Film and the Phenomenology of Art: Reappraising Merleau-Ponty on Cinema

as Form, Medium, and Expression

Daniel Yacavone

New Literary History, Volume 47, Number 1, Winter 2016, pp. 159-185 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2016.0001

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/626118

Accessed 18 Apr 2017 13:20 GMT

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

I
n his prescient 1978 essay “The Neglected Tradition of Phenom-
enology 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, phe-
nomenology—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 expres-
sion 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 affect-
and sensation-based paradigms have largely supplanted structuralist-
semiotic, 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, 2016, 47: 159–186

160 new literary history

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 phenomeno-
logical 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 artis-
tic 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 writ-
ings 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 con-
cerns 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 phenomenologi-
cal 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
Jean-Luc Marion, Alain Bonfand, and Michel Henry.6
With this background in mind, and following a brief overview of the two
most influential and historically distinct iterations of phenomenological
film and the phenomenology of art 161

film theory as a necessary preliminary, I will revisit their most significant

shared source. Namely, Merleau-Ponty’s published lecture “The Film and
the New Psychology,” here critically reread in the light of his broader
existential phenomenological conception of art and cinema as art.

“First Generation” Phenomenology of Film

There have been two distinct waves of phenomenology-inspired film
theory, or, in a mid-twentieth-century context, what might be termed
theory-criticism. Each takes as its starting point phenomenology’s at-
tention to describing human experience in its immediate concreteness,
without bringing secondary or extraneous interpretations to bear. The
first wave comprised the books, articles, and reviews of Amédée Ayfre
(a student of Merleau-Ponty and contributor to the legendary French
film journal Cahiers du Cinéma), Henri Agel, Roger Munier, and, to a
degree, André Bazin, among others. It was a product of a specifically
French, postwar conjunction of film theory and criticism with the broad
concerns of existentialism and phenomenology, as two viable responses
to modernity synthesized in the writings of Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul
Sartre, and Gabriel Marcel.7 Both Andrew and Metz have pointed out
that a distinctly phenomenological understanding of narrative film in-
fluenced by Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy arose in part as a response to
the style(s) and themes of postwar Italian neorealist cinema.8 With its
embrace of location shooting, highly mobile camera work, the long take,
a documentary-like concern with place, use of nonprofessional actors,
narrative ellipses, and the conveyance of nondramatic (or “lived”) time,
neorealism, for Ayfre, Agel, Bazin, and others, presented concrete life
experience in a more direct and authentic, as well as uniquely cinematic,
way, in comparison with classical Hollywood productions and popular
French films. Both the viewer’s experience of neorealist films and char-
acters’ experiences of the environments represented within them were
seen to correspond with existential phenomenological characterizations
of the concrete human experience of space, time, and physical objects,
and of the embodied self, as situated among other selves within the
individual’s perceptual “life-world.”
Early phenomenological approaches to cinema shared much with
what today is referred to homogenously as “classical realist film theory,”
prominently including the leading ideas of Bazin. As is well known, he
argued that as a result of the photographic basis of the medium, entail-
ing the camera’s mechanical and optical-chemical generation of moving
images, films, unlike paintings, confront viewers with the actual physical
162 new literary history

world in its visual, spatial-temporal concreteness (if also its psychological

and suggested metaphysical ambiguity).9 Although Ayfre adopts more
explicitly phenomenological terms and reference points than Bazin,
including the pioneering ideas of Edmund Husserl, like Bazin he also
stresses certain, alleged radical differences between cinema and the tradi-
tional visual arts on the basis of its photographic nature. And hence what
cinema alone is seen as able to (best) achieve. Yet as already mentioned
with reference to neorealism, apart from advancing general theoretical
claims concerning the medium, many early phenomenology-informed
writings on cinema were grounded in the interpretation and aesthetic
evaluation of individual films and cinematic styles.
Phenomenology as a body of ideas was seen, in other words, as a use-
ful descriptive and evaluative tool in the arsenal of the theorist-critic in
writings that directly converged with the rise of the politiques des auteurs
(the French “auteur theory”), with its substantial attention to the ca-
reers and signature styles of particular filmmakers. Roberto Rossellini
and Vittorio De Sica, together with other directors, were canonized as
fully fledged creative artists expressing distinct feelings and cinemati-
cally embodied ideas about their subjects and the world through their
stylistic choices in films such as Umberto D, Bicycle Thieves, and Germany
Year Zero. The authorial expression in question was regarded as a major
source of a film’s artistic, thematic, and broadly philosophical value.
Typified by Ayfre’s 1952 article “Neorealism and Phenomenology,” fo-
cused on Rossellini’s cinema interpreted through the lens of Husserl’s
and Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, primary here was how some films are
“phenomenological” with respect to the creative use of the aforemen-
tioned film techniques characteristic of neorealism combined with the
representation of real-life places and subject matter. These were seen to
coalesce into a unique cinematic aesthetic with film form and content
held in a complimentary, seemingly organic bond.10 Such emphasis, of
course, goes well beyond how the film medium in general (including in
the hands of many other directors, including much lesser ones) may be
considered a form of direct access to the primary perceptual life-world
with which existential phenomenology is chiefly concerned.
Despite the common philosophical ground occupied by earlier and
more recent theorists drawing on phenomenology, and a shared attention
to distinctly perceptual and affective aspects of films, a notably different
set of concerns have come to preoccupy many later writers. To a degree,
these concerns likewise reflect certain developments in film form, style,
and technology. Yet they are also driven by more abstract considerations
at a further remove from film practice and evaluative criticism.
film and the phenomenology of art 163

Contemporary Phenomenology of Film and Sobchack’s

The Address of the Eye

Relatively more recent phenomenological approaches to cinema fall

into two broad categories. A more analytic stream of reflection, represent-
ed by the writings of Stanley Cavell and Allan Casebier, continues in the
vein of Bazin’s realism in stressing the inherent perceptual-psychological
immediacy and so-called transparency of the celluloid, cinematographic
image.11 As an object of viewer attention, this medial (or “ontological”)
feature is seen to continue to radically distinguish live-action (celluloid)
cinema from other forms of narrative and visual art and to also take
experiential priority over various copresent fictional, narrative, and
formal-aesthetic dimensions of films. In one way or another, these are
eclipsed by the reality effect of cinematographic representation.
A differently oriented, more “continental” brand of film theory and
philosophy of film has adopted existential phenomenological language
and concepts in its address of certain embodied, affective, and haptic
(i.e., visually tactile) features of films. In some cases explicitly eschew-
ing Bazinian realism, while still retaining a focus on films considered
first and foremost as perceptual objects, the intellectual fulcrum of the
“new” phenomenology of film is Merleau-Ponty’s anti-Cartesian account
of embodied, and hence affective, perception. The latter sets itself in
opposition to the vestigial Cartesianism and Kantianism (and therefore
idealism) of Husserl’s original transcendental phenomenology. Together
with Sobchack, such recent authors as Jennifer Barker, Jane Stadler,
Hunter Vaughan, Daniel Frampton, and Laura U. Marks are among
the large number of film theorists who draw on Merleau-Ponty’s work
in this vein. The general discourse in question is often presented as an
alternative to semiotic, psychoanalytic, narratological, and cognitivist ap-
proaches to cinematic perception and meaning, which are all centered
on the represented and narrative contents of the fiction film. In the
case of cognitive film theory, for example, this entails analysis of acts
of viewer imagination, emotional response, and mental representation
conceived in empirical psychological terms rather than phenomenologi-
cal ones. No less than its rivals, however, Sobchack’s phenomenology, for
example, also purports to be a fundamental, bottom-up approach to the
experience of films and the comprehension of their meaning (AE 5–7).
More than any other single work, it is Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye
that has served, in Stadler’s words, “to define the field” of contemporary
phenomenology of film, with its dissemination having led to “an explo-
sion of research on affective responses to cinema” and related ideas of
cinematic perception and embodiment.12 Sobchack largely rejects the
164 new literary history

