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. Hanich: Would you also see a proto-political side of phenomenology in its concern with communality rather than identity and difference? Simon Rothöhler, Amateur der Weltgeschichte: Historiographische Praktiken im Kino der Gegenwart, Zurich 2011.

Thomas Morsch, Medienästhetik des Films: Verkörperte Wahrnehmung und ästhetische Erfahrung im Kino, Munich and Paderborn 2011.

Casebier, Allan. Film and Phenomenology: Toward a Realist Theory of Cinematic Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Virginie Sélavy, “Interview with Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani,” Electric Sheep Magazine, 10 April 2014, http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/features/2014/04/10/interview-with-helene-cattet-and-bruno-forzani/. ↩

that stories have the power to convey other people’s experiences to us and allow us to imaginatively “relive” them, such that by using imagination and empathy we are able, from the perspective of the narrator or characters, to relate to their experience as if we ourselves were having it right now. Footnote 103 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 Cities on the Edge of Time: The Urban Science Fiction Film," East-West Film Journal, 3, no. 1 (December 1988): 4–19. Stern, Lesley, and George Kouvaros, eds. Falling for You: Essays on Cinema and Performance. Sydney: Power Publications, 1999.

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Howe, D., 1994. Review of Blue. Washington Post [online] 11 February. Available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/videos/bluenrhowe_a0b031.htm [Accessed 11 November 2009]. Hanich: Some critics claimed it was an interesting metaphor, but shouldn’t be taken literally. You did not mean it metaphorically though.

Merleau-Ponty, M., 1946. ‘The primacy of perception.’ In: The Primacy of Perception. Translated from French and edited by J. M. Edie 1964. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, pp. 12–42. del Río, Elena. “Politics and Erotics of Representation: Feminist Phenomenology and Valie Export’s The Practice of Love”. In Discourse 22:2, 2000, 46–70.

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Now, historically, it is the techno-logic of the electronic—and not the residual logic of the cinematic—that dominates the form and in-forms the content of our cultural representations. And, unlike cinematic representation, electronic representation by its very structure phenomenologically diffuses the fleshly presence of the human body and the dimensions of that body’s material world. However significant and positive its values in some regards, however much its very inventions and use emerge from lived-body subjects, the electronic tends to marginalize or trivialize the human body. Indeed, at this historical moment in our particular society and culture, we can see all around us that the lived body is in crisis. Its struggle to assert its gravity, its differential existence, status, and situation, its vulnerability and mortality, its vital and social investment in a concrete lifeworld inhabited by others, is now marked in hysterical and hyperbolic responses to the disembodying effects of electronic representation. On the one hand, contemporary moving images show us the human body (its mortal “meat”) relentlessly and fatally interrogated, “riddled with holes” and “blown away,” unable to maintain material integrity or moral gravity. If the Terminator doesn’t finish it off, then electronic smart bombs will. On the other hand, the current popular obsession with physical fitness and cosmetic surgery manifests the wish to reconfigure the human body into something more invulnerable—a “hard body”; a lean, mean, and immortal “machine”; a cyborg that can physically interface with the electronic network and maintain a significant—if altered—material presence in the current digitized lifeworld of the subject. Thus, it is no historical accident that, earlier in our electronic existence, bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger played the invulnerable, hard-body cyborg Terminator, whereas, much more recently and more in tune with the lived body’s dematerialization, the slightly built Keanu Reeves flexibly dispersed and diffused what little meat he had across The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999), The Matrix Reloaded (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 2003), and The Matrix Revolutions (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 2003). Marks, Laura. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Bachelard, G., 1958. The Poetics of Space. Translated from French by Maria Jolas 1964. Boston: Beacon Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard, 1945; Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 2005, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm (last accessed May 1, 2020).

The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1968. 143-44. Print. 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). Ihde distinguishes two forms of perception: “What is usually taken as sensory perception (what is immediate and focused bodily in actual seeing, hearing, etc.), I shall call microperception. But there is also what might be called a cultural, or hermeneutic, perception, which I shall call macroperception. Both belong equally to the lifeworld. And both dimensions of perception are closely linked and intertwined” (29: emphasis added).

Chion, M., 1990. Audio-vision: Sound on Screen. Edited and translated from French by C. Gorbman 1994. New York: Columbia University Press. 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?