Do cinematic representations of the natural world only put us in further remove from nature? A phenomenological approach shows that nature screened can produce a richer understanding of human–nature relations as these unfold in visual contact. If vision accesses the world in a unique relationship of sight, in which our contact with the world is defined by vision prior to any other interaction, the cinema offers a special setting for a phenomenology that seeks to draw-out the significance of human (...) relations with the world of nature that come before utility or action. A detailed analysis of the opening sequence of Terrence Malick’s The New World demonstrates how the act of viewing positions the viewer in relation to what she sees. This position, prior to action and with the impossibility to act is seen here as an ethical position, a position of responsibility in the Levinasian sense. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of vision is put here to use alongside the hermeneutic phenomenology of Heidegger and the existential responsibility of Levinas, while subverting Levinas’ anthropocentrism and rejecting Heidegger’s limiting view of technology. The approach taken in this essay, of bringing phenomenology into productive and reflexive interaction with ecology and with film is dubbed an “eco-film-phenomenology.”. (shrink)

Introduction. Flesh and its reversibility ; Defining the baroque ; 'Good looking' ; A cinema of baroque flesh -- 1. Flesh, cinema and the baroque : the aesthetics of reversibility. Baroque vision and painting the flesh ; Baroque flesh ; Analogous embodiments : the film's body ; Baroque vision and cinema ; Summation : face to face-feeling baroque deixis -- 2. Knots of sensation : co-extensive space and a cinema of the passions. Synaesthesia, phenomenology, and the senses ; (...) Cinesthesia and the Bel composto ; A passionate baroque : emotion, excess, and co-extensive space ; Assault and absorption : cruel baroque ; Summation : beside oneself -- 3. Baroque skin/semiotics. Chiasm : language and experience ; Baroque poetic language and the seventeenth-century infinite ; Baroque luxury ; Skin-deep : baroque texturology ; Tickles : baroque wit ; Summation : cine-mimesis -- 4. One hand films the other : baroque haptics. Touching-touched ; Haptic visuality and the baroque ; Baroque haptics and cinema ; Analogical assemblages : Baroque databases ; Summation: TEXXTURE -- Conclusion : or the baroque 'Beauty of the act'. (shrink)

In Film and Phenomenology, Allan Casebier develops a theory of representation first indicated in the writings of the father of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, and then applies it to the case of cinematic representation. This work provides one of the clearest expositions of Husserl's highly influential but often obscure thought. It also demonstrates the power of phenomenology to illuminate the experience of the art form unique to the twentieth-century cinema. Film and Phenomenology is intended as (...) an antidote to all hitherto existing theories about the nature of cinematic representation, whether issuing from classic sources such as the film theory of Andre Bazin or the post-structuralist synthesis of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Barthesian textual analysis and Metzean cine-semiotics. Casebier shows how a phenomenological account of representation will further the aims of any film theory. Developing a viable feminist film theory, legitimizing the documentary, answering the challenge of Derridean deconstruction, properly theorizing narrativity, Film and Phenomenology argues that theory of film must be Realist both with respect to epistemology and ontological issues. In this way, this work runs contrary to the whole course of contemporary film theory which has been deeply anti-Realist. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary study explores the relevance and application of Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology to key issues in the philosophy film. It develops a comprehensive look at how Heidegger’s thought illuminates historical and contemporary problems the film medium poses to philosophers.

Introduction -- Time and matter: temporality, embodied subjectivity and film phenomenology -- Knowing and nothing: Chris Marker, subjective temporalities and vocalic bodies in the future tense -- Agnès Varda's Trinket box: subjective relationality, affect and temporalised space -- Burlesque gestures and bodily attention: phenomenologies of the ephemeral in Chantal Akerman -- Threatened corporealities: thinking with the films of Philippe Grandrieux -- Conclusion: rethinking cinematic subjectivity and beyond.

