ABSTRACT
The experience of watching films offers the viewer different modes of engagement with characters through diverse cinematic points of view. This diversity of points of view creates the context in which the ethical space of cinema is realized. The point of departure is Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s previously unknown remarks on cinematic movement, published in 2010 in Chiasmi International. Here, Merleau-Ponty proposes that we see cinema as a non-mimetic art, not representing the visible but allowing it to appear; its ontological novelty is as a convergence between seer and seen. When these remarks are taken together with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological understanding of visual perception as an embodied activity unfolding in time, and are put in the context of a discussion about the notion of cinematic point of view, they amount to a hint at its ethical importance. They show that the structure of point of view can not only be explained by cinematic convention but is also closely related to and reflected by natural vision, and should be seen as a dynamic and irreducibly plural temporal structure. By stressing the importance of a dynamic plurality of points of view in understanding the meaning of film viewing, my analysis sheds light on the ability of the viewing subject to perceive meaning outside of closed frameworks. It allows me to argue that cinematic experience can lead its viewers to what is outside themselves, different from and beyond them.
