Maintaining that these premises ignore the material and cultural-historical situations of both the spectator and the film, the author makes the radical proposal that the cinematic experience depends on two “viewers” viewing: the spectator and the film, each existing as both subject and object of vision.

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. Mauro Carbone, spécialiste d'esthétique, est Professeur de Philosophie à la Faculté de Philosophie de l'Université Jean Moulin - Lyon 3, ainsi que membre senior de l'Institut Universitaire de France.Cinema is a sensuous object, but in our presence it becomes also a sensing, sensual, sense-making subject. Building on his earlier work on Marcel Proust and considering ongoing developments in optical and media technologies, Carbone adds his own philosophical insight into understanding the visual today.

Focusing on Merleau-Ponty’s later writings, including unpublished course notes and documents not yet available in English, Carbone demonstrates both that Merleau-Ponty’s interest in film was sustained and philosophically crucial, and also that his thinking provides an important resource for illuminating our contemporary relationship to images, with profound implications for the future of philosophy and aesthetics. Carbone connects these ideas to Merleau-Ponty’s continuous interest in cinema-an interest that has been traditionally neglected or circumscribed.

In The Flesh of Images, Mauro Carbone begins with the point that Merleau-Ponty’s often misunderstood notion of “flesh” was another way to signify what he also called “Visibility.” Considering vision as creative voyance, in the visionary sense of creating as a particular presence something which, as such, had not been present before, Carbone proposes original connections between Merleau-Ponty and Paul Gauguin, and articulates his own further development of the “new idea of light” that the French philosopher was beginning to elaborate at the time of his sudden death. Highlights Merleau-Ponty’s interest in film and connects it to his aesthetic theory.

Merleau ponty film