Abstract
The aesthetic experience specific to cinema is rooted in the impression of reality, this half-belief that every spectator grants to the images and events of the film which literally seizes him. The film does more than unfold before the viewer's eyes; he is immersed in it, the film envelops him, plunges him into a sensitive, sound and visual world, even a proprioceptive world. The aesthetic education specific to cinema cannot therefore rely on classical phenomenology centered on the distanced face-to-face of a subject and a separate world, on the model of vision, and from this point of view the pedagogies relying primarily on film analysis cannot suffice; the aesthetic education proper to cinema finds better foundations in the new phenomenology’s giving priority to the immersive sensibility, to "atmospheres", and already in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. This immersive character particularly brings the cinematographic experience closer to the ordinary experience accomplished as prototype of the aesthetic experience, according to Dewey. The film itself as a narrative has many of the characteristics of the prototypical aesthetic experience, including uniqueness. An aesthetic education in cinema as art cannot stand on the side of reception alone; it must also take into account creation as an aesthetic experience, and therefore associate these two sides of the aesthetic experience. In this association cinema can contribute to the education of aesthetic life, of the aesthetic relationship to the world; the thought, the gaze and the sensibility educated by the cinema thus give back to the world what the cinema has borrowed from it. It is indeed as "consciousness thrown into the world" that we watch, live, understand and experience the film.