In Film Fables (2006), summarising what he views as the problematic central wager of the film theoretical tradition that commenced with Jean Epstein, Jacques Rancière writes: “[T]he art of moving images provides access to an inner truth of the sensible that settles the quarrels for priority among the arts and among the senses because it settles, first and foremost, the great quarrel between thought and sensibility”. A brief glance at the annals of French film theory reveals that, far from settled, this ‘great quarrel’ animated film theoretical debate throughout the second half of the twentieth century, as exemplified by the intellectual struggle between phenomenology and structuralist semiotics, both of which claimed to possess the secret to understanding cinematic meaning or sense [sens]. This presentation will interrogate the way the philosophical problem of sens - and its relation to affect [le sensible] - troubled French film theory from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s 1945 address “Film and the New Psychology” to the ‘crisis in film theory’ of the early 1990s. In revisiting the rise and fall of structuralist semiotics in France it will seek to better understand the intellectual context that has sanctioned the proliferation of writings on cinema by Francophone philosophers today.

This is a Department of Film and Television reseach seminar. All staff and students welcome.