A phenomenological look on film editing through Merleau-Ponty’s ideas opens up a new way of seeing what editing is and how it affects the spectator. In the classical sense, editing is looked at technically where certain aspects of its use in the film’s language are interpreted and analyzed to understand why and how something is done. In this thesis, the aim is to not dwell on understanding the why and the how. The aim is to view film (...) editing from a different perspective that might lead to another type of thinking outside the limitations of empirical and intellectualist approaches. While the classical approach is able to satisfy most of what a spectator would need to understand, it falls short on what the spectator feels and experiences. In order to try to grasp how Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach could be adapted to film editing. First we have to start from the beginning to see how editing came to be and what ideas, approaches and techniques it brought with it. As all the approaches have their own uses; we have to consider them as such and lay out what could be with Merleau-Ponty’s way and see how all the approaches compare in the end. Of course, this does not mean erasing all of film history and disregarding the classical way; it means that we can look at films from a perspective that the classical approach may not be able to see. (shrink)

This article surveys influential views on the topic of film-as-philosophy, principally the positions of Bruce Russell, Thomas Wartenburg, Noël Carroll, and Stephen Mulhall. Historically, this conversation has been restricted to a somewhat conservative view initiated by Russell and defended by others, according to which the film medium is fundamentally incapable of generating positive philosophical achievement in purely cinematic fashion. One of my interests is to show how the dialogue initiated by Russell suffers from relying on overly restrictive notions (...) of what philosophy is and the ways in which it occurs. A goal of the article is to articulate the phenomenological suppositions embedded in the very concept of film-as-philosophy, particularly insofar as the concept seems to assume a phenomenological model that unites screen and viewer. I argue that the origins of the debate overlook the aspect in which films do not engage in philosophical activity completely in their own right, but that instead, this occurrence is essentially predicated upon the participative aspect of the viewer experience. In the course of summarizing each of the leading positions, I describe how the history of the debate has gradually anticipated an appreciation of the phenomenological manner in which screen and viewer co-instantiate philosophy’s occurrence through film. I defend Mulhall’s position and devote some space to drawing out the manner in which his argumentation regarding film-as-philosophy supposes a fundamental screen-viewer dynamic that is phenomenological in nature. (shrink)

Through a discussion of Agnès Varda's career from 1954 to 2008 that focuses particularly on La Pointe Courte (1954), L'Opéra-Mouffe (1958), The Gleaners and I (2000), and The Beaches of Agnes (2008), this article considers the connections between Varda's filmmaking and her femaleness. It proposes that two aspects of Varda's cinema—her particularly perceptive portrayal of a set of geographical locations, and her visual and verbal emphasis on female embodiment—make a feminist existential-phenomenological approach to her films particularly fruitful. Drawing both directly (...) on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and on some recent film- and feminist-theoretical texts that have employed his insights, it explores haptic imagery and feminist strategy in The Gleaners and I, the materialization of space characterizing Varda's blurring of fiction and documentary, and the dialectical relationship of people with their environment often observed in her cinema. It concludes that both Varda's female protagonists and the director herself may be said to perform feminist phenomenology in her films, in their actions, movement, and relationship to space, and in the carnality of voice and vision with which Varda's own subjectivity is registered within her film-texts. (shrink)

Max Scheler never published a theory of art, but his aesthetics, like the rest of his thought, occupies an intriguing position that links early phenomenology, Catholic personalist thought, and philosophical anthropology. His metaphysics of the person and theory of value, when combined with his account of the lived-body and of our access to other minds through love, translates into a powerful, humanistic theory of art. This article elaborates what Scheler’s aesthetics would look like had he developed it and applied (...) it to film. Film offers an intimate access to the lives, bodies, and minds of others that is particularly well-suited to Scheler’s idea that art reveals the moral personality—the ordo amoris or “order of love”—that makes up the value-essence of the person. The person’s unique and highest possibilities for acting, feeling, and valuing are the contents of their spiritual essence and these, often thought obscure and inaccessible, are made present in film. (shrink)

