New Book: LIVED MOMENTS

[Glen W. Norton]

I hope some members of this list might be interested in the following. The Godard chapter deals specifically with A bout de souffle, Vivre sa vie, and Bande à part. 

LIVED MOMENTS: PHENOMENOLOGY, NEOREALISM, AND THE NEW WAVE, by Glen W. Norton (Wilfrid Laurier University), is now available from McGill-Queen's University Press:

https://www.mqup.ca/lived-moments-products-9780228023555.php

LIVED MOMENTS reveals how expressions of lived temporality in moments predicated on the lifeworld structures of contingency and indeterminacy are intrinsic to the evolution of cinematic modernism. Engaging with the work of Bazin, Kracauer, and Cavell, it looks beyond standardized film-as-body phenomenology toward a phenomenology of authorial presence expressing a character’s lived moments via cinematic form, style, and lifeworld. Close descriptive analyses of scenes in canonical films by De Sica, Rossellini, Antonioni, Godard, and Rohmer reveal this evolving modernist tendency to craft characters who in some sense recognize they are living a moment now – the only time a moment can be lived.

LIVED MOMENTS deepens our understanding of the history of cinematic modernism, throwing new light on the canonical movements of Neorealism and the New Wave while also demonstrating the importance of lived moments for cinema more broadly. I hope it stands as a model of how film analysis and film philosophy can be symbiotic rather than separate ways of thinking about cinematic experience.