Phenomenology and Film: An Examination of a Religious Approach to Film Theory by Henri Agel and Amedee Ayfre

French film theorists have made a great impact on filmmaking through their essays on the nature and policies of film. The French phenomenologists search for a spiritual reality beyond the semiotic and materialistic theories represented in cinema criticism today. They argue that as the most important of modern art forms, cinema must embrace the realms of the imagination and the divine. This article sets out to examine the writings of two French film theorists of the 1950s and 1960s, the phenomenologists Henri Agel and Amedee Ayfre, whose work is little known in the United States because it has not been translated into English. Their importance lies in their concern with transcendence in film, which has made an important contribution to the way we can understand spirituality in film. Their writings were popularized in the United States by screenwriter and film director Paul Schrader (1972) in his book Transcendental Style in Film. In this article I examine phenomenological theories and suggest that certain films made in Texas in the 1980s display the virtues of a phenomenological approach to filmmaking.