Pure Pleasure and Film Thinking – Watching Instead of Interpreting

In his reflection on watching instead of interpreting as a way of getting to know a film, the author wishes to focus on two issues: (i) one related to the sensuous experience of the cinema, the pleasure of the act of watching itself (in accordance with the formula “seeing as only seeing”), and supported by the long tradition of the aesthetic thought (Baumgarten, Dewey, Shusterman, Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty), and (ii) one connected with film thinking – inspired by the thesis of Rudolf Arnheim: “The visual perception is visual thinking”. Thus, the concept of watching instead of interpreting raises the status of the pre-intellectual and sensuous way of receiving a film work, which does not act against the interpretation (as Susan Sontag claimed), but constitutes its alternative or complementary version.