French film-phenomenological writings of the late 1940s and 1950s on the

basis that, like both realist conceptions of cinema and Husserl’s transcen-
dental phenomenology, they are still tied to an untenable “idealist” and
“essentialist” view of the human subject (or mind) existing somehow apart
from the natural world (AE 29). On her view, they thus fail to properly
recognize the human body as the fundamental source and vehicle of
perception, as theorized in Merleau-Ponty’s major revision of Husserl’s
original phenomenological project. Such recognition leads Sobchack to
critique what she refers to as the “film-as-frame,” “film-as-window,” and
“film-as-mirror” analogies prevalent in film theory, which are associated
with formalist, realist, and psychoanalytic positions, respectively. All posit
a film as a “static viewed object” that is merely presented to viewers for
their inspection, not relevantly different in this way from a painting or
still photograph (AE 14–15). She argues, to the contrary, that all films
regardless of style are prereflectively perceived as viewing subjects (or
quasi-subjects). Complete with nonhuman material “bodies,” they are
experienced as enacting their own dynamic perceptual and expressive
processes that replicate those of individuals as conscious, embodied
agents and are perceived accordingly. Every film, on Sobchack’s view, “du-
plicates the structure and activity (although not necessarily the particular
content and significance) of its spectator’s vision,” through the aegis of
the technology-enabled reproductive capacity of the camera-projection
apparatus as an extension of embodied human perception (AE 136).
To briefly unpack these arguments presented here in condensed form,
Sobchack regards basic conditions of natural, embodied perception
understood in Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenological terms as
being central to the experience of two-dimensional films. The working
assumption is that all live-action cinema simulates the conditions and
response mechanisms of the sensible world-at-large. On Sobchack’s
interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s model of perception, this entails the
self’s embodied and always reciprocal perceptual engagement with other
selves and inanimate objects. For instance, by virtue of the camera’s pres-
ence and movement in the actual physical space of a film’s shooting, as
concomitant with the generation of the moving image, cinematic space
is experienced as more or less continuous with the actual physical space
of the viewer who perceptually inhabits the virtual filmic space much like
any other. However, and clearly departing from earlier phenomenologi-
cal views, Sobchack maintains that on the basis of experiential features
of the medium and its technology, as often reinforced by camera view
and movement, what equally defines the embodied viewer’s perceptual
experience of a film is its self-like and “perceiving” nature. A film, or
more precisely its imputed “embodied” filmic consciousness, is experi-
film and the phenomenology of art 165

enced as acting within, and having visible intentions toward, the objects
that make up its (own) represented world; it views people, places, and
things, and the spaces in which they are situated, while viewers view it
viewing, as it were.
Sobchack’s identification of the camera “eye,” in conjunction with
the projector-screen combination, with the vision of a living subject is
anchored in a larger, all-encompassing “functional analogy” between
the suggested material and prereflectively experienced presence of a
film—its “body”—and the human body. 13 Films and seeing bodies are
both engaged in a “commutation of perception and expression” on
the basis of similar perceptual activity toward objects. This occurs on a
functional level, irrespective of obvious material and instrumental dif-
ferences between films and embodied agents (AE 220). For all of these
reasons, among others, Sobchack advocates replacing a conception of
cinematic experience rooted in the idea of filmmaker(s) as expressing
subject(s) with that of a film itself as an “expressing subject and object.”
Indeed, most if not all other aspects of her phenomenology of film
relate back to this radical proposition, which has the ancillary effect of
marginalizing significant features of a film as a created artifact, and of
certain consequences of its status as such.
My aim here is not to analyze and evaluate Sobchack’s complex, highly
technical, and voluminous study in detail. As its continued influence at-
tests, The Address of the Eye contains valuable insights concerning cinematic
experience and phenomenology as both a philosophical movement
and method. One problem with her project, however, from the specific
standpoint of my present concerns—and, as we will see, a number of
Merleau-Ponty’s—is that rather than being presented as one useful way
of conceiving film viewing experience, with its undoubted singular fea-
tures (including a powerful perceptual and affective immersion in filmic
space on the part of viewers), it is instead offered as a viable replacement
for, and in direct competition with all “expressivist,” “aesthetic,” and
“formalist” views. These are seen to unduly reduce any narrative film to
the status of an “aesthetic and expressive object” of consciousness alone
(AE 20).14 Yet despite its nominally seeking to embrace a film as a work
of art, at least in some experiential senses, Sobchack’s study is primarily
a phenomenology of the celluloid film medium and its technology. It
describes aspects of cinema that, if granted at all, are pre-aesthetic, even
pre-formal, as well as pre-semantic (i.e., below the threshold of narra-
tive comprehension, and the recognition and appreciation of non- or
extranarrative meaning contents). The model of film viewing offered
is unable to account for most of the artistic features of films, including
those that may be a significant part of their direct perception and af-
166 new literary history

fective experience. As I will explain further, however, and contrary to

what some critics of contemporary phenomenological approaches may
suggest, this and related limitations are not a necessary consequence of
the adoption of a generally “phenomenological” perspective nor do they
correspond to Merleau-Ponty’s own arguments about cinema.
In order to fully appreciate these last observations, it is necessary to
recognize a categorical distinction between the film medium (or media,
to encompass digital as well as celluloid filmmaking) and film form, in
its plurality and diversity, and as cutting across various moving-image
media and formats (e.g. live-action film, animation, experimental film,
etc.). A moving image medium has many uses, values, and attendant
modes of attention, which may be neither narrative nor aesthetic, for
instance. By cinematic “form,” on the other hand, I mean to refer to
that total, singular audiovisual structure created by a film’s maker(s),
which shapes and channels the presentation, experience, and interpre-
tation of perceptual, narrative, and thematic content. Such a structure
often also evidences the style of a school or movement (e.g. film noir,
neorealism) or that commonly attributed to an individual filmmaker
(e.g. Hitchcock’s style, or Almodóvar’s). While certainly not confined
to it, a substantial part of the aesthetic character of a film resides in the
perceptual experience of “form” in this sense. If it is accepted (a) that
cinema is or can be art, (b) that art is a product of both expressive and
communicative intentions, broadly understood, and (c) that phenom-
enology is in some sense an approach to the understanding of objects of
consciousness (often referred to as “intentional” objects), then there is
a need for a dedicated phenomenology of cinematic-artistic form and
expression—including an existentially oriented one that builds on the
foundation of relevant phenomenological studies of photography, paint-
ing, literature, and other arts (and aesthetic experience in general)—as
well as phenomenologies of celluloid and digital film media as media.
Rather than films as ordinary or natural perceptual objects or mere
manifestations of a given medium, the former takes as its appropriate
subject the relatively more immediate aspects and so-called lived experi-
ence of films as artworks, i.e., intentionally made and expressive artifacts.
Even if necessarily overlapping at many points, I am suggesting that
these phenomenologies may, and should, remain distinct subjects and
inquiries and be neither confused nor conflated. A more convincing
description of the full (i.e., not only empirical) perceptual experience
of film as art rests upon recognizing such a difference in aim, and in
pursuing its manifold implications. As we will now see, Merleau-Ponty
was not only sensitive to this basic form/medium distinction and its
implications, but it is assumed from the outset in his discussions of
cinema, art, and phenomenology.
film and the phenomenology of art 167

Rereading “Film and the New Psychology”

