Exploring lived cinematic moments in Italian neorealism and the French nouvelle vague

This dissertation charts the varying attitudes within Italian neorealism and the French nouvelle vague toward expressing a character's inward experience of duration. This mode of expression is given the designation "lived cinematic moment". Part one of this dissertation examines the lived cinematic moment in Italian neorealism and its modernist reformation in the work of Michelangelo Antonioni. Italian neorealism's distinctive cinematic temporality is articulated via everyday moments in which "nothing happens", a notion typified by the so-called "little maid" scene in Vittorio De Sica's Umberto D. While these everyday moments remain antithetical to neorealism's otherwise classical treatment of narrative progression, in Antonioni's L'avventura they threaten to devour narration altogether within an incessant expression of similitude. These variations of the lived cinematic moment are linked to the thought of Andre Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer, who contend that neorealism's indeterminate spatiotemporal horizons and contingent, non-narrational components mark a new intertwining of cinema and the phenomenological notion of the Lebenswelt or lifeworld. Our claim is that these criteria of indeterminacy and contingency beget a new cinematic expression of lived temporality.;Part two of this dissertation explores the epistemological consequences of delimiting the lived cinematic moment by the criteria established in part one. Beginning with the French nouvelle vague, a certain skepticism about cinema's ability to utilize indeterminacy and contingency appears, an attitude best understood via the critical thought of Stanley Cavell. Using Cavell as our guide, we examine three of Jean-Luc Godard's early films which reflexively deconstruct various possibilities for presenting lived moments in modernist cinema. This skepticism continues with Eric Rohmer's Ma nuit chez Maud, in which the utilization of indeterminate and contingent elements may in fact come to deter our acknowledgement of the protagonist's epiphanic moment. Utilizing Cavell's notion of "moral perfectionism", we show that cinema's ability to depict such a lived moment is instead dependent upon the moral outlook of the viewer, or to use Cavell's term, upon our "good encounter" with it.