ABSTRACT

Husserl’s phenomenology proposes a method through which a structural analysis of experience is performed, questioning how reality appears to consciousness. What cinema attempts is precisely to recreate human experiences, visually expressing the relation we entertain with our reality. If we take films to be an expression of experience (of the filmmaker) through experience (of the spectator), then phenomenology becomes a particularly suitable perspective for understanding cinema, for it enables the understanding of how a film, as an expression of life, is grasped by consciousness, creating a specific type of experience for the viewer. Consequently, a Husserlian approach allows us to grasp the universality of filmic experience: it is always and for every possible film a matter of a consciousness engaged in an act of apprehension of an object with a specific form and content. How is this relationship constituted? The aim of this chapter is to propose an answer to this question from a Husserlian perspective, by means of close analysis of two acts of our consciousness that make our access to films possible in the first place: perception and imagination.