ABSTRACT
Meunier wrote his major work in 1969 as phenomenology slipped under the sway of structuralism. His next book followed Edgar Morin from a phenomenology of identification with images to an anthropology of mass culture. But in 1969, Meunier ignored Morin and other contemporary theorists. He relied instead on Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and the filmologists. His three-stage approach to experience derives from Husserl and echoes Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. This kept him at a remove from French film studies, though he gained some notice in the USA, especially after the return of phenomenology in the late 1980s. This English translation lets us rethink issues that film theory has engaged with for a century, and that came to a head in 1969.
