Shaw, S: Film Consciousness

The notion of film consciousness is one that has played around various film and philosophical discourses without ever really surfacing as a cogent theory. Representing the first major expression of film consciousness as a tangible concept, this critical study revisits notions of memory, retentional consciousness, narrative expectation, and spatio-temporal perception while also analyzing several major films. The first half of the book focuses on understanding the elements of the film experience--and its associated consciousness--through the descriptive tools of phenomenology. The second part develops the idea of film consciousness as a unique vision of the world and as a large element in the human understanding of reality. Throughout the work, the author combines the ideas of philosophers and film theorists from phenomenology--such as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Bazin, and Kracauer--with the postmodernist work of Deleuze and transitional theorists Bergson and Benjamin.