The Neglect ed Tradit ion of Phenomenology ...

5
The Neglected Tradition of Phenomenology in Film

Theory

DUDLEY ANDREW

I n th is 1 9 7 8 article fro m th e th e n in flu e n tial jo u rn al

Wide Angle

, ve t-
e ran sch o lar D u d le y A n d re w p ro p o se s a th e o ry o f film th at g ive s
lim itle ss valu e to e xp e rie n ce . A p h e n o m e n o lo g ical film th e o ry
like th is wo u ld se t asid e d e b ate s ab o u t tru th an d tu rn atte n tio n to
o u r co m m o n stru g g le with co m p le x re alitie s. A n d re w s b o o k

The
Major Film Theories

1 9 7 6 ) re m ain s th e b e st in tro d u ctio n to th e
su b je ct.

1

Countless American literary and lm scholars who have been
busy retooling themselves for the kinds of structural project that
oated to us from across the Atl anti c nd themsel ves ei ther
bemused or frustrated to learn that the readings those tools have
engendered are now repudiated by their very European designers.
Even i n i ts heyday, of course, the structural sand castle was
eroded continually from the outside. Such movements as the Ger-
man Reader Response School or Stanley Fishs audience theories
specically attacked structuralisms exclusive orientation toward
texts as di d, i n a more subtl e way, the hermeneuti cs of Paul
Ricoeur.
But it is the interior erosion which has done the most damage, as
former promulgators of textual structuralism have turned to textu-
ality or the process of reading and writing. In coming to grips
with the event of reading and the activity of rewriting, Roland
Barthess

S/Z

and

Pleasureof theText

deny and surpass the highly
touted schematic models he generated in the mid-sixties,

Elements
The Neglect ed Tradit ion of Phenomenology ...

5
of Semiology

and Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narra-
tive. In the same tradition Edward Saids

Beginnings

has re-posed
questions of origins and of textual production which mainline
structuralism had ruled out of bounds.
Barthes and Said still work within the domain of the textual but
in them and in others we can unmistakably measure a shift of
interest from the text considered as formal structure to the dynam-
ics of textuality taken to be a oating process of structuration and
deconstruction both writing and reading. Even old-guard semioti-
cians like Umberto Eco have had to steer their objective science of
signs into the murky areas of the psyche where art, novelty and
interpretation reign, weakening their structural model through
overtaxation.
If we consider the development of intellectual movements to be
dialectical in nature, then all these signs of the collapse of rigid
structuralism may suggest a return to the problematic of phenome-
nology, for these two approaches to culture have always been
viewed as polar opposites.
This categorical opposition can be readily expressed by a double-
column entry list whose oversimplication has the advantage of
mapping for us the terms and the issues:
STRUCTURALISM/SEMIOTICSPHENOMENOLOGY
ExplanatoryDescriptive
Synchronic (System)Diachronic (Origins)
Endistanced (Objective)Immersed (Experimental)
Research AttitudeResearch Attitude
(Rhetoric) Communications ModeL(Art) Expression Model
Analytic (Revolutionary)Synthetic (Revelatory)
Repositioning the TextRepositioning the Self
The Neglect ed Tradit ion of Phenomenology ... 5

While no sophisticated theorist working today would consider a
literal return to the postwar phenomenological model, its terms
and emphases indubitably throw structuralism into relief and pro-
vi de an hi stori cal di mensi on to the struggle whi ch, as I have
already suggested, is currently deforming structuralism into some-
thing new and unrecognizable.
Literary and social theorists have recognized the importance of
thi s hi stori cal progressi on. Structurali sm was born out of the
highly public SartreLevi-Strauss debate, or out of Merleau-Pontys
move, late in his career, toward a theory of language, out of Jacques
Lacans shift in the 50s from a phenomenological stance toward a
linguistically based structural psychoanalysis.
But in lm this transition was hardly made and never recog-
nized. There was no university lm tradition to debate or develop
the phenomenology inherent in the work of Bazin, Ayfre, Merleau-
Ponty and others. Moreover, when, around 1963 lm did begin to
enter the university in a substantial way in both France and Amer-
ica, all three men had died, as had

