Glen W. Norton

This paper explores the extent to which the phenomenological notion of experiential temporality shapes our experience of a realistic cinematic »Lebenswelt«. For this I turn to Stanley Cavell’s ideas surrounding what I call the »perfectionist cinematic moment«. Against those who would claim cinema’s realist aspect merely offers a representation of the external world, one in which a character’s interior life can only be understood via crude behaviourism or reductive symbolism, Cavell’s perfectionist moment instead indicates cinema’s power for allowing intuition of character interiority. At bottom, Cavell’s idea of a perfectionist moment delineates a life lived on a continuous threshold between the totality one is at this moment and one’s intrinsic temporal existence as that self which one might be, or better still, one ought to be. The profundity of the perfectionist moment therefore lies in revealing that a character’s true choice of self is never singular, never »once and for all«. Such an epiphanic moment is not a cleaving point in which one chooses to divide one’s past self from one’s future self, but is instead the realization that this choice must be continually made in the present moment as it is lived. I claim that cinema’s realism is in part predicated on its unique ability to express a character’s interior life as this perfectionist temporal threshold. Recast within the purview of phenomenology in general and lived temporality in particular, it becomes clear that our intuition of the moral and ethical ramifications and obligations constituting the lived moments of those inhabiting its »Lebenswelt« is a necessary part of the embodiment of the real in cinema.

Glen W. Norton teaches in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. His primary research focuses on phenomenological approaches toward the study of cinema, with a special interest in the ties between the expression of lived temporality and existential ethics. His most recent publications include an analysis of temporality in the road movies of Benoît Jacquot, as well as a discussion of modernist character embodiment in the early work of Jean-Luc Godard. He is the digital curator of »Cinema=Godard=Cinema«, an online, open access website dedicated to the scholarly study of Godard's work. He is currently completing a manuscript entitled »Lived Moments: From Neorealism to the New Wave«, which offers new and comprehensive readings of moments within canonical films from these movements in order to chart an evolving modernist attitude toward the intertwining of cinema and lived temporal experience.