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The Structures of the Film Experience by Jean-Pierre Meunier
Historical Assessments and Phenomenological Expansions
Edited by Julian Hanich and Daniel Fairfax
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Book Presentation:
For the first time this volume makes Jean-Pierre Meunier’s insightful thoughts on the film experience available for an English-speaking readership. Introduced and commented by specialists in film studies and philosophy, Meunier’s intricate phenomenological descriptions of the spectator’s engagement with fiction films, documentaries and home movies can reach the wide audience they have deserved ever since their publication in French in 1969.
About the authors:
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.
Press Reviews:
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
See the publisher website: Amsterdam University Press
> From the same authors:
What Film Is Good For (2023)
On the Values of Spectatorship
by Julian Hanich and Martin P. Rossouw
Subject: Sociology
The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973) (2021)
Volume I, Ideology and Politics
Subject: On Films > Movie magazines
The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973) (2021)
Volume II, Aesthetics and Ontology
Subject: On Films > Movie magazines
Conversations with Christian Metz (2017)
Selected Interviews on Film Theory
Dir. Warren Buckland and Daniel Fairfax
Subject: Theory
Cinema against Spectacle (2015)
"Technique and Ideology" Revisited
by Jean-Louis Comolli and Daniel Fairfax
Subject: Theory
> On a related topic:
Jung and Film (2001)
Post-Jungian Takes on the Moving Image
Dir. Christopher Hauke and Ian Alister
Subject: Film Analysis
Cinema of/for the Anthropocene (2025)
Affect, Ecology, and More-Than-Human Kinship
Dir. Katarzyna Paszkiewicz and Andrea Ruthven
Subject: Theory
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