Sigrid Leyssen

In my master thesis on Sartre's L'imaginaire (1940), I was concerned with how Sartre, in this early work, developed an excitingly radical conception of the image and presented detailed phenomenological analyses of our looking at different kinds of images. I noticed how Sartre heavily referred to psychological research of the time, and I became interested in the relation between philosophy and psychology in this period. In L'imaginaire, there is a remarkable absence of analyses of how we look at moving images. This observation inspired me to extend my explorations in this direction: what is special about our looking at moving images? How was cinema perception understood by contemporary psychologists and philosophers? How was it investigated?
In my doctoral thesis, I chose to approach these questions from the angle of concrete psychological experiments on perception. In perceptual psychology, images were often used as a means of presenting precise stimulus configurations to observers, yet the perception of images as a specific topic was long neglected. This is even more true more about cinema. I start with a study of the work of the experimental psychologist Albert Michotte (1881-1965), in which both these aspects can be found. Michotte made intensive use of moving images in his experiments on the perception of specific phenomena. Through the use of moving images in these experiments, he came to reflect and experiment on the special phenomenal status of these images themselves.Where Sartre constituted the image as a philosophical problem, Michotte recognises the image as a fundamental psychological problem.

Sigrid Leyssen studied Philosophy in Leuven, Belgium, with a dissertation on Sartre's L'imaginaire; and Philosophy of Film in Cambridge, UK, with a video project on Shadows and a dissertation on Filmed Dreams and Dream Theory, on theoretical and filmic ways of exploring the dream consciousness and transitions between different kinds of conscious states. Starting August 2009, she is part of the Eikones Graduate School Image & Time. She spent time as a visiting research student at the Institut für Theater- und Filmwissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin and the History of Science Department at Harvard University. She is affiliated with the Institute of Philosophy, Leuven University.