Abstract

Most historical accounts of the relations between phenomenology and film take their departure from essays written by Merleau-Ponty and Roman Ingarden after 1945. Thus, they completely ignore the period before the outbreak of World War II. However, if one indeed has difficulties finding any detailed analysis of cinema among the writings of “early phenomenologists,” the subject is nevertheless referred to by authors such as Husserl, Heidegger, Eugen Fink, Moritz Geiger, Felix Kaufmann or Oskar Becker. The present article attempts to reconstruct the implicit conception of cinema which circulated in the phenomenological movement during the interwar period and thus arrives at some significant conclusions regarding the conservative tendencies of phenomenology.