There is a wide agreement that Merleau-Ponty’s longstanding interest in cinema is motivated by the assumption that the perception of what he regards as “film-worlds” can adequately illustrate the complexities of ordinary perception. I want to nuance this widespread view by revaluing his approach to indeterminacy as a positive and irreducible factor of everyday world experience.
Firstly, I will show that the notion of “indeterminacy” has at least three senses in the Phenomenology of Perception, which we could label as follows: 1) entwinement, e.g. of mind and body while engaged in emotion; 2) viscosity, e.g. of sizes, shapes, and colours announcing a phenomenon in the course of emergence; 3) openness, e.g. of one’s lived-world to surprise. On this basis, I will argue that, for Merleau-Ponty, film-worlds adequately illustrate indeterminacy as entwinement (cf. his “Film and the New Psychology”) and indeterminacy as viscosity (cf. his “Cezanne’s Doubt”), but not indeterminacy as openness. Indeed, given his narrow focus on a particular kind of classical fiction cinema, he takes film-worlds to be self-enclosed and self-subsistent and holds that “cinematographic drama […] takes place in a world that is more exact than the real world”.
Secondly, I will suggest that, if we widen our focus to include other cinematic styles, we can, however, acknowledge the potential of films-worlds to illustrate indeterminacy in the last sense also, namely, as openness of one’s lived-world to surprise. As a brief case study, I will outline the effect of astonishment at the world, which Werner Herzog’s docu-fiction cinema often succeeds to induce. According to his interviews, he seeks to achieve that effect by “directing landscapes”, in order to function as environments instead of backgrounds, and to appear mostly alien and sometimes threatening.