“Cinema and the Visual Arts”

2014

The main activity of consciousness is not to allow us to perceive the world, but to allow us to orient ourselves in it. Its work, in other words, allows each one to create a relationship with himself or herself only by directing it towards others and towards things: it ensures the presence of the self to itself only by relating it to what is different from it. The fact that the conscious being overlaps and intersects the being in relation means that the body, far from being a tyrant that imposes his laws, grows and develops itself only by means of a symbiosis with social life: it manages to give an accomplished form to consciousness only by means of symbolic interactions. This relationship between the human body and society manifests itself in the form of an ongoing struggle in which the stakes are the internal intersection points – in the heart itself of the cognitive problem – and the external ones – in the languages, in the objects, in all the social forms. It is around these eve...

Postmodern Openings, 2019

This study aims to show that cinema can produce works of art, especially in the current period, one that is still hyper-aesthetized, at least for a significant part of the audience, where watching movies has reached a climax. The approach we have followed in shaping the subject is progressive, drawing upon the theoretical and methodological framework of Aesthetics, Hermeneutics and Continental philosophy. The study begins with the characterization of art films, in order to distinguish them from mainstream films that contain certain artistic aspects and aesthetical features, at least in their shape or form. Afterwards, we shall highlight the features of the film as a work of art, the aesthetic categories that can be found at this level, the developed aesthetic experience, and other relevant theoretical aspects. In order to illustrate the theoretical notions of our study and to reveal the content in a concrete manner, we also included an applied part, in which, through the tools offered by the abovementioned qualitative methodology, we analyzed three films. The interdisciplinary analysis shall reveal the aesthetic language and categories specific to each film as well as how they contain a message of a philosophical nature that can act through certain scenes and sequences as an analogy for various philosophical concepts. The study will end by highlighting some conclusive ideas.

2020

In the past decades, the field of cinema has undergone several transformations. The digital turn increasingly called for new forms of production, distribution, and exhibition, which imply different ways of thinking, doing, and experimenting cinema. These new forms also reduced the gap between cinema to other so-called visual arts. If cinema and visual arts were already in the process of merging, the last years forced the naturalization of thinking in similar theoretical grounds. This special issue aims to be a forum for the discussion of new practices of researching cinema, and the changes in cinema's forms of experience and production.

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.

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

Art in Translation, 2016

Cinémas: Revue d'études cinématographiques, 2008

Recent upheavals in the media landscape raise two major issues. First, how is new media changing the cinematographic dispositif1 in its primordial dimensions: architectural (the conditions for image projection), technological (production, transmission and distribution) and discursive (cutting, editing, etc.)? How does experimentation in the field create new shifts or deviations with respect to the institutional mode of representation? Unlike the dominant cinema, some films reshape cinema’s dispositif by multiplying screens, exploring other durations and intensities, changing the architecture of the screening room or entering into other relations with spectators. In fact, cinema’s dispositif underwent variations such as these during three particular moments of film history, as we will discuss here: the cinema of attractions, expanded cinema and cinema of exhibition,2 whose differences will be analyzed through the notion of dispositif. While technological transformations are obvious i...

2021