Hanna Trindade

The establishment of a relation between the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and cinema may seem strange at first, since the German philosopher himself has never explicitly wrote about the subject. And yet, as we would like to show, his philosophy provides us an original approach. Phenomenology is concerned with the description not of things, but of the subject’s "experience" of them and if cinema is "the expression of experience (of the filmmaker) by experience (of the spectator)", then phenomenology becomes a perspective particularly suited to understand this art, cause it enables the grasping of the cinematographic experience in its wholeby putting in evidence the correlation subject/movie both in its process of creation and of reception. In the same manner that Husserl’s phenomenology is not concerned with factuality (what is the world), but with the comprehension of how in the first place the world manifest itself and has a sense constituted by me as a consciousness, the understanding of cinema as universal art should not rely only on the analysis of all the possible functions this art may have (what is a film), but in explaining first of all how reality manifest itself through images and has a specific meaningconstructedby both the film director as a creative consciousness and the spectator as a contemplative one. The phenomenological approach could enable us precisely to develop this perspective further and the aim of this paper is therefore to analyze the film experience through the optic of the Husserlian philosophy.

Hanna Trindade is a Ph.D. Student of the »Program of French and German Philosophy« of the Charles University in Prague (Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Humanities). She got her Bachelor in Philosophy at the University of Minas Gerais in Brazil (2012) and her Master in Philosophy through the program »Erasmus Mundus Europhilosophie« (2012 – 2014) with a partner formation between the University of Bonn (Germany), the University of Coimbra (Portugal) and the University of Toulouse – Jean Jaures (France). Her more recent publications include a review of Béla Balázs’book »The Theory of the Film« in the Brazilian revue Pense, an article entitled »Temporality and Phantasy in E. Husserl« in the Spanish revue Eikasia and the article »Constitution and Objectivity: about a transcendental subjectivity in E. Husserl« in the Brazilian revue Ipseitas (in edition). She recently gave a course on phenomenology and cinema entitled »The Phenomenologist and the Filmmaker« during the Winter Semester in the Charles University in Prague and she is in charge of another course this Summer Semester on a phenomenology of the cinematographic image. Her scientific interests include phenomenology, more specifically the one of Edmund Husserl, and film studies. Her doctoral thesis, developed under the direction of M. Karel Novotny, is an attempt to outline a phenomenological theory of cinema from the Husserlian perspective.