Joni Gutierrez

This section continues with a phenomenological analysis of the expansive (Study One) and multi-layered (Nine) life-world as discussed in the previous results and discussion section. The succeeding six analysis sections – (2) ‘internal currents’, (3) ‘immanent patterns’, (4) ‘eidetic formations’, (5) ‘insatiable curiosity’, (6) ‘conscious observation’, and (7) ‘call to action’ – in the manuscript will follow the same pattern. Before we proceed to the phenomenological analysis, the next paragraphs will briefly introduce the far-reaching points in Husserlian phenomenology that will be used throughout the succeeding sections.

Eidetic intuition makes essences come into view for us through ‘three levels of intentional development’ (Sokolowski, 2000, p. 177). On the first level, we find similarities among a number of things that we experience (p. 177). Let us take ‘the street’, which is the pro-filmic subject matter of Study Seven: The Street (Fig. 19), as an example for phenomenological analysis. First, we try to establish a ‘typicality’ (p. 178) of the street, in line with, say, ‘wood floats’ or ‘dogs bite’ (p. 177): ‘streets take us from one point to another’. On the second level of the phenomenological investigation, we look at individual pieces and see if they have the same predicate; for example, Wood A floats and so does Wood B and Wood C. At this second level, that ‘Wood floats’ is a kind of ‘identity synthesis’ (p. 178) in which we recognise the individual pieces of wood as ‘not just similar, but the very same, a “one in many”’ (p. 178). Going back to the main object under investigation, that is, the street, we can say that its predicate of being a conduit wherein human beings move from one point to another is an ‘empirical universal’ because all the instances in which we have found the predicate are things we have actually experienced’ (p. 178).

As put on view by the last two phenomenological analysis sections – the daily matrix and internal currents – the short films epitomise a realist film practice that leads spectators to an eidetic intuition of the life-world, one’s place in it, and his or her existential experience of the modern condition. The current section analyses the indeterminacy of the concrete image as the principal factor that enhances the free nature of the contemplation typified by the previous examples of spectators’ reflections.

Aside from being an examination of the flow of life KCR trope as discussed in the previous section, Study Eight is also a phenomenological investigation on the essence of city life. The film draws on the power of the film medium to photographically capture surface detail of an array of pro-filmic objects from physical reality. This core aspect of the medium can be said to be a cinematic counterpart of the phenomenological method which involves ‘careful, elaborate description of our experience’ (Käufer & Chemero, 2015, p. 26) that reveals their essential features; indeed, Husserl consistently avowed that ‘essences are evident in the experiences themselves once we know how to look for them’ (p. 26).

Husserl’s phenomenological approach regards the life-world as ‘not something over and against the subject’ (Gander, 2017, p. 116); thus, the ‘clarification of the connection of life can only take place in the form of a self-contemplation or self-enlightenment’ (p. 116). In phenomenology, the intentional consciousness is the focal point of ‘how we experience our selves and how we experience things outside our selves, that is, all that is non-self’ (Wagner, 1983, p. 9). While positivist discourse might find this vantage point of consciousness as problematic – psychology has opted to replace experience with ‘behavior’ because of the latter’s externality and observability (Ihde, 1990, p. 22) – phenomenology does not limit itself to the parameters set by positivism as it opens itself to profundity, which, ‘science wants to transform into a cosmos, into a simple, completely clear, lucid order’ (Husserl, 1965, p. 144).