Back to the Spectators Themselves (Jakob Boer)

Latest addition to the Library page at Unspoken Cinema:

"This article advances a methodological proposal for integrating empirical phenomenology into film and media studies, focusing on the reception of slow cinema. The study investigates spectators’ lived experiences using micro-phenomenology (MP), a second-person interview method that elicits fine-grained descriptions of embodied, affective, and attentional dimensions of film viewing. [..]

The study concludes that micro-phenomenology provides a rigorous means of generating thick descriptions of cinematic experience, with implications for theory formation, audience research, and future collaborations with cognitive neuroscience.

Ultimately, the paper argues that empirical phenomenology enriches film reception studies by deepening our understanding of how films affect embodied viewers in time."

Jakob Boer, Back to the Spectators Themselves. A Methodological Proposal for Adopting Empirical Phenomenology in Film and Media Studies, 2025