With the electronic and the advent of the VCR and DVD player, a pause is indeed a pause. However, in the cinema, an image can appear “frozen” on the screen only if it is replicated many times over so that it can continue moving through the projector; unlike the still photograph, the film always has to actively work at “arresting” its gaze. For further elaboration, see my “The Active Eye.” The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event, Editor (New York: AFI Film Reader Series, Routledge, 1996). Indeed, through its motor and organizational agency (achieved by the spatial immediacy of the mobile camera inhabiting a world and the reflective and temporalizing editorial re-membering of that primary spatial experience), the cinema inscribes and provokes a sense of existential presence that is at once subjectively introverted and objectively extroverted; centered synoptically and synthetically yet also decentered and split, mobile and self-displacing. Thus, the cinematic does not evoke the same sense of self-possession generated by the photographic. Indeed, the cinematic subject is sensed as never completely self-possessed, for it is always partially and visibly given over to the vision of others at the same time that it visually appropriates only part of what it sees and also cannot entirely see itself. Furthermore, the very mobility of its vision structures the cinematic subject (both film and spectator) as always in the act of displacing itself in time, space, and the world; thus, despite its existence as materially embodied and synoptically centered (on the screen or as the spectator’s lived body), it is always eluding its own (as well as our) containment.

Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 2005, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm (last accessed May 1, 2020). Hanich: My final question is meant for students or scholars becoming interested in phenomenology. What are the books you would recommend?

In this Book

Grundberg, Andy. “Ask It No Questions: The Camera Can Lie.” New York Times 12 Aug. 1990 2: 1, 29. Print.

As did André Bazin, we might think of photography as primarily a form of mummification (although, unlike Bazin, I will argue that cinema is not) (9-10). Although it testifies to and preserves a sense of the world’s and experience’s once-real presence, it does not preserve their present. The photographic neither functions—like the cinematic—as a “coming-into-being” (a presence always presently constituting itself), nor—like the electronic—as “being-in-itself” (an absolute presence in the present). Rather, it functions to fix a “being-that-has been” (a presence in a present that is always past). Thus, and paradoxically, as it materializes, objectifies, and preserves in its acts of possession, the photographic has something to do with loss, with pastness, and with death, its meanings and value intimately bound within the structure and aesthetic and ethical investments of nostalgia. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Print. Here it is worth noting that James Joyce, in 1909, was “instrumental in introducing the first motion picture theater in Dublin” (Kern 76-77). Hanich: Does this make phenomenology an endeavor that includes paying more attention to language than other film theoretical approaches do? Fisher, Kevin. Intimate Elsewheres: Simulations of Altered States of Consciousness in Post WW II American Cinema. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California Los Angeles, 2004.Hanich: Let’s move to your conceptualisation of the ‘film’s body’ – the idea that in films we encounter a quasi-subject that not only perceives a world but also confronts us with the expression of its perception. This was certainly the most controversial concept in the book. Stern, Lesley, and George Kouvaros, eds. Falling for You: Essays on Cinema and Performance. Sydney: Power Publications, 1999. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” 1984, http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/foucault1.pdf (last accessed May 1, 2020). The bodily dimension of historical experience represents one fundamental point of analogy to the phenomenology of film. Ankersmit notes that in the moment of this experience, the illusion is created that one can physically touch the past. Footnote 53 Based on Aristotle’s epistemology and Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “tactile seeing,” he assigns historical experience to the sense of touch. Footnote 54 By this he means not just haptic perception of the physical world, but also a simultaneously occurring form of self-experience. Footnote 55 According to Ankersmit, in historical experience “tactile seeing” makes not just the past but also our own embodied existence palpable Footnote 56; the sense of touch is characterized by immediacy, experience through self-experience, and contiguity of object and subject. Footnote 57 He assigns different human senses to different modes of access to history: Historical experience is like “being touched by the past,” Footnote 58 whereas historical texts seek to control and structure the past, for which reason Ankersmit associates them with the metaphor of seeing. Footnote 59 Historical debate, meanwhile, attests to the relativity of all historical insight and is therefore connected to the metaphor of hearing. Footnote 60 These classifications make clear that Ankersmit does not wish to pit historical texts and debate against historical experience. Footnote 61 Rather, the metaphorical schema in which different forms of history are associated with different senses is used to describe a complex process of mutual exchange. Historical insight is produced synesthetically in the mode of self-experience. Footnote 62 We can see here a point of connection with the medium of film, which likewise combines the senses of seeing and hearing to create worlds that can be physically experienced by the spectator.

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). In its pre-electronic state and original materiality, however, the cinema mechanically projected and made visible for the very first time not just the objective world but the very structure and process of subjective, embodied vision—hitherto only directly available to human beings as an invisible and private structure that each of us experiences as “our own.” That is, the novel materiality and techno-logic of the cinema gives us concrete and empirical insight and makes objectively visible the reversible, dialectical, and social nature of our own subjective vision. Writing of human vision and our understanding that others also see as we do, Merleau-Ponty tells us: “As soon as we see other seers . . . henceforth, through other eyes we are for ourselves fully visible. . . . For the first time, the seeing that I am is for me really visible; for the first time I appear to myself completely turned inside out under my own eyes” (143-44). Prior to the cinema this visual reflexivity in which we see ourselves seeing through other eyes was accomplished only indirectly: that is, we understood the vision of others as structured similarly to our own only through looking at—not through—the intentional light in their eyes and the investments of their objective behavior. The cinema, however, uniquely materialized this visual reflexivity and philosophical turning directly—that is, in an objectively visible but subjectively structured vision we not only looked at but also looked through. In sum, the cinema provided—quite literally— objective insight into the subjective structure of vision and thus into oneself and others as always both viewing subjects and visible objects.

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. Hanich: You mentioned that you started off as a creative writer. You wrote poetry when you were young, right? Jo Tollebeek and Tom Verschaffel, De vreugden van Houssaye: Apologie van de historische interesse, Amsterdam 1992, p. 18; Johan Huizinga, Verzamelde werken 2: Nederland, Haarlem 1950. Marks, Laura. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Blue, 1993. [Film] Written and directed by D. Jarman. UK: Channel 4 in association with The Arts Council of Great Britain, Opal, BBC Radio 3, and Zeitgeist.

Ihde, Don. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. Print. Although all moving images follow each other serially, each photographic and cinematic image (or frame) is developed or projected analogically rather than digitally. That is, the image is developed or projected as a whole and its elements are differentiated by gradation rather than by the on/off discretion of absolute numerical values.Marks, Laura. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. 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? Carroll, N., 1998. ‘The essence of cinema.’ Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, 89 (2/3), pp. 323–330. Thomas Morsch, Medienästhetik des Films: Verkörperte Wahrnehmung und ästhetische Erfahrung im Kino, Munich and Paderborn 2011. choreographed for the viewer to dwell on excessively. ‘It is produced en plus, in excess or in addition,