Abstract
The rigorous and systematized application of phenomenology to the study of film has been a comparatively late development in film studies. Vivian Sobchack’s ground breaking book, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (1992), has brought to light the relevance of maurice merleau-ponty’s existential phenomenology to major aesthetic and theoretical aspects of the film experience. In so doing, her work has also made apparent the reductive and deterministic nature of the prevalent models of film theory used to date, namely, the psychoanalytical and Marxist/ideological approaches. Thinking about film through such phenomenological notions as the lived body (applied to both film and spectator), the embodied and synaesthetic nature of perception, the reversibility of perception and expression, and the material and sensuous operations of the technological film apparatus, The Address of the Eye seeks to overcome, on the one hand, the sexual objectification performed by psychoanalytical film theory, and on the other hand, the reifying approach to existence practiced within the Marxist model.
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del Río, E. (2009). Film. In: Sepp, H., Embree, L. (eds) Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 59. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2471-8_21
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