Enactive Cinematic Perception: The Cinema as Exploration of the (Re)Presented World

Since the arrival of the medium film, film theorists have studied how spectators perceive the representations that the cinematic medium offers to our senses. In the 1970’s, it was argued by multiple film theorists that the cinematic apparatus was capable of passing a certain ideology to the spectator through the cinematic represented images. This article investigates how cinema is able to give its spectators an ideology through their perception by focussing on an enactive approach of perception. This approach leads to the conclusion that the cinema we explore as perceivers is encountered in the first instance not as housing facts and properties, but rather as mediating our active exploration. With the help of a close reading of one of the works of Jean-Louis Baudry, this article demonstrates how, according to a film theorist like Baudry, films mediate our perception with specific features to expose the viewer to an ideology. This leads to the conclusion that cinema is able to train our ways of exploring the world, while at the same time it teaches us to reflect on the ideology that these films hold.