In the classic movie film, human’s body has been treated as a tool of reflection on man’ emotions and thoughts, and after the age of silent film, how to express the body and to deliver the message of the body has been coded in a standard way. In this point, the body cannot escape from the passivity in the consciousness. However, Robert Bresson’s film shows a different view of human’s body in terms that the body is treated as the subject of perceiving the world. Such a view has similar to Merleau-Ponty’s view over the phenomenology of the body which regard human’s body as the subject of human’s experience, not as the object and the accidental element of building human’s recognition, for the first time in the world.
The purpose of this paper is not to apply Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to Bresson’s body image, but to find the possibility that Bresson’s body image could be interpreted as the phenomenology. This paper, first, would find out the cause of general view over the human’s body through the silent films which began to try showing body’s expression, and then, would find out the relations Bresson’s body with Merleau-Ponty’s body, by way of analyzing body’characteristics showed in some Bresson’s films. Bresson’s body image theory should be understood that the meaning of body’s image does not come from the similarities of reality, but from the relationship itself among various body’s images which is removed a meaning as much as possible. As the result, Bresson’s film shows the process how to body’s performance reveals the emergence of existence, the occurrence of events and thoughts, and self internality. Bresoon’s body image is similar to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body in terms that body’s image shows the process of revealing the other people, and the world.
This paper would also examines the phenomenology of the body could be simply not only a study of a new perspective on the body’s image, but also, a study of the ontology of the film image.