La Revueinternationaledu l-
mologie

, the one journal devoted to theory along quasi-phenome-
nological grounds. Academically, then, our eld was born in the
era of Levi-Strauss, an era offering few respectable alternatives to
the semiotics and narrative structuralism which increasingly domi-
nate our best journals. In lm there was no one to challenge struc-
turalism, and few to sense the dialectic out of which it had been
spawned.
The fact that no phenomenological lm theory ever self-con-
sciously developed is a matter for regret only insofar as this lack of
an opposing tradition locks us within a structuralist project and
vocabulary. We can speak of codes and textual systems which are
the results of signifying processes, yet we seem unable to discuss
The Neglect ed Tradit ion of Phenomenology ... 5

that mode of experience we call signication. More precisely, struc-
turalism and academic lm theory in general have been disinclined
to deal with the other-side of signication, those realms of pre-
formulation where sensory data congeal into something that mat-
ters and those realms of post-formulation where that something
is experienced as mattering. Structuralism, even in its post-struc-
tural reach toward psychoanalysis and intertextuality, concerns
itself only with that something and not with the process of its con-
gealing nor with the event of its mattering.
To put it another way, the classication of general formal codes
in the cinema, while necessary, must not retard the far more press-
ing tasks of describing the peculiar way meaning is experienced in
cinema and the unique quality of the experience of major lms. In
neither of these cases will general codes take us very far. What is
called for instead, and what I think we are beginning to receive
from various camps, is a study of the zone of pre-formulation in
which the psyche confronts a visual text intended for it, and the
zone of post-formulation in which the psyche must come to terms
with a surplus value unaccounted for by recourse to a science of
signication.

2

The tradi ti on behi nd thi s newer theoreti cal atti tude li es i n
French phenomenology, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty. and Dufrenne
have all attempted to describe perceptual, imaginative, and aes-
thetic experience, and all have shown interest in the cinema. From
the posi ti ons they establi shed between 1946 and 1955 a large
number of lm critics began to meditate on the cinema from what
can only he called a phenomenological perspective.
The Neglect ed Tradit ion of Phenomenology ... 5

A history of this scattered tradition is long overdue. As a rst step
I would like to sketch a typology of approaches which ought tenta-
tively to be grouped together as phenomenological, in hopes that
we can use the past to by-pass problems which bewilder current
theory or to invite us to approach problems current theory ignores.
I. In 1945, Gilbert Cohen-Sat blew a loud bugle in the name of
a new science, lmologie. His

Essai sur lesprincipesdunephilosos-
phiede



cinma

became the rallying point of those anxious to orga-
nize a new and progressive science of cinema.
Filmologie from the rst was marked with the phenomenolog-
i cal brand for i t sought to descri be ci nema as a phenomenon
among other phenomena but one exerting a very special pressure
on individuals and society. Cohen-Sat speaks of cinema as a social
eruption controlled by an alien technology and creating a universal
but impersonal dream. Through the breadth of its vision and the
poetic quality of its scientic analysis, Cohen-Sats book led a
whole generation to review and reimagine the full cinematic com-
plex in a fresh way and it immediately fathered several other inves-
ti gati ons, the most well known of whi ch i s Edgar Mori ns

Le
Cinma ou lhomme imaginaire

. In America, we should consider
much of Cavells The World Vi ewed i n li ght of thi s effort to
describe the experience, on both the personal and cultural level, of
the very phenomenon of cinema in its totality. David Thomsons
little-remembered

Movie Man

is likewise a descriptive foray into
the experience of the movie complex. But neither of these works is
so strong or sound as their French counterparts like Ayfres

Cinma
et mystre

, Muniers

Contrelimage

or Morins brilliant book.
II. Since phenomenology has been dominated by the study of
perception, we should expect to nd lm theory responding to
Merleau-Pontys landmark Phenomenology of Percepti on. Of
The Neglect ed Tradit ion of Phenomenology ... 5

course Merleau-Ponty himself wrote on the perceptual basis of cin-
ema and, in the more signicant

Eyeand Mind

, on aesthetic per-
ception in general.
The greatest cache of perception study in relation to lm is the

Revueinternationaledelmologie

which from 1947 through 1960
published a steady stream of essays on cinemas relation to memory,
cognition, time and space, psychophysiology, daydreaming, illu-
sion and so on. Ignored by American lm students, the work of
this journal nevertheless gave rise to several of Christian Metzs
most important essays (especially those on the impression of real-
ity, on daydreaming, and on perception of depth).
III. In both France and America perception studies in lm have,
for the most part, been carried out by scholars essentially outside
cinema. Theorists interested more exclusively in lm have usually
attempted a study of the cinematic process itself. Here phenome-
nology requires that reection recapture the experience in which a
series of sounds and images, in confronting consciousness, consti-
tutes a direction and a world, that is, a human signication. Jean
Mitrys colossal

