Abstract

Since the mid-1940s, when Maurice Merleau-Ponty gave a lecture on cinema at the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (IDHEC) in Paris, which was later published as “Cinema and the New Psychology” (Merleau-Ponty, 1977, pp. 89-105), film scholars have shown a lively interest in the relationship between philosophy and the seventh art. During his lifetime, his thinking influenced a number of important film theorists, from Amédée Ayfre, who was his student, to André Bazin to Henri Agel. More recently, in an Anglophone context, and largely thanks to the pioneering work of Vivian Sobchack, his phenomenology has been a source of inspiration for thinking about the cinematic experience as an embodied vision, involving a deep exploration of perception. My own aim in this text is to encourage a slight but significant shift in focus as I explore what can be learned from Merleau-Ponty about the imagination, and ask how this might improve the understanding of film, particularly documentary film. Merleau-Ponty makes only passing reference to the work of the modernist film movements of the early 20th century in his own writings on film, but his phenomenology is relevant to understanding films made at a later date that engage with modernist discourse in a broadest sense.