ABSTRACT
The home-movie ‘attitude’ is one of Jean-Pierre Meunier’s three modalities of ‘filmic identification’ in The Structure of the Film Experience. This essay both challenges and pays homage to Meunier’s heuristic phenomenology. Accepting his invitation to elaborate upon it with specific cases, I thus focus on those instances when the home-movie viewer’s off-screen self-image suddenly encounters its on-screen image-self in a structure of identification quite different from identification with on-screen others. Often experienced as ‘uncanny,’ this confrontation with one’s ‘self’ not only adds nuance to, but also ruptures and/or transforms what Meunier considers the ‘essential’ characteristics and overall phenomenological function of the home-movie experience.
