Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Vivian Sobchack and the Materialization of Cinematic Sense

Abstract

For the film theorists of the 1970s, phenomenology was pejoratively classified as a form of “idealism” which failed to recognise that “natural perception” is codified and structurally determined by ideological forces. This article proposes that, for this very reason, in returning phenomenology to film theoretical discourse, Vivian Sobchack presented Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology as commensurate with materialism. Exploring both Sobchack and Merleau-Ponty’s respective conceptualizations of cinematic meaning or sense, I point to a subtle discrepancy between Sobchack’s theory of embodied film spectatorship and Merleau-Ponty’s writings on film and the arts, the latter of which do not identity the body as the source of artistic meaning. Through a discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “sensible ideas” and a sequence from Kira Muratova’s Long Farewells (1971), I argue that there is an ideal component to Merleau-Ponty’s writings on cinema and the arts that locates the genesis of meaning, not in the body, but in an incorporeal elsewhere. This reconceptualization of the relation between sense and the sensible allows for a renewed appreciation of the place of idealism in film theory.