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 proposes 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.
- ISBN10 0691031959
- ISBN13 9780691031958
- Publish Date 16 February 1992 (first published 23 December 1991)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 16 January 2011
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Princeton University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 354
- Language English
- URL https://press.princeton.edu/titles/5045.html