This chapter surveys foundational concepts in the history of phenomenology for the purpose of highlighting their relevance for key contemporary issues in the philosophy of film. A central argument concerns phenomenology’s capacity for unraveling the ontology of film, given phenomenology’s emphasis on accounting for the ontology of phenomena through description based in first-person experience. On this ground, the chapter defends the claim that film’s ontology stems from the projective intentionality of the film viewer, (...) where the communicative nature of embodied vision also figures into play. The principal phenomenological frameworks taken up are those of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as the work of contemporary film scholar Vivian Sobchack. (shrink)

Finding the theoretical space where cinema and philosophy meet, Malin Wahlberg’s sophisticated approach to the experience of documentary film aligns with attempts to reconsider the premises of existential phenomenology. The configuration of time is crucial in organizing the sensory affects of film in general but, as Wahlberg adroitly demonstrates, in nonfiction films the problem of managing time is writ large by the moving image’s interaction with social memory and historical figures. Wahlberg discusses a thought-provoking corpus of classical (...) and recent experiments in film and video in which creative approaches to the time of the image and the potential archive memory of filmic representation illuminates meanings of temporality and time experience. She also offers a methodological account of film and brings Deleuze and Ricoeur into dialogue with Bazin and Mitry on the subject of cinema and phenomenology. Drawing attention to the cultural significance of the images’ imprint as a trace of the past, Documentary Time brings to bear phenomenological inquiry on nonfiction film while at the same time reconsidering the existential dimensions of time that have always puzzled humans. Malin Wahlberg is a research fellow in cinema studies at Stockholm University. (shrink)

For the first time this volume makes Jean-Pierre Meunier's influential thoughts on the film experience available for an English-speaking readership. Introduced and commented by specialists in film studies and philosophy, Meunier's intricate phenomenological descriptions of the spectator's engagement with fiction films, documentaries and home movies can reach the wide audience they have deserved ever since their publication in French in 1969.

Our intention is to focus attention upon the nature of the film medium and the peculiar possibilities that it affords. We will approach the study by a double method: a phenomenological inventory, and a comparison with other cognate artforms. The comparison with other artforms, most especially painting, theater, and the novel, will show the peculiarities of film.

This article responds to critical views of John Rhym, Martin Rossouw, Ludo de Roo, and Annie Sandrussi on my 2017 book Phenomenology of Film: A Heideggerian Account of the Film Experience. The article also takes up positive footholds from the analyses of Chiara Quaranta and Jason Wirth. The main topics addressed include Martin Heidegger’s ontic-ontological distinction; the notion of film-as-philosophy; being-in-the-world read as being-in-the-film-world; and questions surrounding the facticity and identity of the film viewer.

이 논문은 〈버닝〉이 궁극적으로 이른바 ‘벌거벗은 생명’이라는 문제의식을 20세기 세 주요 현상학자의 분석틀, 즉 조르조 아감벤의 ‘호모 사케르,’ 한나 아렌트의 ‘탄생성,’ 한스-게오르크 가다머의 ‘예술론’을 통해서 제시하고자 하는 시도이다. 우리 시대의 대표적인 청년층인 종수와 해미는 스펙도 변변치 못해 몸을 쓰는 일을 하며 비정규직을 전전하는 프리터족으로 살아간다. 이들은 자신의 젊음을 의미 없이 ‘버닝’하며 살아가는 것이다. 이창동은 영화 내내 우리 사회가 구조적 폭력에 짓눌리고 배제와 포용의 경계가 불분명한 시대에 봉착했음을 통렬히 보여준다. 급기야 정치적 행위로의 전환을 통해서 종수가 한국형 개츠비의 전형인 벤에 맞서는 장면을 (...) 영화의 마지막 부분에서 롱테이크로 잡아낸다. 영화는 종수가 벤을 ‘버닝’하는 데 집중하기보다는 마침내 소설을 쓸 수 있게 되는 사건을 더 중시한다. 종수가 소설을 쓰게 되는 변화의 순간은 한나 아렌트가 말한 ‘탄생성’이기도 하다. 그럼에도 이창동의 사회 인식이 ‘진지’와 ‘재미’라는 다분히 이원론적 평행구도를 고집함으로써 관객에게 그 어떤 실천의 가능성도 열어놓지 않았다는 점은 안타깝다. 이 연구에서 되물어야 할 질문은 영화에서뿐만 아니라 우리의 현실에서 모든 재미가 감각적 쾌락으로 귀결될 수밖에 없는가에 있다. 결론적으로 이 연구는 재미를 통한 의미의 세계가 충분히 가능하고, 이에 따른 심미적 범주의 즐거움을 누릴 수 있음에도 한국형 개츠비의 방만한 삶을 고발하는 데 역점을 두었다는 점을 비판했다. (shrink)