The “new psychology” Merleau-Ponty refers to in the title of his 1945

lecture delivered at l’Institute des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques in
Paris (later published as an essay in Sens et Non-Sens) is Gestalt psychol-
ogy. Founded upon the relation between perceptual figure and ground,
the early twentieth-century school stresses the active movement from
initial perception to comprehension of phenomena, from “non-sense”
to “sense,” in Merleau-Ponty’s terms. This is an ingrained movement
of attention from the whole of a perceptual field to specific parts or
objects within it, as much as from part to whole. Like art theorist and
psychologist of perception Rudolf Arnheim, whose canonical formalist
as distinct from realist account of film (laid out in his 1932 treatise Film
as Art) was also deeply influenced by the Gestalt paradigm, Merleau-
Ponty takes Gestalt theory to support the idea that the external world
as actively perceived is not a matter of building a picture up from dis-
crete elements of sense data, as is argued or simply assumed in much
of classical psychology and empiricist philosophy. Instead, it is an act of
recognizing implicit patterns and orders. Present outside of the mind,
rather than constructed by it, these are perceived directly, via a grasp of
the global interrelations amongst objects and their surface appearances.
Such objects include, of course, oneself as a body, and other embodied
selves as mobile actors. Recognizing that meaning is often implicit in the
whole of a perceptual field and is actualized via the process of prereflec-
tive attention to it, the new psychology “re-educates us in how to see
this world which we touch at every point of our being,” i.e., the actually
experienced “lived world.”15 The re-education Merleau-Ponty describes
is one he regards cinema as both illustrating and potentially, at least,
being able to effect in its own virtual way. The reality a cinematic work
may help its viewer reconnect with through audio-visual form is part of
what he calls the “aesthetic” aspect of things (FNP 58). This emerges
when, as appearances, the perceptual form and structure of objects are
attentionally divorced from their purely practical functions in everyday
perception and use.
When considered in perceptual terms, a film is a “temporal gestalt,”
as distinct from a visual percept or mere sequence of such (FNP 54).
It is an intentionally organized whole that changes and moves in time,
through which a meaning dimension emerges successively, and as a re-
sult of the cumulative and iterative relation between parts or elements.
With reference to what Merleau-Ponty regards as a potential feature of
art in general—the “joy” of which “lies in its showing how something
takes on meaning”—he writes that in cinema, “the idea is presented in
168 new literary history

a nascent state and emerges from the temporal structure of the film as
it does from the coexistence of the parts of a painting” (FNP 57). As a
basic illustration he points to Lev Kuleshov’s famous editing experiments
(mistakenly credited to V. I. Pudovkin), and the so-called Kuleshov ef-
fect, which demonstrates that the significance of a film shot “depends
on what precedes it in the movie, and this succession of scenes creates a
new reality which is not merely the sum of its parts” (FNP 54). Merleau-
Ponty argues further that what is most significantly unique to cinema
among the arts—the “original expression for the motion picture”—is
not the moving photographic image in-itself but the specific “choice and
grouping” of cinematic representations (FNP 54). In other words, he
assigns clear priority to creative editing, or montage, together with what
is subsumed under the French term découpage as the total shooting plan
or script of a film, as the foundation of film narrative. This pertains, for
instance, to the order of shots and sequences and the length of time of
each as calibrated by the filmmaker (FNP 55). In a sound film that uses
sound in a creative way rather than as a mere appendage to the visual,
the montage of visual images and sequences is interwoven with an in
principle perceptually coequal auditory montage of sound and speech.
More generally, the perceptual form of a sound film is profoundly
audiovisual, a symbiotic union of what is seen and heard. In fact, and
contrasting with the overriding, sometimes exclusive, concern with
the image alone and with visual space in a good deal of contemporary
phenomenology of film, more than half of Merleau-Ponty’s discussion
of cinema in “The Film and the New Psychology” is devoted to its audi-
tory dimension.
The “expressive force” of montage when creatively employed is, in
turn, its “ability to make us sense the coexistence, simultaneity of lives,”
i.e., of fictional characters, operating in “the same world.” This is cast as
analogous to the coexistence of selves in the perceived and felt life-world
of actual (noncinematic) experience (FNP 55). Just like a “conscious-
ness which is thrown into the world,” which Merleau-Ponty, following
the existentialism of Heidegger, conceives as the foremost character of
the human condition, a narrative film presents an interpersonal real-
ity the meaning of which (if it is to exist at all) is strongly audio-visual,
emergent, and holistic (FNP 58). Sometimes also mirroring the perceiv-
ing and interpreting activities of characters within films with respect to
their represented world(s) (as we might add), each viewer must seek
to understand this version of reality on the basis of what, from the
standpoint of each moment in time, is limited, incomplete informa-
tion. This cinematic dynamic of perception as fundamentally in search
of (better) comprehension or the “sense” of appearances—including
film and the phenomenology of art 169

what translates into the narrative comprehension of events as described

and analyzed by numerous nonphenomenological film theorists such as
David Bordwell and Edward Branigan—is seen to reflect the inherently
perspectival nature of the embodied self’s always limited perceptual
“take,” confined as it is to a single body and spatiotemporal vantage
point. Further, and with its own similarity to perceptual and affective
being in the three-dimensional life-world, the unfolding, perceptual
reality of people, places, and objects a film creates in the consciousness
of the viewer is powerfully rhythmic to lesser or greater degrees. In
addition to the visual rhythm of composition and in-frame movement,
which Merleau-Ponty does not discuss, this includes the duration of
shots and sequences, supplemented by the rhythms of sound, music,
and speech, all of which he singles out as characteristically cinematic
and yet qualitatively unique to every film. In contrast to an imaginary
or conceptual object, a cinematic work is for Merleau-Ponty a rhythmic
audiovisual experience that conveys story and drama “directly” to the
senses, and in this respect is “not thought; it is perceived” (FNP 58). The
fiction film does not, in other words, rely wholly, or even primarily, on
the audience’s imagination in order to come to concrete imagistic life,
in marked contrast to a novel or poem, for example.
Notice that unlike in Sobchack’s phenomenology of film, the specific
analogies Merleau-Ponty draws throughout the text between the elemen-
tary conditions of human, embodied perception and the cinema is not
founded on a film’s or the camera’s, “body,” “view,” “eye,” or “vision.”
Neither any of these, nor in-frame movement or mise-en-scène, specifi-
cally, are mentioned (even if attention to these last two visual-spatial
aspects of film form may well have lent greater, more detailed support to
the lecture’s main claims). The existential phenomenological analogies
offered are wholly anchored, rather, in a film conceived of as a profoundly
perceptual and temporal, as well as narrative, unity-in-multiplicity. This
aesthetic unity, including an “intersubjective” perceptual and narrative
integration of multiple character perspectives and represented experi-
ences, owes its most significant meaning and expression to the creative
use of montage as distinct from merely functional editing, i.e., editing
sufficient for the creation of a coherent and comprehensible narrative
alone.
Like Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Pudovkin, and others before him
who also associate the full artistic potential of film with the combinatory
spatial-temporal powers of editing—such emphasis being the defining
feature of the early Soviet formalist film theory with which he appears
to have been at least somewhat familiar and references approvingly—
for Merleau-Ponty the essence of cinematic art is not the indexical and
170 new literary history

