Cinema Consciousness: Elements of a Husserlian Approach to Film Image

By drawing on Husserl’s manuscripts on Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory, this paper aims to shed light on some of the primary concepts defi ning his notion of image—such as “belief,” “presentifi cation” (Vergegenwärtigung) and perzeptive Phantasie—and endeavours to show how such concepts could be profi tably developed for the sake of a phenomenological description of fi lm image. More in particular, these analyses aim to give a phenomenological account of the distinction between positing fi lm images, presupposing a claim to reality—for example the ones we experience in a documentary attitude—and quasi-positing fi lm images involved in artistic creation. The latter, despite their photographic relation to reality, are capable of giving rise to fi lmic “image-worlds” having intersubjective existence.