This is a philosophical rumination on Shawn Loht’s important extension of “film as philosophy” into a Heideggerian phenomenological account of the philosophical response that cinema can engender. After considering the importance of these kinds of approaches, I turn to Loht’s phenomenological engagement with Terrence Malick’s early masterpiece, Days of Heaven (1978). After sympathetically reviewing his “interpretation”, I expand upon its delineation of “earth and world” to include the “fallenness” of the world as well as the possibility of a metanōetic (...) awakening to the vocation of “mud doctor”, that is, to heal the rift between earth and world, a rift made more exigent by world war, economic exploitation, and the ecological catastrophe of the Anthropocene. (shrink)

on Film and Phenomenology by Allan Casebier.

ABSTRACTThis review essay of Shawn Loht’s new book, Phenomenology of Film: A Heideggerian Account of the Film Experience, not only offers an ontological reading of the filmic experience inspired by Heidegger’s philosophy but also contributes substantially to the ongoing debate of whether or not film is a medium that is legitimately philosophical. In addition to confronting unique ideas about film that emerge from Loht’s analysis of Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology of Dasein, including a reading of later (...) Heidegger of the “Turn,” this essay also seeks to think with and then beyond Loht in a way that might inspire readers to further pursue these issues in relation to a potentially reconceived understanding of the practice of film-as-philosophy. (shrink)

Shawn Loht's ground-breaking Phenomenology of Film: A Heideggerian Account of the Film Experience (2017) offers a detailed account of film experience as rooted in Martin Heidegger's existential structure of Dasein. Adapting Being and Time for a phenomenology of cinematic experience, Loht accurately describes how various existential structures of Dasein are “fostered” by the projected world of film: in Loht's account, being-in-the-world is extended in the film experience. Loht's project offers fertile ground for developing (...) the phenomenological basis of film experience. Yet, Loht anchors this account of film experience primarily in Heidegger's early philosophy; this leaves his adaptation not without challenges. First, if the structure of film experience is mapped too closely onto the notion of Dasein projecting itself into the filmworld, this theory presents the risk of taking the early Heidegger's “hands-on” approach too literally. Moreover, in its concern for Dasein's extensions into the world of film, Phenomenology of Film says little about the distinctly mediated character of filmworlds; this leaves ambiguous where the film experience effectively takes place. (shrink)

