Film as an Unstable Event: A Phenomenology of Ambivalent Experience

Abstract

The article presents a phenomenological analysis of the ontological status of the cinematic work. It problematizes the traditional understanding of film as a fixed, stable object and substantiates its nature as an “unstable event” that is constituted exclusively at the moment of interaction between the technical apparatus and the viewer’s consciousness. The methodological basis of the study comprises the phenomenological concepts of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, and Vivian Sobchack, as well as apparatus theory and the performative anthropology of Christoph Wulf. The central element of the research is the concept of “ambivalent experience”, which is revealed through the analysis of two fundamental gaps: temporal and spatial. The article investigates the non-isomorphism between the predetermined mechanical time of film projection and the immanent duration of the viewer’s experience. It demonstrates how, through the mechanisms of retention and protention, consciousness transforms the technical discreteness of montage into a continuous temporal flow. Particular attention is paid to the phenomenon of spatial bilocation (the state of the viewer’s simultaneous presence in the physical immobility of the cinema hall and virtual motion). The role of haptic visuality and kinesthetic resonance in overcoming the distance between the viewer and the screen is analyzed. It is argued that the integration of split experience is ensured by the productive work of the imagination and the mechanism of “suture”. The viewer acts as an active site of the film’s assembly, synthesizing ontological gaps through their own psychic and bodily investment. The article concludes that the structural instability and irreducibility of the film experience are not flaws of perception, but constitutive conditions for the existence of film as an aesthetic phenomenon.