The Address of the Eye

A Phenomenology of Film Experience

Vivian Sobchack

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691213279
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Cinema is a sensuous object, but in our presence it becomes also a sensing, sensual, sense-making subject. Thus argues Vivian Sobchack as she challenges basic assumptions of current film theory that reduce film to an object of vision and the spectator to a victim of a deterministic cinematic apparatus. Maintaining that these premises ignore the material and cultural-historical situations of both the spectator and the film, the author makes the radical proposal that the cinematic experience depends on two "viewers" viewing: the spectator and the film, each existing as both subject and object of vision. Drawing on existential and semiotic phenomenology, and particularly on the work of Merleau-Ponty, Sobchack shows how the film experience provides empirical insight into the reversible, dialectical, and signifying nature of that embodied vision we each live daily as both "mine" and "another's." In this attempt to account for cinematic intelligibility and signification, the author explores the possibility of human choice and expressive freedom within the bounds of history and culture.

CHAPTER ONE

Phenomenology and the Film Experience

In a sense the whole of philosophy . . . consists in restoring a power to signify, a birth of meaning, or a wild meaning, an expression of experience by experience, which in particular clarifies the special domain of language. And in a sense . . . language is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is the voice of the things, the waves, and the forests.¹

WHAT ELSE IS A FILM if not “an expression of experience by experience”? And what else is the primary task of film theory if not to restore to us, through reflection upon that experience and its expression, the original power of the motion picture to signify? However, when Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote the above lines shortly before his death in 1961, it is unlikely that the cinema was in his thoughts. Rather, his overarching concern was with the living exchange of perception and expression, with the sensuous contours of language, with meaning and its signification born not abstractly but concretely from the surface contact, the fleshly dialogue, of human beings and the world together making sense sensible. Yet it is precisely this emphasis on the material and carnal foundations of language that makes the above fragment of The Visible and the Invisible particularly relevant to the semiotic and hermeneutic questions posed by the medium of cinema. The passage suggests not only the primordial and unprivate nature of language, but also the physically concrete “reversibility” of perception and expression that constitutes both the moving picture and our experience of it.

More than any other medium of human communication, the moving picture makes itself sensuously and sensibly manifest as the expression of experience by experience. A film is an act of seeing that makes itself seen, an act of hearing that makes itself heard, an act of physical and reflective movement that makes itself reflexively felt and understood. Objectively projected, visibly and audibly expressed before us, the film’s activity of seeing, hearing, and moving signifies in a pervasive, primary, and embodied language that precedes and provides the grounds for the secondary significations of a more discrete, systematic, less “wild” communication. Cinema thus transposes, without completely transforming, those modes of being alive and consciously embodied in the world that count for each of us as direct experience: as experience “centered” in that particular, situated, and solely occupied existence sensed first as “Here, where the world touches” and then as “Here, where the world is sensible; here, where I am.”²

In an unprecedented way, the cinema makes visible and audible the primordial origins of language in the reversibility of embodied and enworlded perception and expression. However, as Merleau-Ponty points out in a continuation of the passage quoted above, “What we have to understand is that there is no dialectical reversal from one of these views to the other; we do not have to reassemble them into a synthesis: they are two aspects of the reversibility which is the ultimate truth.”³ That is, the reversibility of perception and expression is neither instantiated as a thought nor synthesized from discrete and separate acts of consciousness. It is given with existence, in the simultaneity of subjective embodiment and objective enworldedness. Using the term chiasmus to name this reversibility (“the ultimate truth”), Merleau-Ponty characterizes it as that “unique space which separates and reunites, which sustains every cohesion.”⁴ That unique space is both the lived-body and the experienced world.

Indeed, the cinema uses modes of embodied existence (seeing, hearing, physical and reflective movement) as the vehicle, the “stuff,” the substance of its language. It also uses the structures of direct experience (the “centering” and bodily situating of existence in relation to the world of objects and others) as the basis for the structures of its language. Thus, as a symbolic form of human communication, the cinema is like no other. At the end of his two-volume Esthétique et psychologic du cinéma (and sounding very much like Merleau-Ponty), Jean Mitry articulates both the medium’s privileged nature and the problem it poses for those who would discover the “rules” governing its expression and grounding its intelligibility:

These [cinematic] forms are ... as varied as life itself and, furthermore, as one hasn’t the knowledge to regulate life, neither has one the knowledge to regulate an art of which life is at one and the same time the subject and object.

Whereas the classical arts propose to signify movement with the immobile, life with the inanimate, the cinema must express life with life itself. It begins there where the others leave off. It escapes, therefore, all their rules as it does all their principles.⁵

In a search for rules and principles governing cinematic expression, most of the descriptions and reflections of classical and contemporary film theory have not fully addressed the cinema as life expressing life, as experience expressing experience. Nor have they explored the mutual possession of this experience of perception and its expression by filmmaker, film, and spectator—all viewers viewing, engaged as participants in dynamically and directionally reversible acts that reflexively and reflectively constitute the perception of expression and the expression of perception. Indeed, it is this mutual capacity for and possession of experience through common structures of embodied existence, through similar modes of being-in-the-world, that provide the intersubjective basis of objective cinematic communication.

