ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 provides a broad overview of some of the SEL’s movies’ general themes, while demonstrating the filmmakers’ immersive approach to an ethnographic cinema grounded in the phenomenology of lived experience, drawing on ideas I discussed in the previous chapter. This chapter also identifies several of the SEL’s conceptual and concrete aesthetic practices and discusses how the SEL tends to embed its aesthetic practices in lived experience. It ends with an exploration of the SEL’s approach to expressive phenomenology and cinematic sensory experience through John Dewey’s concept of “having an experience,” that I believe to be central to understanding the experiential approach to filmmaking established by the SEL.
