Introduction

Fifty years ago, a young Belgian psychologist wrote a short book for a small publisher in the Belgian town of Leuven, a book that had little resonance in the French-speaking world and was almost completely overlooked elsewhere. The psychologist, 27 years old at the time, was Jean-Pierre Meunier, and his study bore the title Les Structures de l’expérience filmique: L’identification filmique. ¹ Meunier, born in 1941 in Namur (Wallonia), had studied psychology at the Catholic University in Leuven from 1960 to 1964, and subsequently became a chercheur at the Centre des techniques de diffusion under the auspices of Victor Bachy, one of the first professors to teach film courses at a Belgian university. Later promoted to research assistant, Meunier joined an interdisciplinary team consisting of philosophers, psychologists, specialists in law, and sociologists to study the effects of media. It was at that time that he developed a phenomenological approach to the study of film and set out to write The Structures of the Film Experience.