Between the mind and the senses: Jean Mitry’s approach to cinematic consciousness

Representing altered states of consciousness, also through the most phantasmatic among the technical images, is an inherent contradiction; once we attribute a physical body, that is objectivity, to mental images, we deny what Husserl considers their very essence.Jean Mitry moves from this presupposition when he discusses the filmic access to mental states from a phenomenological perspective. The following essay re-thinks Mitry’s contribution with specific reference to the role of projection, technically and metaphorically speaking, in the cinematic imagination; this, with the intention to bring out some crucial questions for the comparison between the filmic forms of the visible and those inaugurated by the technology of the virtual.