Using hybrid phenomenological approaches to film, this book focuses on how moving images are 'experienced' and 'encountered' as well as 'read' and 'viewed'. Its close engagements with films and installations by four contemporary French filmmakers explore the limits and possibilities of 'cinematic' subjectivity.

Phenomenology of Film: A Heideggerian Account of the Film Experience uses the philosophy of Martin Heidegger as a framework for addressing key issues in the philosophy of film. This study grapples with the question of how we can reconcile film as a popular entertainment medium with Heidegger’s own various critiques of popular media and culture throughout his career. Shawn Loht also explores topics such as the ontology of film and moving images; the phenomenological character of the viewer experience; film conceived as an art medium; and the function of films as vehicles for philosophical thought. He further discusses important concepts from Heidegger’s philosophy--Dasein, existentiality, world, art and poetry, and the nature of philosophy. The first four chapters take up these issues from a theoretical perspective. The remaining chapters provide robust application of the theoretical material to the films of three contemporary filmmakers: Terrence Malick, Michael Haneke, and David Gordon Green. As the first single-author monograph that takes up Heidegger’s relevance to film, Phenomenology of Film will be of particular interest to philosophers of film and specialists of film and media studies working in the intersection of phenomenology and film or phenomenological approaches to issues in popular culture.

Film Phenomenology and Adaptation: Sensuous Elaboration argues that in order to make sense of film adaptation, we must first apprehend their sensual form. Across its chapters, this book brings the philosophy and research methodology of phenomenology into contact with adaptation studies, examining how vision, hearing, touch, and the structures of the embodied imagination and memory thicken and make tangible an adaptation's source. In doing so, this book not only conceives adaptation as an intertextual layering of source material and adaptation, but also an intersubjective and textural experience that includes the materiality of the body.

The formal techniques two classic French filmmakers developed to explore cinema's philosophical potential.

'Filmosophy' is a manifesto for a radically philosophical way of understanding cinema. The book coalesces 20th century ideas of film as thought into a practical theory of 'film-thinking', arguing that film style conveys poetic ideas through a constant dramatic 'intent' about the characters, spaces, and events of film.

Since the 1980s the number of women regularly directing films has increased significantly in most Western countries; in France, Claire Denis and Catherine Breillat have joined Agnès Varda in gaining international renown, while British directors Lynne Ramsay and Andrea Arnold have forged award-winning careers in feature film. This new volume in the “Thinking Cinema” series draws on feminist philosophers and theorists from Simone de Beauvoir on to offer readings of a range of the most important and memorable of these films from the 1990s and 2000s, focusing as it does so on how the films convey women's lives and identities. Mainstream entertainment cinema traditionally distorts the representation of women, objectifying their bodies, minimizing their agency, and avoiding the most important questions about how cinema can "do justice" to female subjectivity. Kate Ince suggests that the films of independent women directors are progressively redressing the balance, reinvigorating both the narratives and the formal ambitions of European cinema. Ince uses feminist philosophers to interpret such films as Sex Is Comedy, Morvern Callar, White Material, and Fish Tank anew, suggesting that a philosophical understanding of female subjectivity as embodied and ethical should underpin future feminist film study.

Doing Time addresses two areas of interest in recent film study—film temporality and film philosophy—to propose an innovative theorization of cinematic time that sees it as a dynamic process of engagement, or something we do as viewers. This active relation to cinematic time, which discloses a film's temporal character, is called its "timeliness." Here it is traced across a range of fascinating case studies from Hollywood and the global art cinema, uncovering each film's characteristic way of "doing time." Throughout, the ambiguities of filmic time are held as powerful attractions as they modulate film viewing: such pauses, gaps, repetitions, and stretches of time illuminate a living field that extends from viewing activity. Drawing on the writings of French film critic and theorist André Bazin, as well as the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Lee Carruthers forwards a claim about the value of cinematic time for thinking. She also raises the tasks of film analysis and interpretation to renewed visibility. By prioritizing the viewer's experience of filmic temporality, and offering a rich vocabulary for describing this exchange, Carruthers articulates a new sphere of theoretical inquiry that invites film viewers (and readers) to participate.