iconic character of the photographic image (in C. S. Peirce’s semiotic

terms) in all its life-likeness, as it is in Bazin’s realism. Nor is it to be
mainly located in any visual-spatial verisimilitude or illusionism—or,
indeed, any features of basic cinematographic representation, as such.
As Eugene Kaelin has observed, Merleau-Ponty pointedly extends his
general criticism of traditional mimetic conceptions of both literature
and painting to any understanding of cinema that likewise mistakes
“the resemblance relation” of visual or poetic images to the world for
the primary meaning and expression of works. He instead strongly
disassociates cinema from the simulation of ordinary, lived experience
and avant la lettre the related, problematically partial “mimetic” or “eye-
witness” conception of cinematic representation and narration, which
Bordwell, among other theorists, has notably critiqued.16 Addressing the
point directly, Merleau-Ponty observes that whatever “basic realism” the
medium involves, this “does not mean . . . that the movies are fated to
let us see and hear what we would see and hear if we were present at
the events being related” (FNP 57).
Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye devotes only two pages to “The Film
and the New Psychology,” specifically (AE 164–65). Following this prec-
edent, whether intentionally or not, other prominent contemporary
phenomenological studies of cinema that are to differing degrees also
built upon the conceptual foundations of Merleau-Ponty’s existential
phenomenology likewise—and surprisingly—either do not engage with
this text at all, or do so in a cursory fashion.17 Moreover, when the lecture
is discussed there has been a general tendency to regard it as simply and
nonproblematically in keeping with contemporary views of cinematic
experience partly built upon from Merleau-Ponty’s non-film- or art-
focused writings (e.g. The Phenomenology of Perception), such as Sobchack’s.
Leaving most of the above-mentioned features of Merleau-Ponty’s
characterizations of cinema as medium and as art uncommented upon,
Sobchack regards his film lecture as powerfully reaffirming Merleau-
Ponty’s view of the “human” and “animated” nature of “all technology”
including cinema (AE 165). Yet there is little or no textual support for
this reading. Even if in accord with Merleau-Ponty’s general suggestions
elsewhere, as applied to cinema this appears instead to largely reflect
Sobchack’s own, very different and more contemporary conception of
the “embodied” nature not only of a film as a visual spectacle but also of
its making and viewing technology. In fact, as a close reading of the text
bears out, what is instead quite explicit is Merleau-Ponty’s recurring stress
on cinematic form, and on film art as fundamentally distinct from, and in
various ways transcending, firstly, the material, technological, and most basic
reproductive/representational conditions of the film medium, and secondly,
film and the phenomenology of art 171

some widespread narrative filmmaking techniques and styles that are

wedded to these conditions rather than seeking to move beyond them
(both of these points are further emphasized in a later lecture, “Art and
the World of Perception”). Indeed, his argument entails that artistically
creative filmmakers (whose works are of phenomenological interest)
may find it necessary to work against, as much as with, that which the
medium and its technology alone provides or appears to encourage.
These ideas are mostly directly expressed in the summary of the rela-
tion between cinema and existential phenomenology (in essence, his
own philosophical program) that concludes the lecture. Merleau-Ponty
distinguishes between artistically good, what he calls “real films”—which
build on the capacities and aspects noted above and in this way move
in the “same direction” as existential phenomenology—and “bad mov-
ies,” which do not. Consistent with the form/medium distinction,
the continuing importance of which has been noted, this amounts in
Merleau-Ponty’s view to a clear contrast between all cinema, regarded as a
“technical instrument” (“l’instrument technique”) and some films’ formal
“reinvention” of “the medium” (“comme inventé une seconde fois,” in his
exact words). When realized, the latter is a product and achievement of
what is referred to as the specifically “artistic will” (“volonté artistique”)
of the creative filmmaker as something imposed on the medium and
its technology (FNP 59). What is affirmed here and throughout the
lecture clearly falls under the heading of the artistic approach and style
of a filmmaker that a given cinematic work instantiates, makes manifest
in the consciousness of the audience through the creation of singular
expressive-aesthetic form(s). Through such forms (which Merleau-Ponty
describes as possessing both “musical” and “poetic” aspects), in tandem
with story and character, a particularly human and “existential” repre-
sentation of lived experience may be presented to viewers.
Before proceeding, it may be useful to briefly summarize the main
features of the two conspicuously divergent, indeed, almost diametri-
cally opposed, film-phenomenological positions under consideration.
For Sobchack, writing in the name of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, the
existential phenomenological nature of cinema is in one way or another
strongly associated with (a) the cinematographic image, including all
its perceptual and psychological realism and lifelikeness; (b) the shoot-
ing stage of filmmaking; (c) the visual in-itself; (d) cinematographi-
cally presented space; (e) camera view and movement, together with
mise-en-scène (which Sobchack equates with cinematic “being” as her
primary existential phenomenological concern, in contrast to cinematic
“language,” which is identified with editing); and finally (f) a film’s
suggested dual experiential presence as not only a visible object but a
172 new literary history

perceiving (“viewing”) subject. This last-mentioned presence does not

include the viewer’s experience of the filmmaker’s artistic expression,
subjectivity, personality, or style, as conveyed by a film, or attendant
aesthetic realities as customarily theorized, which are bracketed out of
the phenomenological equation completely (AE 17).
Merleau-Ponty, by contrast, directly associates the existential phenom-
enological possibilities of cinema with (a) the creative and transforma-
tive use of montage, and thus (b) the editing stage of filmmaking; (c)
a fundamentally audiovisual presentation to the senses of viewers (in
the case of the sound film); (d) presented and experienced time; and
(e) overall cinematic rhythm—as all resulting in a highly (and neces-
sarily) stylized presented world, “finer grained” and “more exact” than
actual reality, and constituting (f) a perceptual, expressive, and distinctly
aesthetic object-experience as the direct product of a filmmaker’s artistic
vision, choices, and intentions (including those related to narrative)
(FNP 58). Thus, rather than jettisoning all substantial reference to
the “artist as expressing subject” and “his or her style and manner of
being through cinematic representation,” in Sobchack’s words and as
she advocates in The Address of the Eye, Merleau-Ponty underlines their
experiential reality on the part of viewers, as well as their primary exis-
tential-phenomenological relevance (AE 9). He rightly recognizes, for
instance, that it is not simply the case that owing to the technological
and perceptual conditions of the medium (or apparatus) that cinema
is automatically able to embody or represent processes of “lived percep-
tion” that constitute the life-world of an individual. In line with Ayfre’s
ideas, expounded with reference to Rossellini’s neorealist films (and no
doubt influenced by Merleau-Ponty’s lecture), this phenomenological
meaning or expression is instead an aesthetic potential of cinema, which
certain features of the medium and its technology certainly may aid but,
by definition, neither determine nor guarantee. No less than in the cre-
ative use of any media, this phenomenological capacity is regarded as a
function of style and artistic intentions. Therefore when and if certain
films possess such phenomenological and existential significance, they
do so as a highly valuable but second-order feature.
Merleau-Ponty, like Dufrenne after him, valorizes the recognizable
creative expression of individual filmmakers as intending artists not
somehow at the expense of existential phenomenology but in its name.
In other words, contrary to what Sobchack maintains, there is simply
no necessary conflict between a conception of cinema that stresses
aesthetic form, personal style, and individual expression, on the one
hand, and the view held by Merleau-Ponty, Sobchack, and many others
that human perception (including the perception of films) is radically
film and the phenomenology of art 173

