Claudio Rozzoni

From Aristotle (»Poetics«) to Du Bos (»Reflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture«) to the most recent works on the notion of "mimesis", philosophers have pointed out the peculiar "pleasure" people take in imitating things and events, that is o say the pleasure people take in the process of "representation", even when imitated objects are the kind that in real life, in the regime of reality – in short, if present instead of "represented" – they would not be able to see without reacting with pain, horror, disgust, and so on.

When seated in the ‘movie theater cave’, for example, spectators are capable of enjoying the representation of evil, violence and suffering. As Michael Haneke has pointed out, spectators are very often allowed to enjoy what they cannot stand perceiving in everyday life, as if what they are seeing were ‘not true’. Does this enjoyment truly depend on the fact that they "believe" that what they are watching is not ‘real’ and only an ‘image of reality’?

In order to address this issue both rigorously and profitably we propose a phenomenological taxonomy (starting with the Husserlian analysis of image consciousness, perception and phantasy) concerning the different kinds of images involved in cinematic experience (i.e. fictional or documentary images). More particularly, such a classification will hinge on the notion of "belief". This very notion plays a decisive role in the process of spectatorship, implicitly permeating and determining the character of feelings and values aroused "before a screen".

Claudio Rozzoni obtained his Ph.D. in »Aesthetics and Theory of Art« from the University of Palermo. He then developed two post-doctoral research programs about the notion of image at the University of Milan (the first starting with both Husserl’s and Fink’s works, while the second dealing with Diderot’s Salons). He is currently a FCT post-doc fellow at the Nova Institute of Philosophy (IFILNOVA), New University of Lisbon, with a project focusing on the philosophical significance of film image. In August 2015 he was also a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles).