Reviews

Jenny Chamarette (2012) Phenomenology and the Future of Film: Rethinking

Subjectivity beyond French Cinema, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan,
288 pp.
Where does the film body end and the enworlded body begin?
This question, which Jenny Chamarette formulates in her conclusion
(238), addresses the highly stimulating link that she draws between
phenomenology and the future of film as per the title of her monograph.
Indeed, interrogations about the fluidity of embodied filmic assemblages
have always haunted cinema, and become more crucial with contemporary
modes of cinematographic experience. With 3D technology and the
emergence of virtual reality, for example, films are and will increasingly
become immersive, while the cinematic has at the same time become an
integral feature of commercials, video games and social media. However,
the interest of Chamarettes project lies in the idea that the future of film
is rooted in cinematographic practices that have been experimented with
by marginal, peripheral and avant-garde cinematic art (10). Chamarettes
phenomenological accounts of some of the films and installations of Chris
Marker, Agnes Varda, Chantal Akerman and Philippe Grandrieux explore
the in-betweenness through which films, filmic dispositifs, and authorial
and spectatorial positions make sense a complex and embodied sense.
Building on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Vivian Sobchack,
Laura U. Marks and Martine Beugnet, Phenomenology and the Future of
Film offers an analysis of a cinematographic subjectivity that emerges from
the interstices, or the lines of flight, that take place during the encounter
between spectator and film.
The first chapter offers a critical overview of theories that engage
with cinema and subjectivity through the articulation of temporality
and embodiment. Chamarette calls for a phenomenology that eschews
both the subject-without-body of psychoanalysis and the body-without-
subjectivity of cultural materialism, while still offering space for
revealing and challenging oppressive social/ideological structures. In
order to perform this, she offers a phenomenological approach that
intends to analyse the emergence of unstable, moving and slippery
subjectivities in relation to questions both of film/spectator embodiment
and of fluid, multiple and dynamic forms of cinematographic spaces,
materiality and modes of presence.
In the following chapters, Chamarette analyses from this perspective the
ethical, aesthetic, political, sensory and embodied forms of subjectivity
that emerge from the material presence of [the] cinematic encounter
(23). Even though each chapter is dedicated to some of the work of
a specific director (Marker, Varda, Akerman and Grandrieux), the book

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does not aim to reinforce authorial subjectivities. Instead, Chamarette

offers an interesting analysis of the filmmakers as bodies interacting
with the other bodies in/of their films. She scrutinises their onscreen
materiality, their presence or absence, and she analyses how each of them
develops distinct strategies that defer any definite authorial signature
and/or stable subjective positions, but which instead explore new
cinematic assemblages of time and space.
In chapter two, Chamarette offers interesting new perspectives on
Chris Markers La Jetee (France, 1962), the photogrammatic stills of
which produce a raw materiality of the cinematic image, and Chats
Perches (France, 2004), with its digital manipulation of the speed of
images. Chamarette argues that these films allow us to experience the very
impossibility to represent time itself (85), and a subjectivity that could
represent itself out of time (70). Furthermore, she analyses how the
legendary and controlled disembodiment of Marker, who never appeared
onscreen and very rarely off-screen, produces a series of layers in which
the dialectical presence and absence of the author (his voicelessness, the
voiceover and the text-as-voice) enter into intricate relations that produce
a betweenness of body, technology and world, such that the film is the
world and the world is what constitutes us (106).
Chamarette develops this idea further in chapter three, where she
takes relational subjectivity (118) to be an essential characteristic of Agnes
Vardas practice. Chamarette argues that by filming herself, Varda makes
of her body an event in which clear oppositions between object and subject
position are blurred. For Varda, the practice of filmmaking is, therefore,
oriented towards an alternative process of relation-making and sense-
making between filmed subjects and filmed objects (141), which allows
a fluid circulation of affects. In her later works focusing on nostalgia, such
as Les Veuves de Noirmoutier/The Widows of Noirmoutier (France, 2004),
these relations define specific spaces that Varda organises as installations.
Chamarette analyses from a rich phenomenological perspective the
inclusive power of these spaces of affective remembering (140).
This analysis is developed further in the next chapter through
an exploration of Akermans films and installation work, with some of
the latter revisiting, fragmenting, re/de-constructing, developing and
reflecting on some of the components of the former. Chamarette explores
the layers and folds produced by the in-betweenness of these works,
and how their repetitions and variations both blur and reveal difference
between fiction an autobiography, genre and verisimilitude, cinema and
installation, filmic space and gallery space (153). Chamarette studies
the bodies that act in these encounters, and which pass through the
temporal and spatial labyrinth that their pairing produces. She focuses

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on the interactions between the material bodies of installation visitors, the

onscreen bodies of light and digits, a range of performing bodies, such as
the body of Sylvie Testud in Demain on demenage/Tomorrow We Move
(France/Belgium, 2004), which is informed by and which reflects on
the performance of physical comedy, and the filmed bodies of Akerman
and her mother and grandmother in Marcher a cote de ses lacets dans un
Frigidaire vide/To Walk Next to Ones Shoelace in an Empty Fridge (2004),
and the viewers bodies performing their daily viewing activities. Through
the encounters of these bodies, Chamarette argues that Akerman calls for
a bodily attention that could help us think of subjectivity in a fragmented
and relational form (167).
The final chapter studies how a cinematic subjectivity of the nonhuman
emerges from the various modes of dissolution that bodies experience
in Grandrieuxs work. Considering Sombre (France, 1998) and La vie
nouvelle/A New Life (France, 2002), Chamarette analyses how Grandrieuxs
excessive, violent and corporeal cinema breaks the body/subject link in
order to access fluid and transmissive modes of subjectivity. Grandrieuxs
ethics of violence, in which bodies enter into processes of dissolution and
dematerialisation, reveals enworlded bodies/subjects always in excess of
both embodiment and subjectivity. For Chamarette, the difficult encounter
with these films is a manifestation of extreme subjectivity, emptied of self
and body (213).
Overall, from a phenomenological perspective, Chamarette addresses
some of the most interesting questions raised by contemporary cinema in
relation to bodies, subjectivity and temporality. Focusing on a corpus of
films and installations that she describes as resistant to mainstream French
cinema, she establishes that experimental cinema has been exploring
these issues for decades. However, Phenomenology and the Future of Film
offers precise phenomenological insights that enable Chamarette to move
beyond recent French film in revealing and analysing the mutations at
work in contemporary cinema.

Frederic Brayard
University of Glasgow
DOI: 10.3366/film.2016.0025

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