Roman Ingarden’s Concept of the Filmic Work of Art: Strata, Sound, Spectacle

In the present paper, I suggest a modification to some aspects of Ingarden's analyses of the sound-synchronized filmic work of art. The argument progresses through two stages: (1) I clarify Ingarden's claim that the work of art is a stratified formation in which the various aspects present objectivities; (2) I elucidate and critically assess Ingarden's suggestion that the filmic work of art is a borderline case in respect to other types of works of art—paintings and literary works. Here, I identify a problem with Ingarden's claims about the function of sound in the concretized filmic work's presentation of its fictive world. Ingarden identifies the presented universe of the filmic work of art as a habitus of reality, but Ingarden seems oddly conflicted with respect to his notion of habitus. I argue that this stems from Ingarden's conceptualization of the filmic work of art as primarily composed of the stratum of represented “visible aspects” in both the cases of the silent film and the sound-synchronized film, and his restriction of the role of phonetic content in the latter. I suggest that were we to reconceptualise the role of aurally presented phonetic content in the concretized sound-synchronized film, we could better understand how film has the seeming magical capacity to transfix us.