Filmens figurer: En figural tilnærming til film og filmanalyse

Figures of Cinema: A Figural Approach to Film and Film Analysis Can films create new ways of seeing? The prevailing discourse on film often centres on storytelling. What if we take as our point of departure that films create new appearances and invite new forms of attention? These are some of the main questions posed in this monograph, exploring what is called figural film analysis and the concept of figure. A ‘figure’ is here to be understood as an expressive appearance created by a film’s stylization of the world, making us perceive in unusual ways. The main goal of this dissertation is to discuss how figural film analysis and the concept of the figure can enrich our discourse on cinema as an art of attention. Specifically, this monograph is guided by three research questions: First, what is a film-specific figure? Second, how can we analyze film-specific figures? And third, what are the implications of figural film analysis when it comes to understanding representation, form, and style in film? This dissertation engages in dialogue with a number of scholars who have discussed the notion of figure as an aesthetic and film theoretical concept. The phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the two film scholars Nicole Brenez and Jacques Aumont are particularly important for this discussion. Written from a phenomenological perspective, the monograph is concerned with our experience of films. Therefore, the research questions are further explored through a series of film analyses. A recurrent point of focus in these analyses is how films’ montage of images reorganize our world of perception in ways that makes us wonder. The monograph concludes that figural film analysis lets us regard cinema’s representations as fundamentally poetic, film form as a ceasless reshaping of the world, and film style as an experimentation with our perception