이 글은 세계 속 신체-주체와 지각 대상의 접속에 의한 지각 현상의 특성을 밝히고, 이를 바탕으로 영화 속 영화이미지의 현상학적 특성과 현상학적인 존재론적 살로서의 영화 이미지의 특성 및 영화이미지의 존재 의미를 밝히는 것을 목적으로 한다. 이런 밝힘으로 말미암아 현상학적인 존재론적 살로서의 영화이미지의 가치가 드러날 것이다. 현상학적 지각 현상은 차이장 속 차이의 지각 현상이 되고 차이 존재를 토대로 지각 현 상 자체를 나타내는 차이존재론적 지각 현상이 된다. 지각 현상은 운동적인 지각지평-차 이장 속 역동적인 차이들이 시공적으로 생산되고 있는 총체적 시스템의 지각 현상이다. 시간적 (...) 게슈탈트로서의 영화란 단순히 이미지들을 모아놓은 집합이 아니라, 이다. 영화이미지는 가상이면서도 현실이고 현실이면서도 가상이 되고 있으며, 차이장 속 가상과 현실을 맞물리게 하는 맞물림의 시뮬라크르 가 되고 있다. 영화이미지들의 관계적인 접속적 상황에서 영화적 현재는 영화적 과거와 영화적 미래 에 대한 시간적 살을 가진다. 영화이미지들은 서로에 대한 대립과 대립적 살을 가지고, 갈등, 권력, 사랑의 관계적인 영화이미지들은 각각 서로에 대하여 갈등과 갈등적 살, 권력과 권력적 살, 사랑과 사랑의 살을 가진다. 영화이미지들의 교차는 살적인 새로운 생성 의미 와 그 영화이미지들의 존재 의미를 드러내고, 관객은 영화이미지들의 살을 통해서 영화이 미지의 의미와 존재 의미 및 자신의 존재 의미를 느끼고 의식한다. 영화 속 영화이미지들은 항상 컨텍스트-영화이미지들로서 작동한다. (shrink)

Proposes a shift in thinking about the connection of Malick's filmmaking and the philosophy of Heidegger. My approach considers Heidegger's philosophy of art in order to develop some outlines of a Heideggerian philosophy of film. I also consider some aspects of Terrence Malick's films viewed as exemplar instances of the philosophical theory of film Heidegger's work can support.

This article reassesses the concept of identification in line with the increased importance phenomenology has taken on in film-philosophy of the 1990s and 2000s. In the 1970s and 1980s, a Lacanian psychoanalytic interpretation of identification dominated film theory and criticism, and spectatorial engagement with elements of films was understood as what psychoanalysis calls secondary identification – the identification with stable subject-positions (characters) in the film-text. But non-Lacanian psychoanalysis and Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology offer film-philosophy a (...) very different understanding of identification as a non image-based, ‘blind’, bodily affective tie that is established between spectators and what Vivian Sobchack describes as ‘the sense and sensibility of materiality itself’ (Sobchack 2004, 65). By first exploring how this more bodily (for psychoanalysis, primary ) identification is theorized by psychoanalysts (Freud, Paul Schilder, Henri Wallon) and by film theorists (Kaja Silverman), the article proposes that film criticism make greater use of it in order to engage more meaningfully with the visible cultural specificities – size, skin colour, age, sex – of the images of bodies viewed on cinema screens. It is not just ‘the’ body that needs bringing back into thinking about film spectatorship, but culturally differentiated bodies , both on the screen and in the auditorium. A psychoanalytic and phenomenological film criticism of embodied cultural identity, one that attends to the materiality of the film and of the body-images and objects on the screen, may be the most culturally and politically useful successor to ‘screen’ theory of the 1970s and 1980s. (shrink)

Erkenntnisprozesse spielen in der Filmerfahrung eine zentrale Rolle. Dabei vermitteln Filme offenbar nicht einfach nur Tatsachenwissen, wie es gleichermaßen etwa in Aussagen ausgedrückt oder durch Beobachtung belegt würde. Das Wissen, das für die Wahrnehmung filmischer Bewegungsbilder charakteristisch ist, hat vielmehr eine spezifische Form: Es ist bestimmt durch Merkmale der Bildlichkeit, des zeitlich-dynamischen Zeigens, des Filmtons und des sprachlichen Ausdrucks. In der vorliegenden Arbeit werden diese Aspekte in ihrer filmischen Einheit gedacht. Ausgehend von dieser Idee tragen einschlägige Positionen der Filmtheorie, der (...) phänomenologischen Bildtheorie und der Epistemologie zu einer systematischen Bestimmung der epistemischen Objekte des Films bei. Die Ergebnisse der Untersuchung bilden die Grundlage für eine philosophische Konzeption des Films, in deren Rahmen klassische Fragen der Filmtheorie beantwortet werden können - z. B. nach dem Status von Ton, Musik und Sprache im vermeintlich rein visuellen Filmbild, nach der Rolle der Subjektivität im Film und nach den Möglichkeiten einer besonderen philosophischen Kraft des Films. (shrink)

