Abstract

This article reconsiders some of the arguments that I made in my two phenomenology-inspired books on what I have called the “filmic identification” in the cinema: Les structures de l’expérience filmique and Essai sur l’image et la communication. While the former has received some attention in film studies via Vivian Sobchack’s mediating work in her influential essay “Toward a Phenomenology of Nonfictional Film Experience”, the latter is little known in film studies and phenomenological circles. The two guest editors have therefore asked me to introduce and update my former position and place it in the intellectual climate of French-speaking film studies from the 1950s to the 1980s—that is, from the filmology movement to the dominance of semiology and psychoanalysis.