ABSTRACT
The tendency of cinema studies theorists is to focus on the filmmaker’s responsibility toward fictional screen characters in the framework of a discourse of “the politics of representation” or “the authenticity of voice.”However, here I propose to examine the responsibility for the cinematic other evoked in the film viewer. To this end, I consider the perspectives of Emmanuel Levinas, Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze. And in returning to the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, I suggest how his awareness of cinema as an embodied activity implies a new kind of responsibility, outside traditional oppositions of subject and object, same and other, human and non-human, and immanent and transcendent. To theorize responsibility as a part of cinematic experience, I show how the film viewer is embodied with the filmmaker, sharing with her responsibility for screen others. The book ends with an examination of how the viewer can also be aligned with film characters’ emotional responses in such a way as to feel responsible with them. I show how various cinematic concerns and strategies bring about correspondingly different kinds of responsibilities. Moreover, as I demonstrate, cinema allows us to conceive these responsibilities not as fixed, determined by the dichotomy of viewer and viewed, but on a dynamic temporal spectrum involving subjectivity and objectivity, activity and passivity, perception and response, emotion and reason.
