Φύσις on film?: Heidegger, art and the question of the cinematic manifestation of being

Martin Heidegger is not a figure who features prominently in the philosophical study of cinema and when scholars do draw upon his thinking in their engagement with film it is for the most part in relation to the cinema of Terence Malick, a one time Heidegger scholar. Critics have claimed that Malick has faithfully transposed Heidegger's thinking into cinema and purported to use concepts from Heidegger's philosophy to provide insight into Malick's films.In their studies, however, critics have often interpreted Heidegger's ontological enquiry into Being as as an ontic enquiry into meaning, ignored his (mainly critical) comments on film, and also ignored or interpreted superficially his understanding of art. As such, these studies provide little insight into the nature of the potential relationship between Heidegger's philosophy and cinema. This thesis argues for a conception of cinema as Heideggerian art and makes a more substantial attempt to remain consistent with Heidegger's thinking. It contends that for Heidegger art manifests Being in its withdrawal, and that he excludes cinema from the realm of art as he understands the film-photographic image to be a 'copy'. To explore how despite its status as copy cinema may be understood to function as Heideggerian art, the present study considers the effect of Michelangelo Antonioni's use of 'dead time' in his 1962 film L'eclisse.