Article/Publication Details
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CINEMATIC PRESENCE IN VIEWERS’ EXPERIENCE

Abstract
The proposed article is aimed at conceptualizing the phenomenon of cinematic presence, as well as the search for possible components for its formation in the viewing experience. Presence, considered in the context of intersubjective interaction, will be viewed as a characteristic of the specific bodily relationships between the cinema and the viewers, as well as an essential aspect of the cinema itself. After analyzing both the fundamental texts theorizing this concept and the theoretical work of modern researchers in the field of cinema, as well as turning to experimental practices and slow cinema, the author deduces her own concept of cinematic presence. The article rejects the notion of presence as a state of involvement in the diegetic world. Instead, the author proposes to view it as distanced co-existence which makes it impossible for the viewer to fully immerse in the film space, but there is an opportunity to get an experience specific only to the situation of watching a film. Corporeality in the broader sense of the word plays an important role in the origin of the named experience. The described effect is themed through intimacy and closeness: viewers find themselves in a transit position, becoming a movie, when there is fusion, a loss of a sense of distance from the other, but at the same time the boundaries between their own body and the body of the film are preserved. The main thesis of the article is that the cinematic presence, grasped in the viewers’ experience, reveals itself not only and not much by exposing parts of the cinematic body, although the manifestation of the specific sensuality of the apparatus is the basis for the formation of presence. The experience of a collision with a cinema as such implies the perception of it as another, possessing agency and preventing the full disclosure of its essence.

Keywords
presence, cinematic experience, corporeality, phenomenology, intimacy, becoming-cinema, slow cinema, experimental cinema.

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