This essay argues that the most influential strand of contemporary phenomenological film theory, indebted to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of perception and embodiment, has tended to under-emphasize or distort the specifically aesthetic dimension of cinematic experience. This stems, in part, from a neglect of the rich tradition of phenomenological aesthetics - including (ironically) certain of Merleau-Ponty’s own writings on art and cinema - which may be persuasively seen to challenge the medium essentialism, anti-intentionalism, and disproportionate privileging of vision and space (e.g. over time) in some contemporary film theory that invokes phenomenology. A fresh and largely sympathetic analysis of Merleau-Ponty’s essay “Film and the New Psychology” and related writings (alongside Mikel Dufrenne’s phenomenology of aesthetic experience) helps to differentiate between an existential phenomenology of the film medium and an existential phenomenology of film art. The latter is rooted in cinematic form and aesthetic perception as distinct from ordinary or non-aesthetic perception. In addition to explaining why the two are distinct, the essay indicates some of the ways in which a phenomenology of film art, as seldom pursued, has much to offer to film theory and the philosophy of film.

This review deems Patricia Pisters’s monograph The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture to be a timely intervention in contemporary media theory, well grounded in the particularities of twenty-first-century screen practice. The reviewer also points out certain assumptions and presumptions that lead the author to a few injudicious assertions about relationships among the mind, the brain, and the screen.

This article is a discussion piece that reflects on the authors' video article 'Obsession: Redux-Sounds from a Garage-Film' (Cumming and Potter 2019) and the digitized soundtrack of co-author John Cumming's film Obsession (1985). The authors explore the processes of, and concepts behind, creating the original multi-layered analogue soundtrack for Obsession, an artefact of creative practice from a specific moment on film culture and of filmmaking within Melbourne 'post-punk' culture of the early 1980s. As a personal and self-reflexive work, the Obsession soundtrack is replete with memory, both personal and popular, local and global. It is a collection of oral objects-an audio archive of live recordings and media samples made in Melbourne, Australia, between 1978 and 1985. The discussion piece revisits the Obsession soundtrack, alongside the redux of this film, in the context of contemporary literature and practice in sonic thinking. The representation of the self and relationships in sound is underpinned by Michel Chion's (1994) understanding of palimpsest and Raul Ruiz's (1995) ideas on poetic objects and shamanic films. The purpose of this investigation is to link sonic memories and subjective self-representation to specific practices of soundtrack composition and specific sites and moments of cultural history. The synthesis of concepts, methods and works that we examine here contributes to an emerging discourse around embodied and reflexive sound.

Susana Viegas and James Williams (Eds), "Painting, Moving Images and Philosophy", Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image n. 10, Dec 2018. ARTICLES . Painting at the Beginning of Time: Deleuze on the Image of Time in Francis Bacon and Modern Cinema, David Benjamin Johnson . “Each Single Gesture Becomes a Destiny”: Gesturality between Cinema and Painting in Raúl Ruiz’s L’hypothèse du Tableau Volé, Greg Hinks . Whither the Sign: Mohammed Khadda in Assia Djebar’s La Nouba des Femmes du Mont Chenoua, Natasha Marie Llorens . Manet and Godard: Perception and History in Histoire(s) du Cinéma, Pablo Gonzalez Ramalho . A Work of Chaos: Gianluigi Toccafondo’s Animated Paintings, Paulo Viveiros . Ill Seen, Ill Said: The Deleuzian Stutter Meets the Stroop Effect in Diana Thater’s Colorvision Series (2016), Colin Gardner . Blue Residue: Painterly Melancholia and Chromatic Dingnity in the Films of David Lynch, Ed Cameron

This article concerns the complex nature of post-war European film modernism’s historicity. According to András Bálint Kovács, this cinema rose in an arc starting from the mid-1950s, peaking in the 1960s, and slowly petering out by 1980. At its best such historicizing produces precise contextual detailing, rather than romantic, hermetic affirmation or subsequent backlash dismissal, in the process creating room for new accounts of films and filmmakers beyond their role in the heated politics of then-contemporary critical taste and the competitive linear regime of vanguard innovation. But we also need to look closely at the peculiarities of this particular modernist cinema’s apparent ‘past-ness’ as revealing crucial elements of modernism’s perennial (if variously contested or disavowed) power, challenge and attraction. This article explores the uncanny, untimely return of such cinema’s 1960s apogee, embedded in a very real past while also emerging from virtual futures, as it complicates anew our unstable present.

... The book's forward is by written Geoffrey Hartman, the introduction, entitled 'Blind Cinema', is by Nick Royle. ... The book was designed by Marika Van Adelsberg but presumably the directors also played a part in the creation and selection of images. ...