_Film Worlds_ unpacks the significance of the "worlds" that narrative films create, offering an innovative perspective on cinema as art. Drawing on aesthetics and the philosophy of art in both the continental and analytic traditions, as well as classical and contemporary film theory, it weaves together multiple strands of thought and analysis to provide new understandings of filmic representation, fictionality, expression, self-reflexivity, style, and the full range of cinema's affective and symbolic dimensions. Always more than "fictional worlds" and "storyworlds" (...) on account of cinema's perceptual, cognitive, and affective nature, film worlds are theorized as immersive and transformative artistic realities. As such, they are capable of fostering novel ways of seeing, feeling, and understanding experience. Engaging with the writings of Jean Mitry, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Christian Metz, David Bordwell, Gilles Deleuze, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, among other thinkers, _Film Worlds_ extends Nelson Goodman's analytic account of symbolic and artistic "worldmaking" to cinema, expands on French philosopher Mikel Dufrenne's phenomenology of aesthetic experience in relation to films and their worlds, and addresses the hermeneutic dimensions of cinematic art. It emphasizes what both celluloid and digital filmmaking and viewing share with the creation and experience of all art, while at the same time recognizing what is unique to the moving image in aesthetic terms. The resulting framework reconciles central aspects of realist and formalist/neo-formalist positions in film theory while also moving beyond them and seeks to open new avenues of exploration in film studies and the philosophy of film. (shrink)

This paper brings Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach to Sasha Waltz’s dance film S, which focuses on the relation between sexuality and language. Maintaining that movement in cinema takes place in the viewers and not the film, the paper considers how the visual can be deepened to include the ways we move and are moved. Saussure’s insights into language are brought to the sensible, which is here understood in terms of divergences from norms. Though film would seem to privilege (...) vision, viewing this film helps to elucidate Merleau-Ponty’s claim that a film succeeds when it engages the viewer’s embodied understanding, and shifts the norms of the corporeal schema. (shrink)

Introduction. Observing the production and consumer area of modern cinematography makes it possible to draw conclusions about the value dominants of modern society, to conduct its sociocultural analysis. Cinema, both auteur and mass, is a way of reflecting and modeling the society spiritual state and its analysis makes it possible to draw quite serious and justified philosophical and social conclusions. The film in a philosophical sense is ontologized by the dominant intention of the era. Such a dominant intention of (...) modernity is hedonism. Pleasure, enjoyment, happiness, according to the humanities, is the basic values of the 21st century society. Cinema is the most comprehensive reaction to the needs of hedonism, since hedonistic prerequisites are to some degree laid down in its technical (movement, photographic phenomenology) and social nature (art and entertainment). In this regard, it seems relevant to conduct a philosophical analysis of the ontological level of modern cinema. The aim of the study is to conduct a philosophical analysis of the ontological level of modern cinema; identify ontological models, variations and combinations of which provide its artistic diversity. Methods: the authors use the general scientific methods of analysis and synthesis, the phenomenological method, since they identify the sensory intentions that underlie modern cinema. The authors also use the hermeneutic method, since they reveal the hidden meanings of the film, determined by the time and conditions of its creation, as well as the semiotic approach, which makes it possible to analyze the structural-semiotic whole of the film. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that the authors analyze films from philosophical aspects, and not just cultural studies, as is customary. In modern cinema, the authors look for a reflection of the “social soul”, identify those intentions that underlie modern cinema, both auteur and mass. This makes it possible to deduce a typology of film models that have not previously been applied to the analysis of the film process. Results. During the analysis, the authors developed a hedonistic-ontological typology of cinematic models, identified five generative models of cinema, four of which have a hedonistic orientation: an alimentary model that pleases the recipient by intensively stimulating his perceptual sphere; a parkour model that gives pleasure to light and unhindered movement, minimizing the severity and resistance of the environment; an arcade model that provides the viewer the pleasure of victory through virtual immersion in the ups and downs of the “action film”; a detective model that gives the viewer pleasure through the removal of cognitive uncertainty. The fifth model, tentatively called existential, should lead the viewer into a complex philosophical state of being-with-self-self, an experience of one’s own fulfillment, associated with the experience of suffering. However, due to the hedonistic orientations of modern culture, this model is not relevant in the first decades of the 21st century. Conclusions. Philosophical analysis of modern cinema has revealed that at the ontological level it is based on the philosophy of hedonism. Modern cinema delivers the following types of pleasures to the recipient: enjoyment of the flesh of the world, enjoyment of bodily freedom in motion, enjoyment of peace, cognitive enjoyment. (shrink)

