KL: Gabrielle Hezekiah: The Subject and the World: Thinking Evential Hermeneutics in Experimental Cinema

Recent approaches in phenomenology and film have renewed scholarly interest in questions of subjectivity, objectivity and intention, foregrounding the lived-body of the spectator and the materiality of the film as belonging to subjects in the world. Mobilizing the existential phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, this scholarship provides a nuanced description of film experience and aesthetics that has been particularly useful in interpreting the work of culturally marginalized and diasporic filmmakers. Yet the place of the filmmaker, becoming subject through the work, has not been thoroughly explored. In this lecture, I will draw on the evential hermeneutics of philosopher Claude Romano and the work of artist Mona Hatoum to suggest new ways of thinking the subject phenomenologically in an experimental cinema of rupture and loss.