Volume 16, 2016
Film and Phenomenology
Hans Rainer Sepp
Pages 91-109
Kamera und Leib
Film in statu nascendi
The central thesis of this article is that film is directing and directed kinaesthesis understood as an opening of world beyond the relation of “subjective” and “objective”. Thus the analysis does not focus on the recipients of a movie but on the origins filming finds in specific ways of experiencing, that is, in the living bodies of the persons who decide on the perspective of a take by using the camera’s body. Moved by its filmmakers, the body of the camera is directed as the product of its authors, and is directing insofar as it establishes a world by its own means. The article explains basic forms of opening world by kinaesthetic processes in general (1), and applies this investigation to the corpus of film (2). Finally, the results of these analyses will be put in concrete terms by relating them to basic film features and a few samples of movies (3).