The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (27)

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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Le cinéma et la nouvelle psychologie.” In his Sens et non-sens. Paris: Nagel, 1948, 85–106; “The film and the new psychology.” In his Sense and Non-Sense. Trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia A. Dreyfus. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964, 48–59. In what follows, then, I want to emphasize certain microperceptual aspects of our engagement with the perceptual technologies of photographic, cinematic, and electronic representation that have been often overlooked. I also want to suggest some of the ways the respective material conditions of these media and their reception and use inform and transform our microperceptual experience—particularly our temporal and spatial sense of ourselves and our cultural contexts of meaning. We look at and carry around photographs or sit in a movie theater, before a television set, or in front of a computer not only as conscious beings engaged in the activity of perception and expression but also as carnal beings. Our vision is neither abstracted from our bodies nor from our other modes of perceptual access to the world. Nor does what we see merely touch the surface of our eyes. Seeing images mediated and made visible by technological vision thus enables us not only to see technological images but also to see technologically. As Ihde emphasizes, “the concreteness of [technological] ‘hardware’ in the broadest sense connects with the equal concreteness of our bodily existence”; thus “the term ‘existential’ in context refers to perceptual and bodily experience, to a kind of ‘phenomenological materiality’” (21). Insofar as the photographic, the cinematic, and the electronic have each been objectively constituted as a new and discrete techno-logic, each also has been subjectively incorporated, enabling a new and discrete perceptual mode of existential and embodied presence. In sum, as they have mediated and represented our engagement with the world, with others, and with ourselves, photographic, cinematic, and electronic technologies have transformed us so that we presently see, sense, and make sense of ourselves as quite other than we were before each of them existed. Following Walter Benjamin (and contrary to his reservations about film as mass art), it can be maintained that no art can historically articulate the past in the way cinema can, for inherent in the transience of the film image is a specific possibility of experience and thought. Footnote 81 The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1968. 143-44. Print.

Christa Blümlinger, Kino aus zweiter Hand: Zur Ästhetik materieller Aneignung im Film und in der Medienkunst, Berlin 2009. Morris’ documentary details the extraordinary story of a small-town American man who went from fixing electric chairs to defending David Irving by providing “scientific evidence” that the gas chambers at Auschwitz were never used for extermination. The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Cinematic and Electronic ‘Presence," in Materialities of Communication, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 83–106. Of all narrative film genres, science fiction has been most concerned with poetically mapping those transformations of spatiality, temporality, and subjectivity informed and/or constituted by new technologies. As well, SF cinema, in its particular materiality, has made these new poetic maps concretely visible. For elaboration see my Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (223-305). Hanich: Another criticism sometimes leveled at phenomenology is that it is a-political. With its insistence on the description of lived experience, it focuses on what is rather than what should be.

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Hanich: Would you also see a proto-political side of phenomenology in its concern with communality rather than identity and difference? Hanich: Phenomenology is certainly not compatible with every other method. There are competing approaches that phenomenologists have to reject on metaphysical or methodological grounds. In your writing one can find occasional stabs at apparatus theory and cognitive film theory. Is there anything in contemporary theory that makes you angry? In 1992, she moved to the University of California, Los Angeles as a professor in the Critical Studies area of the UCLA Department of Film Television, and Digital Media and Associate Dean of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. [2] She retired from administration and currently teaches classes in Visual Phenomenology, Contemporary Film Theory, Historiography, and Cultural Studies. Although the technology of the cinematic is grounded, in part, in the technology of the photographic, we need to again remember that “the essence of technology is nothing technological.” The fact that the technology of the cinematic necessarily depends on the discrete and still photographic frame moving intermittently (rather than continuously) through the shutters of both camera and projector does not sufficiently account for the materiality of the cinematic as we experience it. Unlike the photograph, a film is semiotically engaged in experience not merely as its mechanical objectification—or material reproduction—that is, as merely an object for vision. Rather, the moving picture, however mechanical and photographic its origin, is semiotically experienced as also subjective and intentional, as presenting representation of the objective world. Thus, perceived as the subject of its own vision, as well as an object for our vision, a moving picture is not precisely a thing that (like a photograph) can be easily controlled, contained, or materially possessed—at least, not until the relatively recent advent of electronic culture. Certainly before videotape and DVDs the spectator could share in and thereby, to a degree, interpretively alter a film’s presentation and representation of embodied and enworlded experience, but the spectator could not control or contain its autonomous and ephemeral flow and rhythm or materially possess its animated experience. Now, of course, with the help of consumer electronics the spectator can both alter the film’s temporality and materially possess its inanimate “body.” However, this new ability to control the autonomy and flow of the film’s experience through fast-forwarding, replaying, and pausing [13] and the ability to possess the film’s “body” so as to animate it at will and at home are not functions of the material and technological ontology of the cinematic; rather, they are functions of the material and technological ontology of the electronic, which has come to increasingly dominate, appropriate, and transform the cinematic and our phenomenological experience of its perceptual and representational modalities. Eye and mind.’ In: The Primacy of Perception. Translated from French and edited by J. M. Edie 1964. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 159–90.

Stephanie Baumann, Im Vorraum der Geschichte: Siegfried Kracauers History: The Last Things Before the Last, Konstanz 2014.Most media theorists point out that photographic (and cinematic) optics are structured according to a norm of perception based on Renaissance theories of perspective; such perspective represented the visible as originating in, organized, and mastered by an individual and centered subject. This form of painterly representation is naturalized by the optics of photography and the cinema. Comolli, in “Machines of the Visible,” says, “The mechanical eye, the photographic lens, . . . functions . . . as a guarantor of the identity of the visible with the normality of vision . . . with the norm of visual perception” (123-24).

Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past. Vol. 1. 1922. Trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. New York: Random House, 1981. Print. Simon Rothöhler, Amateur der Weltgeschichte: Historiographische Praktiken im Kino der Gegenwart, Zurich 2011. Bachelard, G., 1958. The Poetics of Space. Translated from French by Maria Jolas 1964. Boston: Beacon Press. Comolli, Jean-Louis. “Machines of the Visible.” The Cinematic Apparatus. Eds. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath. New York: St. Martin’s, 1980. 121-42. Print. Hanich: Film studies has long entertained plural methodologies. While some frameworks seem to be more popular than others, not a single paradigm dominates. What can film phenomenology add to this huge toolbox that scholars and students can choose from? What makes it valuable over and above the ones also on offer?Heim, Michael. Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987. Print.