The experience of cinema A Husserlian approach to the filmic experience

Cinema seeks to recreate human experiences, expressing the relation we entertain with our reality. A film is not only the mechanical record of facts, but a visual manifestation of an interpretation of the world. But how does the spectator experience this specific form of expression of life itself? We propose an answer to this question through the point of view of the Husserlian philosophy. The focus of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology is not the description of things themselves, but of the structure of the subject's experience of them. His analysis aims at unveiling how reality appears to consciousness, manifesting a sense through this apparition. If we take films to be an expression of experience (of the filmmaker) through experience (of the spectator), then phenomenology becomes a particularly suitable perspective for understanding cinema. It enables the understanding both of how films manifest a sense of life and of how is structured the viewer's experience of this type of manifestation. Consequently, a Husserlian approach allows us to grasp the universality of filmic experiences: it is always a matter of a consciousness engaged in an act of apprehension of an object with the specific form and content. How is this relationship constituted? Keywords Films - Phenomenology - Experience -..