What Is Film Phenomenology?

In this article Christian Ferencz-Flatz and I try to give an answer to the question what film phenomenology actually is. We proceed in three steps. First, we provide a survey of five different research practices within current film phenomenological writing: We call them excavation, explanation, exemplification, extrapolation and expansion. Then we give an overview of the major shifts in the history of film phenomenology, sometimes zooming in on specific protagonists, from the 1930s till today. At the end we try to cluster three contemporary fields of interest that stand out as particularly noticeable. Here we focus on (1) embodied spectatorship, synaesthesia and the sense of touch, (2) feminist and queer film phenomenology and (3) film and/as consciousness.