Not surprisingly, Merleau-Ponty’s last course notes indicate literature – first of all Proust’s

Recherche – painting and cinema as symptoms of the new ontology he planned to formulate philosophically.

The first reflection that Merleau-Ponty devoted to cinema was a famous lecture given in 1945. The first section of my paper focuses on two topics underlying precisely that lecture. On the one hand, we have the reflection about the peculiarities of filmic expression and cinematic image; on the other, the convergence between the inspiration of cinema and that of philosophy, which Merleau-Ponty sees as a significant characteristic of his times: a convergence in which the nouvelle vague’s cinema will recognise itself and which Christian Metz will retrospectively confirm. Moreover, in developing both of these topics, I find the way to interpret Merleau-Ponty’s lecture as an undeclared polemical response to Henri Bergson’s famous negative judgement on cinema.

The second section focuses over the question of movement in cinema, putting together further references to cinema made by Merleau-Ponty in posthumous or unpublished writings  such as the notes for the 1952-53 course on “The Sensible World and the World of Expression.”

The third section focuses on Merleau-Ponty’s later reflection about vision and images. This shows how the peculiar novelty of cinema is more and more understood by Merleau-Ponty not only as historically convergent with a new way of conceiving philosophy, but as a symptom of the new ontology he was trying to formulate. In particular, in Eye and Mind hedescribes vision as a mutual “precession” between images and things. I could examine all the occurrences of the word “precession” in Merleau-Ponty’s unpublished manuscripts. They confirm that he was more and more interested in describing a retrograde temporality that is “at the limits of phenomenology”, since phenomenology always focuses on “the beginning”. Therefore, the notion of “precession” integrates and illuminates what Merleau-Ponty was writing about Proust’s “mythical time”, suggesting the idea of an “immemorial depth of the visible”that I propose to find at work in cinematic images too.