don Ihde and Vivian Sobchack is considered. (shrink)

This article argues that, propaedeutic to the construction of an Objectivist aesthetics, scholars must refute the irrational/immoral philosophical premises that have been destroying the philosophy of art. Due to the troubling combination of its contemporaneity, extremism, and considerable influence, poststructuralism, which, since the 1960s, has served as the default philosophical foundation for philosophers of art, is the target of this article. This article contends that the road to an Objectivist aesthetics must first be cleared of philosophical debris like poststructuralism before (...) we can hope to go back to the world of art. (shrink)

This article reassesses the concept of identification in line with the increased importance phenomenology has taken on in film-philosophy of the 1990s and 2000s. In the 1970s and 1980s, a Lacanian psychoanalytic interpretation of identification dominated film theory and criticism, and spectatorial engagement with elements of films was understood as what psychoanalysis calls secondary identification – the identification with stable subject-positions (characters) in the film-text. But non-Lacanian psychoanalysis and Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology offer film-philosophy a very different understanding of identification as (...) a non image-based, ‘blind’, bodily affective tie that is established between spectators and what Vivian Sobchack describes as ‘the sense and sensibility of materiality itself’ (Sobchack 2004, 65). By first exploring how this more bodily (for psychoanalysis, primary ) identification is theorized by psychoanalysts (Freud, Paul Schilder, Henri Wallon) and by film theorists (Kaja Silverman), the article proposes that film criticism make greater use of it in order to engage more meaningfully with the visible cultural specificities – size, skin colour, age, sex – of the images of bodies viewed on cinema screens. It is not just ‘the’ body that needs bringing back into thinking about film spectatorship, but culturally differentiated bodies , both on the screen and in the auditorium. A psychoanalytic and phenomenological film criticism of embodied cultural identity, one that attends to the materiality of the film and of the body-images and objects on the screen, may be the most culturally and politically useful successor to ‘screen’ theory of the 1970s and 1980s. (shrink)

This article analyses the way in which websites of conservation foundations organise the affective investments of viewers in animals by the use of webcams. Against a background of—often overly—general speculation on the influence of electronic media on our engagement with the world, it focuses on one particular practice where this issue is at stake. Phenomenological investigation is supplemented with ethnographic observation of user practice. It is argued that conservation websites provide caring spaces in two interrelated ways: by providing affective spaces (...) where users’ feelings are evoked, articulated and organised; and by opening up ethical space where the beauty of animals appears as an incentive to care. As an alternative to thinking of on- and off-line places as clearly delineated and of bodies and technologies as separate entities, the analysis focuses on trajectories of engagement that cut through these in various directions. In actual acts of looking and being affected, users, animals, places and technologies are intimately entwined. The article further suggests how focussing on trajectories of involvement can be developed to evaluate various websites and their user activity in relationship to clearly defined goals, e.g. conservation goals. (shrink)

This paper presents a Heideggerian phenomenological analysis of screens. In a world and an epoch where screens pervade a great many aspects of human experience, we submit that phenomenology, much in a traditional methodological form, can provide an interesting and novel basis for our understanding of screens. We ground our analysis in the ontology of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time [1927/1962], claiming that screens will only show themselves as they are if taken as screens-in-the-world. Thus, the phenomenon of screen is (...) not investigated in its empirical form or conceptually. It is rather taken as a grounding intentional orientation that conditions our engagement with certain surfaces as we comport ourselves towards them “as screens.” In doing this we claim to have opened up the phenomenon of screen in a new and meaningful way. (shrink)

The aim of this work is to analyze the constitution of a new collective subject thanks to wearable computers. Wearable computers are emerging technologies which are supposed to become pervasively used in the near future. They are devices designed to be on us every single moment of our life and to capture every experience we have. Therefore, we need to be prepared to such intrusive devices and to analyze potential effect they will have on us and our society. Thanks to (...) a phenomenological and postphenomenological analysis, we will show how these technologies are able to generate a new collective subject with its different collective needs and appetites by merging the living body of many subjects into one. The world becomes dwelled by these new collective subjects, and we will feed their own peculiar needs. (shrink)

Surface has become an important consideration of sensory film theory, conceived of in various forms: the screen itself as less a barrier than a permeable skin, the site of a meaningful interaction between film and audience; the image as a surface to be experienced haptically, the eye functioning as a hand that brushes across and engages with the field of vision; surfaces within the film, be they organic or fabricated, presenting a tactile appeal. Surface evokes contact and touch, the look (...) or sound it produces inviting consideration of its materiality, and perhaps even a tactile interchange. If the surface of film, across its varied associations, presents the possibility of an intersubjective contact between film and audience, this article seeks to include another body: that of the filmmaker. There are many people who contribute to the material constitution of a film and I would suggest that we might seek to appreciate its textures just as we might that of a painting. Focus on the fine... (shrink)