Structures of the Film Experience by Jean-Pierre Meunier

Julian Hanich is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Groningen. He is the author of two monographs: The Audience Effect: On the Collective Cinema Experience (2018) and Cinematic Emotion in Horror Films and Thrillers: The Aesthetic Paradox of Pleasurable Fear (2010).Daniel Fairfax is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt and an editor of the online film journal Senses of Cinema.

"This is a very likeable scholarly project about Jean-Pierre Meunier, a Belgian film theoretician who wrote an important theoretical work on spectatorship over fifty years ago. It exemplifies the very best in contemporary cinema scholarship dedicated to completing its own history, and may it keep doing so."- Christophe Wall-Romana, University of Minnesota, H-France Review Vol. 21 (May 2021), No. 78 "Supplemented by insightful critical essays and an especially useful and informed introduction, this English translation of a pioneering phenomenological film theorist’s work is without doubt a major event in Anglophone film studies and the philosophy of film. Meunier’s writings are highly significant both historically and conceptually — and as the volume’s essays and interview further demonstrate, his nuanced account of moving-image experience is strikingly current and widely applicable."- Daniel Yacavone, The University of Edinburgh "The Structures of the Film Experience, originally published in 1969, provides unique insight into and even prefigures many of the concerns of contemporary phenomenological and cognitive film theory. Thus it is a welcome development to see this book translated into English. This volume contains not only Meunier’s book-in-translation, but also an introduction, a recent interview, and more than a dozen chapters by leading scholars who contextualize, explicate, and wrestle with Meunier’s ideas. This unique and well-designed volume thus makes a vital contribution to film theory."- Carl Plantinga, Calvin College

• Introduction, Every Theory Needs a Reference to Lived Experience: An Interview with Jean-Pierre Meunier, Part I: Jean-Pierre Meunier: The Structures of the Film Experience: Filmic Identification, Introduction, Part One: Introduction to the General Structures of Experience, Chapter I: Perception, I. The point of view of traditional psychology, II. The findings of phenomenology, Chapter II: Identification, I. The origins of the concept, II. Identification as the behavior of private intersubjectivity, III. The principal aspects of identification, IV. Fleeting and structuring identifications, V. Identification, projection, introjection, VI. Identification, mimicry and imitation, VII. Identification and personality, VIII. Identification, communication and information, Part Two: The Film Experience, Chapter I: Filmic Consciousness Faced with its Object, I. The film as an object of perception, II. Film, real and unreal, III. The imaginary consciousness, IV. The attitudes of filmic consciousness faced with its object, V. From the home movie to the fiction film VI. Movement, VII. Conclusion, List of Illustrations, List of Contributors