Film, ‘twixt text and museum

Oxford Bibliographies Online, 2012

Ruminating on his encounters with cinematic artworks, Bellour makes a case for thinking about the features of an "other cinema" or, in other words, a different kind of cinema using different forms of expression, located in artistic practice. Offers a framework for categorizing these varied works according to elements of their basic structure and the spaces in which they exist.

Art in Translation, 2016

Okno na przeszłość. Szkice z historii wizualnej, t. 4, 2022

The article aims to retrace the fragmentary form of the project Histoire(s) du Cinéma in the light of the dialectical tensions in-between the pictures. Several critical commentaries starting a dialogue with visual arts, i. e, those of Ranciére, Château, Witt, Didi-Huberman will be discussed. The assumption of the “death of cinema” which addresses the shift from cinema to post-cinema in a double helix spread between the insight into the history of the cinema and its reference to visual culture is also advanced. It is congruent with the ideas of Le Musée imaginaire by André Malraux and Musé de Cinéma by Henri Langlois. Godard’s discussion constructs a genealogy of seeing, image-making as historically- determined and philosophically-oriented. In pursuing the above, the author makes also an epistemological diagnosis to render multifarious problems such as the disintegration of the unity of one image by superposition, juxtaposing, overriding, name-dropping, and audiovisual reverberation

PsycCritiques, 2014

What is cinema？" That is how the class started, with an invitation to reflect and write down our own, personal definition. Apparently, a fundamental and pompous question, but only later did we understand that this time, the enquiry had a different reason behind it. The purpose was not to find another way of translating the cinematic experience or set a general background for the following course, but it was meant to determine us to start a self introspection about what we are, how we are and what cinema connotes to us, the young, soon-to-be cineastes.

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...

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

Radical Philosophy, 2015