Esthtiqueet psychologiedu cinma

seeks to chroni-
cle the movement of the cinematic experience from perception to
the elaboration of a world and in certain lms to an aesthetic plane
from which we can review all our experience. Mitrys minute analy-
ses of cinematic rhythm, subjective camera, reexive montage, and
so on constitute a vast phenomenological encyclopedia of traits of
the cinema. Even Christian Metz, often considered a harsh oppo-
nent of phenomenol ogy, embarked on hi s career wi th essays
derived directly from Mitry, one on the impression of reality in
cinema, another on the experience of narrative in lm.
Metz here hovered about the two aspects of the lm process most
crucial for phenomenology: narrative and identication. These
The Neglect ed Tradit ion of Phenomenology ... 5

aspects have each received book-length studythe rst in Albert
Laffays

Logique



du cinma

and the second in Jean-Pierre Meuniers

LesStructuresdelexpriencelmique.

Laffays work has received quite a bit of attention, thanks again
to Metzs enthusiasm for it. Meuniers 1968 treatise, however, is all
but unknown. On the surface it appears to be a key to an overall
phenomenological lm theory, dedicated as it is to Merleau-Pontys
position and deriving explicitly from Sartres writing on images and
the imagination. Meunier hopes to describe, and account for, the
peculiar fascination and momentum belonging to the various types
of lm, from home movies through narrative features. Identica-
tion is his key, unlocking the inner dynamics of genre upon genre
by meditating on the viewers shifting mode of consciousness in
confrontation with various types and organizations of images.
IV. The rst three types of phenomenological lm study sur-
veyed here have all aimed at the description of one or another sort
of consciousness the spectator assumes in apprehending movies: a
global response to the movie complex, a perceptual stance in rela-
tion to the animation and denition of images, and a narrative
stance implicating the spectators consciousness through the pro-
cesses of identication and individuation in relation to a sequence
of images all directed toward some goal or experience.
All three of these descriptions essentially aim at what I have
termed the zone of pre-formulation. All attempt to describe as
adequately as possible the experience of signication in cinema,
comparing it to other forms of perception and imagination. There
is also, however, a phenomenology which seeks to be adequate to
that experience which lies on the hither side of signication, some-
where beyond the text. This venture can be divided into phenome-
The Neglect ed Tradit ion of Phenomenology ... 5

nological lm criticism on the one hand and a phenomenology of
the act of interpretation (called hermeneutics) on the other.
What exists beyond the text and what kind of description can be
adequate to it?Here we encounter the exciting and dangerous term
world. A lm elaborates a world which it is the critics job to esh
out or respond to. But what is this cinematic world?
After World War II a group of critics centered at the University
of Geneva developed a technique of describing the world called up
by the writing of any given author. In this so-called Criticism of
Consciousness the boundaries between books dissolved as the
transcendental author was seen to spew out fragments of a world
which the critics learned to reconstitute.
Meditations on groups of lms might also, then, be deemed phe-
nomenological, making both auteur and genre studies the most
prolix phenomenological endeavor in our eld. Unquestionably
Andr Bazins writings are at the top of this category and provide
its clearest model. In essays like The Virtues and Limitations of
Montage, The Cinema of Exploration, and Defense of Rossel-
lini, he brilliantly circumscribes the unique worlds we experience
respectively in fairy tale lms, documentaries, and neorealism. His
large studies of Welles, Chaplin, and the ve directors subsumed
under the title

Cinma of Cruelty

are the closest things we have to a
phenomenological criticism in the manner of the Geneva School,
for in all these he strives to erase the distinction between works and
to join himself, as he was so able to do, to the creative energy of
each auteur. Bazins method essentially led him to elaborate the
world of genre or auteur and then to pinpoint the source (be it
economic, philosophic, political, etc.) capable of generating such a
world.
The Neglect ed Tradit ion of Phenomenology ... 5

Much of

Cahiers du cinma

criticism developed as part of this
project, especially the auteur and genre studies which have become
so prevalent in America today. But few English-language critics
have been able to mimic that speculative aura which struggles to go
beyond the mere enumeration of repeated elements and to capture
the quality of the experience we live through with an auteur or a
genre. As always in the phenomenological criticism of any art, one
nds casual impressionism standing beside decisive, law-discover-
ing observation, the former masquerading as the latter.
V. To my mind the most important current phenomenological
impulse in criticism stems from the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur.
In effect Ricoeur wants to restrain the naive romanticism and exu-
berance of phenomenological criticism while retaining its goal of
going beyond the text by means of fructifying experience of the
text. The machinery by which texts have been produced or make
sense must, he feels, be encountered head on. Ricoeurs debates
with Levi-Strauss and his monumental study of Freud

