In previous chapters I established that film as thought is also an expression of intentionality: film is both a mental state and an event that provides a sense of ‘aboutness’. The question ‘what is the film about?’ signals that a complex network of actors is involved in the distribution of meaning and yearning to produce (or reduce) and ascribe some ontological quality. ‘Aboutness’ is somewhat different from other states that can be defined in terms of the senses since the latter may not necessarily produce a perception of intentionality. In the scholastic tradition, ‘aboutness’ implies an idea of the mental or intentional inexistence of an object or phenomenon and their appearance in the process of enunciation as immanence rather than meaning (e.g., in worshipping, something is worshipped but it does not connote the meaning of worship). Such immanence differentiates intentionality from intentions whereby the former relates to mental states, and the latter is just a state or a projection of a particular sense. As a result, intentionality cannot be instantiated in the physical world, or in a world which physicalism is true. Daniel Stoljar (2010) believes that even if physicalism were to be eschewed, our thinking would not solve the paradoxes of intentionality, because intentionality is not an indication (of a specific object) and is not predetermined by senses although it operates alongside them.

In relation to film theory, the concept of intentionality goes back to Husserl's phenomenology. He used the term to distinguish between the meaning of the object and the object as such. These two dimensions account for the corporeal and reflective ways of experiencing objects and situations, whereas intentionality connotes self-referential processes, or the thought-thinking about itself. Here a mode of consciousness (noesis) is detracted from the intended object (noema). In developing Husserl's ideas, Aaron Gurwitsch focuses on the Gestalt structure of perception whereby noema is a matter of sense in experience and it accentuates other aspects of experience that require uncovering, undoing and bringing back to light in the process of signification (1966). Allan Casebier uses Gurwitsch's ideas to argue for film being a visceral experience impacting the perception of film as a sensuous givenness and viewing the spectator as marked by hyletic data: ‘the sense, lines, patterns, size and shape relationships, the camera movement, camera placement, editing forms, sound textures’ (1991: 13).