Caring science that has a foundation in ‘lived experience’ may be viewed as a ‘patient science’, in other words nursing has its starting point in the patient’s perspective. To support in learning caring science, the learning situation has to embrace the students’ lived experience in relation to the substance of caring science. One of the challenges in education involves making theoretical meanings vivid in the absence of actual patients. Written patient narratives and fiction like novels in combination with scientific literature (...) are often used in order to obtain lived experiences as the foundation for teaching. Questions concerning how film can be used in this context to support the learning of caring science have recently emerged. The aim of this study is to describe how film as learning-support may boost reflection when learning caring science. The data was collected through audio-taped seminars, written reflections and group-interviews with students on basic, advanced, and doctoral levels. The analysis is based on the Reflective Lifeworld Research (RLR) approach which is founded in phenomenology. The results show how film as a learning-support enhances the understanding of the caring science theory, and provides a deeper understanding of the subject. Film can be very touching and provides support for the students’ embodied reflections. Hence, it is important that the students are encouraged to watch films from a caring science perspective. This requires a structure for learning-support related to the film, such as having a focus and purpose for watching the film, as well as support for follow-ups. The film itself does not create such support and guidance; instead, it must be combined with well-considered pedagogic thoughts on what learning is and how learning can be supported. The results are highlighted with the help of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of ‘the lived body’, and ‘the flesh of the world’. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 12, Special Edition July 2012. (shrink)

Hunter Vaughan interweaves phenomenology and semiotics to analyze cinema's ability to challenge conventional modes of thought. Merging Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception with Gilles Deleuze's image-philosophy, Vaughan applies a rich theoretical framework to a comparative analysis of Jean-Luc Godard's films, which critique the audio-visual illusion of empirical observation (objectivity), and the cinema of Alain Resnais, in which the sound-image generates innovative portrayals of individual experience (subjectivity). Both filmmakers radically upend conventional film practices and challenge philosophical traditions to (...) alter our understanding of the self, the world, and the relationship between the two. Films discussed in detail include Godard's _Vivre sa vie_ (1962), _Contempt_ (1963), and _2 or 3 Things I Know About Her_ (1967); and Resnais's _Hiroshima, mon amour_ (1959), _Last Year at Marienbad_ (1961), and _The War Is Over_ (1966). Situating the formative works of these filmmakers within a broader philosophical context, Vaughan pioneers a phenomenological film semiotics linking two disparate methodologies to the mirrored achievements of two seemingly irreconcilable artists. (shrink)

Many of the most popular and critically acclaimed horror films feature grief as a central theme. This article argues that horror films are especially suited to portraying and communicating the phenomenology of grief. We explore two overlapping claims. First, horror is well suited to represent the experience of grief, in particular because the disruptive effects of horror “monsters” on protagonists mirror the core experience of disruption that accompanies bereavement. Second, horror offers ways in which the experience of grief can (...) be contained and regulated and, in doing so, may offer psychological benefits for the bereaved. While our focus will be squarely on film, much of what we say applies to other media. (shrink)