perspectival and embodied, on the other. A cornerstone of many versions

of the “auteur theory” of cinema, but by no means only relevant to it,
such creative form, style, and authorial expression (sometimes translat-
ing into a personal “vision” of reality) is, as previously mentioned, also
precisely what is acknowledged and celebrated in some first-generation
French phenomenological film theory and criticism, e.g. with reference
to certain neorealist directors and styles.18
Evoking Dufrenne’s metaphorical description of an aesthetic object
of consciousness as a “quasi-subject”—in some ways existing halfway be-
tween the subjectivity of the artist(s) who created it and the objectivity of
the artwork as an empirical reality in the physical world—both Jennifer
Barker and Sobchack (who also cites Dufrenne as a precedent for her
arguments [AE 142]) stress that this entails a “dialogue” and “dialectic”
between the viewer and the experienced film as itself a “perceiver,” “body,”
“object-subject,” and “an other.”19 Yet as both Dufrenne and Merleau-
Ponty correctly recognize, and reiterate, this is instead a fundamentally
three-term lived relation. It exists between two (or more) actual human
subjects—the viewer and the filmmaker(s)—and one symbolic and com-
municative, as well as also highly expressive, object, i.e., the cinematic
work of art as and when experienced. The subjects in question are
brought together and are profoundly invested in the work, on one side
through the acts of a film’s creation (including intentions and aesthetic
choices), and on the other, through the percipient and mental acts of
a film’s experience. One form that the relation between the expressing
filmmaker and the receptive viewer may take is the direct experience of
the unique durational and affective unity-in-multiplicity Dufrenne calls
the “expressed world” of a film, experienced as an integral part of its
larger, creator-owned and creator-revealing “aesthetic world” (e.g. the
expressive totality or “world” of Vertigo as a cinematic work, as distinct
from and yet also including, the fictional world that is represented in
Hitchcock’s film).20 This is the global, affective corollary of the singu-
lar formal-perceptual Gestalt that Merleau-Ponty regards some films as
presenting. And it is one prominent way in which the artistic subjectivity
or personality of the work’s maker (or makers) is experientially present
in all that we see and hear in some films—whether or not this is the
object of relatively more conscious reflection during a film’s viewing.21
A major aspect of all cultural life and a part of what makes us hu-
man, artistic expression, regardless of its medial and formal vehicle, is
a notoriously ramified, deeply mysterious phenomenon. Yet it is quite
clear that characterizations of aesthetic objects as quasi-subjects aside—
and as common experiences of paintings and literary works roughly
analogous to those that Dufrenne and Merleau-Ponty describe with
174 new literary history

reference to cinema also suggest—beyond the filmmaker (or makers)

and the viewer, no other subjects or “bodies” of experience, literal or
metaphorical, film-technological or material, are required in theory or
practice for these expressive dynamics. Nor in a cinematic context do
they ultimately derive from filmmaking and film viewing technology (or
the cinematic “apparatus”) in and of itself, however much these may
involve and emulate embodied human perception.

Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Art (and Cinema)

“The Film and the New Psychology” is closely related to the argu-
ments of both “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1945) and “Eye and Mind” (1961),
two major contributions to general aesthetics and art history and theory
that bookend Meleau-Ponty’s philosophical career. The film lecture also
substantially overlaps with a 1948 lecture for broadcast radio, “Art and
the World of Perception.” It is worth pursuing these seldom discussed
intertextual connections for the further light they shed on Merleau-
Ponty’s phenomenology of art and cinema’s place within it, and as
adding greater depth and detail to the specific ideas and arguments to
which I have thus far drawn attention.
In “Art and the World of Perception,” cinema is discussed alongside
the traditional arts, with the two notably drawn together rather than
separated; for example, on the basis of what is unique to the medium
and its technology. Merleau-Ponty identifies two important similarities
between a visual artwork and any other object of “lived perception,” prior
to any intellectual abstraction from their actual experience. Firstly, and
most obviously, no linguistic description is an adequate substitute for
either the artwork or the direct perception of any object, and, secondly,
with respect to that direct experience, it is impossible to “separate things
from their way of appearing.”22 Of course, in one literal sense, since a
film must be played or projected in order to be experienced, it may ap-
pear differently to viewers depending on how and where it is viewed and
what technologies are used in the process. But in the phenomenological
and aesthetic context of Merleau-Ponty’s reflections, appearance harkens
back to esthesis, in something like the original Greek sense of the term,
as well as the intentional “aboutness” of phenomenological conscious-
ness, as a matter of the concrete presencing of mental objects and their
various aspects. This sense of appearance encompasses the inviolable
concreteness, singularity, and self-sufficiency of artistic representations as
qualities shared with other objects of perception but notably lacking from
abstract and “arbitrary” linguistic signs—for example, the words of liter-
film and the phenomenology of art 175

ary texts. Such immediately appearing presentations include paintings,

as well as photographic and cinematic images. Like the perceptions of
all sensible things in the three-dimensional world, the meanings of such
artifactual compositions are also “inseparable from the sign” itself.23 In
other words, they do not reside in signified content as wholly abstracted
from their given perceptual forms.
Yet there are also crucial differences between aesthetic and nonaes-
thetic objects and phenomena relating to basic, experiential features of
our perceptions of them. Approvingly quoting cubist painter Georges
Braque, and also foreshadowing Dufrenne’s later phenomenology of
artwork worlds, Merleau-Ponty observes that far more than a mimetic,
visual duplication of (represented) objects in the world, a painting is
a sui generis “pictorial event.” As such, it presents an artistic “world
of its own” (AWP 71). In our specifically “aesthetic” encounter with a
representational painting, our attention is not (only) sent back to the
“natural object(s)” in the world that are represented. Rather, it is held
by the canvas as a self-sufficient spectacle, the form-embodied meaning
of which goes well beyond representation and visual resemblance in
and of itself. This aesthetic world of a work is profoundly removed from
the arena of practical action and instrumentality. Crucially, however, it
is also removed from the natural, prereflective perceptual life-world of
human beings. In fact, it is only by virtue of art’s reflective, physically
and symbolically mediated distance from the ubiquitous perceptual
processes of actual bodily experience that constitute the concrete world
of three-dimensional space and time, in which we move and act, that
some works are able to foreground this primary, prereflective world
and its conditions.
In presenting such novel, supramimetic perceptual and affective
worlds of their own by means of forms that shape the perception of their
represented content, some paintings, Merleau-Ponty maintains, bring
to conscious awareness a great deal that the “lazy viewer”—presumably
meaning the aesthetically uninformed or interested one—fails to see or
comprehend.24 Namely, they may bring to reflective attention the dy-
namic ways in which the human self concretely interacts with perceptual
objects in the three-dimensional world. Included among such works are
Cézanne’s paintings. In their representation of familiar objects as if seen
from different positions at the same time (among other deliberate stylistic
strategies), Cézanne’s paintings do not show how they look at a given
moment, in a single view, but how we construct what we regard as their
independent reality from an indefinite, dynamic series of perspectival,
spatiotemporally distinct views. Like other modern painters following
his example, Cézanne thus paints subjective phenomena, events of the
176 new literary history

