In her review of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, Beauvoir makes a point concerning embodied perception, saying that ‘in spite of ethics’, each person knows intimately a life that is their own, where each person sees with their own eyes (1945b/2004: 159). She emphasises ambiguity within the experience of perception as a means of highlighting the more prevalent ambiguity within the human condition, supporting Merleau-Ponty's use of the phenomenological approach that facilitates authentic connections with the world: ‘it is in giving myself to the world that I realize myself, and it is in assuming myself that I have a hold on the world’ (1945b/2004: 160). In other words, becoming enworlded as conscious and reflexive agents requires recognition and acceptance of ambiguous experience. This philosophy is clearly personified in the ‘Dunyementaries’, a collection of experimental films by African American filmmaker Cheryl Duyne, whose creative practice blends various reflexive, participatory and poetic modes to destabilise established narrative and documentary genres, crafting a subtle, yet effective style that celebrates ambiguity in women's identity. In this chapter, I discuss phenomenologies of habit as a way to think through the relationship between racialised vision, situation, and freedom within film experience, ending with a consideration of how Dunye realises Alia Al-Saji's (2014) phenomenology of hesitation as ethico-political action that interrupts complacent viewing habits in the cinematic encounter.

Beauvoir states phenomenology's rejection of the opposition between subject and object opens up the possibility of seeing connections through lived experience and that this perceptive awareness is what leads to the development of an ethical existence. The result is the opportunity for an audacious life, the freedom to make oneself known and say, ‘I am here’ (1945b/2004: 160). Not as easy as it sounds, of course, as the audacity of ethical existence requires acceptance of responsibility, often breaking the habits of perception we have learned to use in order to navigate our life. It is when we are shown worlds of another's lived experience (those that are often ignored, forgotten or neglected), presented with embodied perceptions that are not our own, that we may learn to develop more ethical ways of being.