Cinema Consciousness: Elements of a Husserlian Approach to Film Image

Dialoguing with Husserl’s manuscripts on Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory, this paper aims to shed light on some of the primary concepts defining his notion of image – such as “belief,” “presentification” (Vergegenwärtigung) and perzeptive Phantasie – and endeavors to show how such concepts could be profitably developed for the sake of a phenomenological description of film image. More in particular, these analyses aim to give a phenomenological account of the distinction between positing film images, presupposing a claim to reality – for example the ones we experience in a documentary attitude – and quasi-positing film images involved in artistic creation. The latter, despite their photographic relation to reality, are capable of giving rise to filmic “image-worlds” having intersubjective existence.