Insofar as the embodied structure and modes of being of a film are like those of filmmaker and spectator, the film has the capacity and competence to signify, to not only have sense but also to make sense through a unique and systemic form of communication. Indeed, to the extent that any film can and does signify in some fashion to a viewer who is communicatively competent (that is, already aware that perception is expressible), and that any film—however abstract or “structural-materialist”—presupposes that it will be understood as signification, as conveying meaning beyond the brute material presence of light and shadow on a plane surface, the cinema assumes and assures its own intelligibility (even if it assumes and assures no single interpretation).⁶ That intelligibility is also assumed by filmmaker and spectator. The film experience, therefore, rests on the mutual presupposition of its intersubjective nature and function, based on the intelligibility of embodied vision. Its significance emerges from a shared belief and from shared evidence that the substance and structure of cinematic perception and expression (however historically and culturally qualified) are inherently able to “reflect the universality of specific scopes of experience.”⁷

This presupposition remains to be explored in the following chapters. Yet, immediately, it indicates that any semiotics and hermeneutics of the cinema must return to radically reflect on the origins of cinematic communication in the structures and pragmatics of existential experience. Such a semiotics and hermeneutic enterprise, undertaking this radical turn toward existence and away from secondary and abstract formulations, becomes a semiotic phenomenology—taking, as it does, signification and significance as immanent, as given with existence.⁸ Such a phenomenology of human meaning and its representation attempts to describe, thematize, and interpret the structures of communication as they radically emerge in the structures of being. This phenomenology’s aim, however, is not to arrive at “essential” and proscriptive categories but to address the “thickness” of human experience and the rich and radical entailments of incarnate being and its representation. To accommodate itself to experience, its method is responsively dialectical and informed by no particular telos.

The aim of this simultaneously empirical and philosophical study, then, is to serve as a prolegomenon to a lived logic of signification in the cinema. The focus here will center on the radical origin of such a logic in lived-body experience, that is, in the activity of embodied consciousness realizing itself in the world and with others as both visual and visible, as both sense-making and sensible. The entailment of incarnate consciousness and the “flesh” of the world of which it is a part will be described as the basis for the origination of the general structures of cinematic signification, structures that are themselves produced in the performance of specific modes of existential and embodied communication in the film experience (that is, in the activity of vision intersubjectively connecting film and spectator with a world and each other).

In no way is the following effort meant to deny the extra-cinematic, empirical, and contingent conditions that limit and affect the specific shape of actual (not merely possible) cinematic communication, systematically distorting it either spontaneously or willfully for ideological, rhetorical, and poetic purpose. Indeed, as indicated in the Preface, this study itself is necessarily situated within and distorted by its own theoretical context; and, so situated, it must always and necessarily entail the ideological, rhetorical, and poetic in-formation of its own historicity. Nonetheless, what follows is not intended as remedial. This is no idealist attempt to “cure” cinema or to uncritically embrace the “critical theory” of the Frankfurt school in general (or Habermas in particular).⁹ It does not take as its focus the exposure of “distorted” cinematic communication and, in fact, refuses the idealism that yearns for communication (an existential phenomenon) made completely rational, somehow “purged” of historical and cultural prejudice or “distortion,” somehow “cleansed” of the contingencies and specificity of biased existence that make communication not only necessary but also possible.¹⁰ Similarly, although this study must be informed necessarily by rhetorical force and poetic linguistic praxis, it is not intended as a rhetoric or poetics of cinematic communication. Rather, its phenomenological project is to radically reflect upon the general structures that always emerge particularly and contingently as the entailment of the lived-body and the world in cinematic acts of perception and expression. These primary structures, founded in existence and constitutive of conscious experience, produce themselves in the world as a systemic “cinematic communicative competence,” against which the secondary (but always present) notion of systematic “distortion” can be identified and, indeed, from which it can be constituted as ideology, rhetoric, and poetics.

THE EMBODIED AND ENWORLDED EYE:PERCEPTION AND EXPRESSION

When we sit in a movie theater and perceive a film as sensible, as making sense, we (and the film before us) are immersed in a world and in an activity of visual being. The experience is as familiar as it is intense, and it is marked by the way in which significance and the act of signifying are directly felt, sensuously available to the viewer. The embodied activity of perception and expression—making sense and signifying it—are given to us as modalities of a single experience of being in the presence of and producing meaning and diacritical value. What we look at projected on the screen—whether Merleau-Ponty’s “the things, the waves, and the forests,” or only abstract lines and colors—addresses us as the expressed perception of an anonymous, yet present, “other.” And, as we watch this expressive projection of an “other’s” experience, we, too, express our perceptive experience. Through the address of our own vision, we speak back to the cinematic expression before us, using a visual language that is also tactile, that takes hold of and actively grasps the perceptual expression, the seeing, the direct experience of that anonymously present, sensing and sentient “other.”

Thus, the film experience is a system of communication based on bodily perception as a vehicle of conscious expression. It entails the visible, audible, kinetic aspects of sensible experience to make sense visibly, audibly, and haptically. The film experience not only represents and reflects upon the prior direct perceptual experience of the filmmaker by means of the modes and structures of direct and reflective perceptual experience, but also presents the direct and reflective experience of a perceptual and expressive existence as the film. In its presence and activity of perception and expression, the film transcends the filmmaker to constitute and locate its own address, its own perceptual and expressive experience of being and becoming. As well, the film experience includes the perceptive and expressive viewer who must interpret and signify the film as experience, doing so through the very same structures and relations of perception and expression that inform the indirect representational address of the filmmaker and the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One: Phenomenology and the Film Experience
• Chapter Two: The Act of Being with One’s Own Eyes
• Chapter Three: Film’s Body
• Chapter Four: The Address of the Eye
• Selected Bibliography
• Index