The ‘Worlds of Cinema’ and the ‘Cinema of Worlds’: A Heideggerian Phenomenology

Abstract Within a range of academic disciplines like film studies, philosophy of film, and narratology, scholars talk about ‘worlds.’ In this essay, I present various ‘ontic’ and ‘ontological’ descriptions of ‘world’ according to a Heideggerian phenomenology. My aim is to distinguish between what I call the ‘worlds of cinema,’ which bring about a particular subject-object relationship experienced as absorption, immersion, distraction, or distancing, and the ‘cinema of worlds,’ where film as art unsettles us as an ontological event, disrupting the subject-object dynamic in which we understand the depthlessness of our Being. Where the once familiar webs of meaning that made up our lives to which movies normally appeal, are now made strange to us through an onto-cinematic event. Here the actuality of my world is only known via its possibilities to which the film, as art, now draws my attention.