Lived Moments: Phenomenology, Neorealism, and the New Wave

From the everyday concerns of Umberto D to the spiritual traces of Ma nuit chez Maud, revelatory moments are intrinsic to the fabric of cinematic modernism. Lived Moments conceptualizes the path from Italian Neorealism to the French New Wave as a trajectory unique in its expressions of the indeterminacy and contingency of daily life. Drawing on film theory and criticism as well as the history of phenomenological thought, Glen Norton offers illustrative readings of cinematic scenes exemplifying this modernist evolution in canonical films by Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, and Eric Rohmer. Norton describes how these filmmakers structure their characters’ lifeworlds via moments grounded by chance and multiplicity, each having the potential to lift the opaque veil of inwardness. Experienced in their immediacy, these moments offer the viewer glimpses of a character’s potential individuation. As such, they embody the difficult, private, and perhaps even incommunicable choices made in the midst of self-reflection, self-awareness, and self-definition. 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. The book stands as a model of how film analysis and film philosophy can be symbiotic rather than separate ways of thinking about cinematic experience.