ABSTRACT
In 1978, at the height of structural, semiotic, and psychoanalytic film theory, Dudley Andrew published “The Neglected Tradition of Phenomenology in Film Theory,” an essay critical of academic film theory's tendency to ignore the “peculiar way meaning is experienced in the cinema and the unique quality of the experience of many films” (1985 [1978]: 627–8). Providing a brief history of phenomenology's conjunction with the cinema and calling for reconsideration of a mode of inquiry that might describe the perceptual, sensuous, affective, and aesthetic dimensions of signification and meaning in the film experience, Andrew contrasted synthetic phenomenological description with the analytic search for cinematic codes and textual systems, and the purely structural or psychoanalytic readings of films.
