ABSTRACT
A film is an act of seeing that makes itself seen, an act of hearing that makes itself heard, an act of physical and reflective movement that makes itself reflexively felt and understood. The shift firstly towards psychoanalysis and then towards reception and empirical research seemed to abandon the political project of those theorists originally committed to the post-1968 radical cultural movement. The reactionary political climate of contemporary Western society, and the concomitant reappearance of scientific utility and objectivity, is reflected in what Althusser named the 'problematics' of culture. Hollywood cinema always restricted itself to formal mise-en-scene and normative ideological structures such as political conservatism and patriarchal encoding. To reiterate, Sobchack prefers to think of cinema as an intersubjective sociality of a language of direct embodied experience. In addition, there will be a discussion as to how we may use the Jungian notion of cultural and natural symbols for the study of film.