natural perception of things in the world (rendered objective) rather

than things apart from, or following, this primary perception. His works
thereby thrust us “into the presence of the world of lived experience”
in a way not otherwise available to the intellect, which habitually moves
away from concrete perception and its processes via its more abstract
and abstracting symbolic modes of operation (AWP 69).
Logically implicit in Merleau-Ponty’s argument is that as profound,
revolutionary, and influential as Cézanne’s achievement may be, it rep-
resents but one way, by one artist, and through one style of painting—and
in one art form and media—of drawing attention to often-overlooked
aspects of the perceptual world in which we live but which are often
hidden “beneath all the sediment of knowledge and social living” (AWP
69). Through deliberate artistic strategies resulting in an individual style,
Cézanne’s art, like Picasso’s and Braque’s, on Merleau-Ponty’s view, ac-
complishes this revelation only via a process of distancing itself and its
viewers from the over-familiar quotidian world, as the product of the
abstracting intellect, practical intentions and functions, and attendant
habitual modes of perception. More conventional artistic representa-
tions, on the other hand, merely mirror and reaffirm this abstract reality
rather than challenging it. The defamiliarization Merleau-Ponty speaks
of, to evoke a generally similar idea in the theory of art and literature,
allows genuine visual artworks to “return” its viewers in virtual fashion
to the world of lived appearances itself. Of course, this always occurs,
as it must, on a higher or second-order aesthetic and symbolic level oc-
casioned by the work’s formal and artistic transformation of quotidian
reality and requiring relevant knowledge on the part of the viewer to
recognize it. In other words, the dynamic in question surpasses what may
be grasped by perception alone, whether for these purposes perception
is defined in existential phenomenological terms as “embodied percep-
tion,” or any others.
To extend a clear line of thought present in Merleau-Ponty’s cinema
lecture: if more conventional mimetic and perspectival painting both
begins with and remains an abstraction from lived, perceptual experi-
ence, so too are many conventional films, including those that emulate
traditional pictorial conventions in the aid of visual illusionism, content
to offer a highly rationalized and idealized two-dimensional semblance or
replica of three-dimensional reality as already familiar and known. Other,
more ambitious cinematic works, in contrast, highlight the dynamic ways
in which the natural environment is prerationally perceptually and bodily
experienced, and thus comes to be known (in human terms) at all. All
this may be understood as a matter of creative filmmakers achieving in
cinema something akin to philosophers’ and theorists’ highly conscious
film and the phenomenology of art 177

application of the so-called phenomenological reduction of conscious

experience to its actual, prereflective constituents in the interest of at-
tempting to better describe it. In so doing, the artistic filmmaker, like
the painter, may present “what would, without him, remain walled up
in the separate life of each consciousness,” as Merleau-Ponty writes in
“Cézanne’s Doubt.”25
The main message here is that, rather than constituting an exception,
narrative cinema made and experienced as art largely shares in these
same dynamics as modern painting. Films, on this view, may also create,
by different means, such an artificial model—in effect, a single complex
artistic symbol (rather than communicative sign)—for fundamental
processes of “lived perception.”26 In working to the same end as some
paintings, a film can achieve a return of consciousness to a more funda-
mental, prerational, and basic perception-forming level of experience.
But, as must be stressed, the consciousness that is thereby returned to
prereflective consciousness and perceptual experience through cin-
ematic art is (and must be) a reflective, knowledgeable, and sensitive
consciousness, capable of recognizing and appreciating this dynamic
and its significance. On the filmmaker’s part this return is accomplished
through the innovative formal treatment of represented objects in ways
that the medium allows. But of course the medium does not itself either
provide or dictate this treatment: since, if it did, all paintings and films
would automatically subserve this function, whereas of course, and as
Merleau-Ponty emphasizes, they are only a select minority of all the films
(and paintings) made.
As also discussed in the late-published essay “Eye and Mind,” in any
medium and art form, creating such a phenomenologically relevant
and lived perception-reflecting symbolization (as part and parcel of a
work’s larger aesthetically meaningful, expressive significance) requires
a great deal of creative effort, intuition, and imagination on the part of
artists. To find an artistic means of presenting a represented content,
i.e., an object, an event, a story, that challenges the abstraction from
perceptual experience characterizing the so-called natural but in fact
highly abstract(ing) attitude of much practical and intellectual activ-
ity—and simultaneously to overturn many of the conventional forms and
techniques of illusionistic representation that replicate and further reify
this attitude—requires strenuous labor in the field of the aesthetic. Such
is the labor that Merleau-Ponty chronicles so effectively in “Cézanne’s
Doubt,” rightly regarded as among the most illuminating explorations
of the hard-won development of modern (post-impressionist) painting.
With specific reference to cinema, “Art and the World of Perception”
offers further detail and support for this view, since a great deal of stress
178 new literary history

is placed on what is common to potentially all forms of artistic creation

and aesthetic perception. Here, yet again, we find the strong suggestion
that film art is marked by a number of the same transmedial features and
work-occasioned modes of perception/attention to be found in some
modern painting, poetry, and music, as these pertain to form, rhythm,
feeling, etc. Merleau-Ponty observes that owing to first the demands of
the star system, resulting in a general over-reliance on plot and dialogue,
secondly, a relatively empty “sensationalism” of visual technique, e.g.
merely showing off certain capacities of the camera and lenses, and
thirdly, the prevalent motivation to achieve popular and commercial
success as opposed to the encouragement of genuine artistic and life-
world-revealing form and expression, few films deserve to be regarded
as “works of art from start to finish” (AWP 73). Yet it remains possible
(even if institutionally difficult) to create such meritorious works, he
argues, the goals of which are to reconnect viewers with relatively less
abstract, rationalized, and utilitarian modes of seeing and feeling.
In an obvious echo of his earlier film lecture, Merleau-Ponty argues
that well beyond any a priori, inherent conditions of the film medium,
including specific technological ones, the primary criterion for cinematic
art consists in the successful creation of a distinctly aesthetic cohesive-
ness and expressive holism of formal and temporal (rhythmic) structure
(AWP 73–74). Like Eisenstein (especially in his later writings), together
with Dufrenne, Merleau-Ponty suggests that what distinguishes genuine
artistic films from nonartistic ones is the creation of a total, original, and
compelling “rhythm.” Both perceived and powerfully felt, this rhythm
serves as a conduit for a specifically aesthetic expression that defines the
work in question. In Merleau-Ponty’s chosen, and rather general terms,
the choice of shots, their ordering, and the variable length of a film’s
episodes as aesthetic elements manipulated by filmmakers helps to cre-
ate a “radiant image” rooted in a particular, total “cinematographical
rhythm,” itself founded upon, and expressed through, a felt “unity and
necessity of the temporal progression” (AWP 73). As in all art, there is
no recipe for creating this perceptual and expressive unity and sense
of formal necessity, which resists rational definition, and depends upon
the experimentation and intuition of filmmakers. Here it is worth not-
ing that although Sobchack continually stresses what a film “is doing in
the world and what it is making of space,” and rightly suggests that a
film exists for the viewer in an “act of becoming,” there is little discus-
sion in her treatise of what a film “makes of” time and rhythm (AE 60).
Indeed, with some recent exceptions, the experience of cinematic time
per se is notably and surprisingly under-analyzed in the contemporary
phenomenology of film.27 Yet if cinema is a profoundly, even paradig-
film and the phenomenology of art 179

matically, temporal art, as many critics, theorists, and filmmakers have

long suggested, it is a major and proper subject of any phenomenology
of film, including an aesthetically focused one. This is certainly not lost
on Merleau-Ponty, who puts both temporal duration and rhythm at the
center of his phenomenological reflections on cinema.
The expressive cohesion and integration of different elements in
the film work, with respect to montage, rhythm, and part-whole rela-
tions of which Merleau-Ponty speaks, is quite similar to the so-called
organic form as well as beauty that has been traditionally regarded as
partly constitutive of aesthetic interest and value since at least the eigh-
teenth century. It is central in Kant’s model of the interlinked relations
amongst aesthetic form, perception, and judgment, for instance, and a
prominent part of various post-Kantian and Romantic conceptions of
art. In a cinematic context, specifically, these ideas concerning form,
temporality, and literal and represented rhythm as defining aspects of
aesthetic experience forwarded in “Art and the World of Perception”
clearly overlap with descriptions of film as art found in both classical
formalist film theory (including in Eisentein’s later writings, as already
noted, and in the theories of Rudolf Arnheim and Hugo Münsterberg),
as well some aesthetically focused postclassical accounts of cinema, such
as Andrei Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time (as the title alone of the Russian
director’s book on cinema indicates). Merleau-Ponty undoubtedly gives
a new, existential-phenomenological inflection to these traditional,
form-centered ideas. But he embraces rather than repudiates them, for
example as being out of keeping with his broader philosophical positions.

