ABSTRACT
This paper takes its cue from Jean-Pierre Meunier’s brief references to children’s games to ask what child’s play might teach us about his model of filmic identification. Filmic identification, in Meunier’s account, emerges from and against the background of “syncretic sociability,” a state of “anonymous collectivity” that characterizes infancy and early childhood, but which never entirely disappears in the adult. By examining what Daniel Stern called “forms of vitality,” we gain a clearer sense of how that shift between Meunier‘s “primordial intersubjectivity” and “private intersubjectivity” takes place. Forms of vitality also lend support to Meunier’s nuanced descriptions of the affective relationship between spectators, characters, and films by bringing into focus the aesthetic movements through which that relation comes into being.