1

suggest that
the rst step of interpretation for him is a backward one which dis-
trusts the text and seeks to explain its origins via semiotics, psycho-
analysi s, and a theory of i deology. Thi s type of suspi ci on the
Geneva School was always afraid to entertain, preferring instead
the romantic faith in the creative power of the individual author.
Ricoeur knows that no author is completely in control of what his
text says, that Freud, Marx, and de Saussure have taught us that
texts are produced out of the interaction of massive systems far
greater than personal consciousness. Nevertheless this suspicious
explanatory attitude, the attitude dominant among structuralists,
must not suspend our experience of artworks. He nds that great
works bear a surplus of meaning and of value which is qualied
but not exhausted by analysis. And he calls for a progressive and
The Neglect ed Tradit ion of Phenomenology ... 5

synthetic hermeneutics to recover the gain in meaning which the
artwork represents. Ulti mately Ri coeur wants to clear enough
space for us to be able to experience and reexperience artworks in a
way which allows us to be adequate to them, to learn from them,
to change our lives in relation to the meaning they suggest, rather
than to protect ourselves from them through a structural analysis
which can only discuss their possibility, not their actuality.
While Ricoeurs work has hardly been adapted to cinema studies,
it should provide a model for those interested in contemplating the
use of the phenomenological tradition in todays critical arena. For
despite the fact that Ricoeur should be thought of as one who has
passed through phenomenology and on to something else, his cur-
rent work exemplies the same concerns that motivate all the types
of study surveyed here and put them in opposition to structuralism
and semiotics. Since those concerns might better be thought of as
an attitude toward research and toward the object of research, I
would like to characterize that attitude in lieu of a conclusion.

3

Instead of elaborating an epistemology which is then applied in a
second-level way to cinema, as do the structuralists, phenomenol-
ogy has attempted to stay within the hidden reason of cinema
itself and to make visible that reason on the run, so to speak.
Opposed as they are in their basic approaches to research, these
movements have quickly given off political overtones: structuralists
are typed as cultural radicals while phenomenologists are accused
of neutrality, if not rightism. The former, proceeding out of a
higher logic, can envision a utopia of signs, of knowledge, and of
communication, a cinema which will be clear, just, and demysti-
ed. The latter are anxious to change nothing but instead to com-
The Neglect ed Tradit ion of Phenomenology ... 5

prehend a process which ows along perfectly well on its own.
Indeed, phenomenologists have a longstanding distrust of pure rea-
son, viewing rationality as a single mode of consciousness among
others, a mode whose unquenchable thirst to swallow all experi-
ence must be restrained precisely because life itself tells us that
experience is dearer and more trustworthy than schemes by which
we seek to know and change it.
Perhaps now we can see why from Cohen-Sat to Meunier, phe-
nomenologists have distrusted the grammarians of cinema, be
they Arnheim and Spottiswoode or Umberto Eco and Christian
Metz. I nstead of systemati c grammars they wri te chapters on
Emotion in the Cinema and on Our Experience of Movement
in the Cinema, because for them such experiences, both private
and societal, must be the starting point and the ultimate goal of
research. Grammars, lexicons, and structural studies in general can
only remove us from the cinema and force us to focus on a second-
level system (a logical system), which itself rests on a metaphysics
or an epistemology masking a metaphysics.
Phenomenology wants to remain immune to the diseases, anti-
bodi es, and cri ti cal i noculati ons whi ch have characteri zed the
feverish world of structuralism for the past fteen years. Second-
level systems will always be vulnerable to, will in fact produce, the
critiques which must destroy them. By according limitless value to
experi ence and by granti ng all li fe processes an unquesti oned
respect, phenomenology seeks to put reason and language at the
service of life or at least of human experience. If life and reality lie
beyond human experience or our consciousness of it, as certain
recent structuralists have avowed, then lets forget it anyway. And
so from the most primitive descriptions of the peculiarities of per-
ception in cinema, to our emotional involvement in the image, to
The Neglect ed Tradit ion of Phenomenology ... 5

the momentum of a narrative, to the constitution of a cinematic
world, to the description of types of worlds (or genres) and to the
life of our interpretation of them, phenomenology claims to be
closer, not necessarily to truth, but to cinema and our experience of
it. Since this is its object, it will happily let second-level philoso-
phers and overly ambitious critics bicker and ght over truth.

Note
1. See especially, Ricoeurs Structure, Word, Event,

Philosophy Today

12
(1968): 114129, and of course his

Freud and Philosophy

, Yale University
Press 1969. I have tried to elaborate Ricoeurs potential for lm criticism
in an essay on Sunrise published in

Quarterly Review of Film Studies

, no. 3
(August 1977).