Evaluating Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Film

Art in a Contemporary Context

In the preceding interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s relevant texts—

which in the case of “The Film and the New Psychology” may also be
regarded as a substantial reinterpretation, in the ways I have suggested—I
have endeavored to lay out some of his main ideas and arguments con-
cerning cinematic art. I have done so in a more linear and systematic
fashion than these originally appear in order to make what I consider
the strongest case for them. In the last section of this essay, I wish to
address some of these ideas in a more critical, evaluative way.
The brevity of the writings and lectures under consideration, intended
primarily for a nonspecialist audience, limit and constrain Merleau-
Ponty’s account of cinema as art. Written prior to major developments in
film theory as well as film practice, it is conspicuously lacking reference
180 new literary history

and attention to other, clearly phenomenologically relevant features of

films, including framings, camera movements, in-frame movement, light-
ing, staging, and various aspects of performance and the (re)presenta-
tions of faces and bodies on screen, as all of these are perceived. More
conceptually damaging to his arguments, however, is Merleau-Ponty’s
unequivocal equation of all successful cinematic art with the revela-
tion of the conditions of lived-perception, as construed in the specific
terms of existential phenomenology and his own version of it. In this
sense it is not always clear, as Paul Crowther also legitimately wonders,
if Merleau-Ponty is “engaged in the philosophy of art” or “merely look-
ing for [his] philosophy in art,” including in cinema.28 Clearly, many
genuinely artistic and also philosophically interesting films (or indeed
paintings) appear to do and offer relatively little in this, or perhaps any,
distinctly existential phenomenological direction. Some films instead
actively build upon cinema’s capacity to suppress or surpass basic condi-
tions of natural, embodied human perception and its representation.
A well-known critic of phenomenological conceptions of cinema, Gilles
Deleuze raises this general point with reference to Merleau-Ponty’s film
lecture. Yet it is as much if not more of a problem for the validity of
Sobchack’s phenomenology of film in its implicit claim to speak to all
cinematic experience.29
Evoking Henri Bergson’s nonphenomenological philosophy of percep-
tion, Deleuze aptly observes that cinema is not confined to emulating or
embodying “natural subjective perception” defined in Merleau-Ponty’s
existential phenomenological terms. Such perception is a limited, partial
view of things “unicentered” on and by the embodied subject of percep-
tion—the “I” moving in space and oriented toward a perceptual horizon.
For Deleuze, here paraphrasing Merleau-Ponty, this entails the world as
a “sensible form (Gestalt) which organizes the perceptive field as a func-
tion of situated intentional consciousness.”30 Films, however, frequently
oscillate between this sort of human perception (or its representation)
and a nonhuman, “objective” yet diffuse and “acentered” appearance of
things.31 The latter is not a matter of a subjective perspective or point
of view, but the view itself, as seen by no one, as it were. As viewers sit
immobile before the screen, cinema can “bring us close to things or
take us away from them and revolve around them” and hence suppresses
“both the anchoring of the subject and the horizon of the world.”32 For
this reason among others, by virtue of the creative capacities of editing,
camera movement, framing, and mise-en-scène in their narrative and
extranarrative dimensions, cinema is eminently capable not only of
making “the world itself something unreal” and of turning it into “its
own image” as Deleuze continues.33 But also of both representing and
film and the phenomenology of art 181

expressing the great “cognitive shift in human mental life,” that in phi-
losopher Thomas Nagel’s words, is “an expansion of consciousness from
the perspectival form contained in the lives of particular creatures to
an objective, world-encompassing form that exists both individually and
intersubjectively.”34 The experience of films as meaningful perceptual
and affective but also broadly speaking symbolic realities always entails
both “subjective” and “objective” perspectives vis-à-vis what is happening
on screen and the viewers’ attitudes toward it.
If, as Merleau-Ponty and subsequent theorists stress, films may pres-
ent (or simulate) prereflective sensory-perceptual engagements with
the concrete life-world—and thereby return our conscious awareness
to it—they are equally, if not in some ways more, adept at taking us out
of and away from this world. That is, they may show us other, equally
artistic and in some ways uniquely cinematic forms of perceiving and
being, however abstract these may be from the standpoint of embod-
ied perceptual experience and its conditions. (This fact calls to mind
philosopher and film theorist Noël Carroll’s suggestion via thought
experiment that to the extent that films are clearly modeled on not just
the experience of the body but human mental, psychological processes,
they may be said to “liberate viewers” from “sheer bodily” experience.
They thus avoid the “mindless realism” that a hypothetical “alien” mode
of filmmaking wholly and literally devoted to pure bodily existence in
lived space and time might conceivably entail).35 More generally, the
comprehension, perceptual and otherwise, of films as works of art is
not confined to a one-directional movement from basic “non-sense” to
“sense,” in Merleau-Ponty’s terms. Since, in the case of films as inescap-
ably cultural-symbolic realities rather than merely natural and perceptual
ones, lived, embodied perception on the one hand, and all meaning
that notably transcends it (logical, narrative, artistic, sociocultural) on
the other, are inseparably conjoined and conditioned. Moreover, such
meaning is always as much a starting point in the perception of films, a
precondition or background, as an end point or goal.
In sum, while singling out one highly significant aspect of some
interesting and valuable cinematic works (narrative and nonnarrative
alike), the phenomenological desiderata Merleau-Ponty celebrates do
not reflect all relevant experience of films as perceptual objects. Nor
do they speak to the full, highly variable, aesthetic meaning and value
of cinema as a whole (or, for that matter, of artworks in any form),
and certainly not to all potential features of films properly regarded as
“artistic” or “aesthetic.” Nonetheless—and bracketing the larger, vexed
question of whether the perception of anything let alone a film or other
kind of art work can ever be wholly divorced from cultural reality and
182 new literary history

symbolically informed thought on any level—the notable capacities of

film art that Merleau-Ponty draws our attention to transcend these and
other (onto)logical difficulties and limitations. They provide one useful
starting point for a phenomenology of cinematic art that moves beyond
the recent emphasis on only the most general, wholly medium-specific
and determinate dynamics of cinematic experience and related features
of films qua films.
To this end, one of the main merits of Merleau-Ponty’s framing of cin-
ema as art is that it is not wedded to celluloid film and the oft-discussed
reality effect its highly indexical-iconic images. Thus it has no difficulty
in accommodating digital filmmaking and viewing. A phenomenological
aesthetics taking its tone from these suggestions is also better capable
of addressing transmedial aesthetic features and capacities. As some of
Merleau-Ponty’s comparative examples highlight, it may thus lead to new,
enlightening comparisons between the perceptual and affective experi-
ence of films, paintings, plays, and other forms of visual, dramatic, and
narrative art. Finally, it may also serve to bring to the fore perceptual-
affective realties unique to particular filmmakers and styles as associated
with distinct yet potentially converging artistic intentions and goals.
Certainly, the works of those past and present narrative film auteurs who
have been seen as especially “phenomenologically” inclined—includ-
ing Krzysztof Kieślowski, Agnès Varda, Terrence Malick, Claire Denis,
and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, to single out but a few—as well as
of some notable nonnarrative documentary filmmakers (e.g. Lucien
Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, creators of the viscerally sensorial
ethnographic-cum-experimental film Leviathan), may be revealingly de-
scribed and interpreted through the prism of some of the perceptual,
formal, and aesthetic dynamics that Merleau-Ponty, together with Du-
frenne describes; dynamics which may be considerably expanded upon
and fleshed out in a number of theoretical and film-critical directions.
On a more methodological note, whereas Merleau-Ponty’s description
of cinema, like Sobchack’s phenomenology of film, is presented in a
priori terms as if following from the truth of more general, phenomeno-
logical premises, there is also ample room for a rather more inductive
approach. Already adopted by some film critics and theorists—if often
not under the banner of existential phenomenology, phenomenological
aesthetics, or Merleau-Ponty’s views—this begins with certain films or
styles that may exemplify a notable return to those immediately given,
prereflective perceptual appearances that precede the common life-world
and attempts to describe and analyze it.36 Of course, to complete the full
aesthetic and experiential picture in a narrative film context, we must
also seek to understand what this reconnection of viewers with their own
film and the phenomenology of art 183

bodily, sensory-affective experience of the world via cinematic art may

mean and represent—not just as an admirable goal in itself, but with
respect to the overall experience, comprehension, and interpretation
of individual films as narrative and extranarrative wholes. This involves
consideration of work-(and sometimes style-)defining relations between
and among not just perceptual features and acts (sometimes on the
part of film characters, as well as viewers) but extra- or nonperceptual
narrative, emotional, imaginative, and conceptual ones. Here any phe-
nomenology of film experience reaches its outermost descriptive and
explanatory boundaries and must cede part of the stage to semiotic,
narratological, cognitive, and Deleuzian insights, for instance.37
In conclusion, I do not maintain that the alternative reading of
Merleau-Ponty’s “The Film and the New Psychology” that I have offered
is the only valid one. I do hope, however, that by looking at it through
another lens, as it were, and attending to both textual nuance and a
wider aesthetics and film theory context, I have shown why and how
Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about cinema are very much of a piece with his
reflections on art in general. And also how for this reason and others,
these reflections diverge from some more contemporary phenomeno-
logical understandings of cinema anchored in his philosophy of general
rather than specifically aesthetic perception. Finally, I have sought to
highlight, albeit in brief compass, some of the ways in which, despite its
notable shortcomings, Merleau-Ponty’s account of cinema as art (still)
speaks to issues surrounding filmic perception, affect, authorship, and
intentionality that are surely no less relevant to film theory and film
practice today than they were either in the 1940s or at the start of the
resurgence of interest in the phenomenology of film beginning in the
late twentieth century and showing no signs of abating.

University of Edinburgh

Notes

1 See Dudley Andrew, “The Neglected Tradition of Phenomenology in Film Theory,”

in Movies and Methods, vol. 2, An Anthology, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
Univ. of California Press, 1985), 625–32, and Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A
Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1992), 26 (hereafter
cited as AE).
2 Jean Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of Cinema, trans. Christopher King (Indianapolis:
Indiana Univ. Press, 1997), for example, draws heavily on Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenol-
ogy of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Edward S. Casey (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univ. Press,
1973), as do Christian Metz’s early writings collected in Film Language: A Semiotics of the
Cinema (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974), which is dedicated to Dufrenne.
3 See Daniel Yacavone, Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema (New York: Co-
lumbia Univ. Press, 2015) and Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience.
184 new literary history

4 These include Jennifer M. Barker’s The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 2009); Julian Hanich’s Cinematic
Emotions in Horror Films and Thrillers: The Aesthetic Paradox of Pleasurable Fear (New York:
Routledge, 2010); and Hunter Vaughan’s Where Film Meets Philosophy: Godard, Resnais, and
Experiments in Cinematic Thinking (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2013).
5 Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 2004), 91.
6 See Julien Guillemet, “The ‘New Wave’ of French Phenomenology and Cinema: New
Concepts for the Cinematic Experience,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 8, no.1
(2010): 94–114.
7 See Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
1976), 242–53.
8 See Metz, Film Language: a Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Bertrand August (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974), 42–43.
9 See André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema?
trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 2005), 1:9–17.
10 Amédée Ayfre, “Néo Réalism et Phénoménologie,” Cahiers du Cinéma 17 (1952),
reprinted and translated in Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950’s, ed. Jim Hillier (Cambridge:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1985).
11 See Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980); Allan Casebier, Film and Phenomenology: Toward a Realist
Theory of Cinematic Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009); and David
Sorfa, “Phenomenology and Film,” in The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Film Theory, ed. Edward
Branigan and Warren Buckland (New York: Routledge, 2013), 353–58. On the perceptual
transparency of photographic images, see philosopher Kendal Walton’s
“Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism” in Critical Inquiry 11, no.
2 (1984): 246–77.
12 Jane Stadler, “Affect, Film and,” in The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Film Theory, 4.
13 The notion of a film as “body,” explicated in terms appropriated from Merleau-Ponty’s
philosophy of natural perception, has been subsequently adopted by other theorists,
including Barker, who extends it in cataloging features of a film’s “skin,” “musculature,”
“viscera,” etc.
14 For similar reasons Sobchack also takes “realist” and “cultural” approaches to task for
positing films as “empirical” and “cultural” objects, respectively.
15 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Film and the New Psychology,” Sense and Non-Sense,
trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Press,
1964), 53–54 (hereafter cited as FNP).
16 David Bordwell sees this anthropomorphic understanding of the camera’s view and
action as the root cause of a number of confusions besetting structualist-narratological
accounts of cinema. See Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press,
1985), 10–11.
17 To cite the example of two significant studies of film that engage with Merleau-Ponty’s
phenomenology, including by way of Sobchack’s interpretations of it: in Stadler’s Pulling
Focus: Intersubjective Experience, Narrative Film, and Ethics, there is no mention of the film
lecture and it is briefly cited only once in Barker’s The Tactile Eye.
18 See Ayfre, “Néo Réalism et Phénoménologie.”
19 Barker, The Tactile Eye, 18.
20 For more on this world-of and world-in distinction, see Yacavone, Film Worlds.
21 For a much more detailed discussion of Dufrenne’s ideas, including the previously
mentioned characterization of the aesthetic object as a “quasi-subject,” see Film Worlds,
esp. 190–227.
film and the phenomenology of art 185

22 Merleau-Ponty, “Art and the World of Perception,” in The World of Perception, trans.
Oliver Davis (London: Routledge, 2004), 70 (hereafter cited as AWP).
23 Eugene F. Kaelin, An Existentialist Aesthetic: The Theories of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty
(Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1966), 303. This is Kaelin’s translation from the French
Preface to Sens et non-sens, and much closer to the original French than the standard
English (Dreyfus) translation.
24 Merleau-Ponty, “Exploring the World of Perception: Space,” in The World of Perception,
41.
25 “Cézanne’s Doubt,” in Sense and Non-Sense, 18.
26 See Kaelin, An Existentialist Aesthetic, 275.
27 See, for instance, Jenny Chamarette’s Phenomenology and the Future of Film: Rethinking
Subjectivity Beyond French Cinema (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and Hanich’s Cin-
ematic Emotions in Horror Films and Thrillers. For more on the subordination of time and
duration to space in Sobchack’s phenomenology of film, see Matilda Mroz, Temporality
and Film Analysis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ.Press,
2012), 28–29.
28 Paul Crowther, The Phenomenology of Modern Art: Exploding Deleuze, Illuminating Style
(London: Continuum, 2012), 118–19.
29 Sobchack briefly discusses Gilles Deleuze’s objections. See AE 29.
30 Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Hab-
berjam (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986), 57–58.
31 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 64.
32 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 57.
33 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 57.
34 Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature
Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2012), 83.
35 Noël Carroll, “Film/Mind Analogies: The Case of Hugo Munsterberg,” The Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46, no. 4 (1988): 495.
36 See, for instance, Vaughan’s Where Film Meets Philosophy: Godard, Resnais, and Experi-
ments in Cinematic Thinking and Yacavone, “Space, Theme and Movement in Trois couleurs:
Rouge,” Studies in French Cinema 6, no. 2 (2006): 83–94.
37 For more on the relation between a phenomenology of cinematic art and these ap-
proaches, see Yacavone, Film Worlds.