0. Introduction 1. A Novelistic Art of Space 1.1. Sartre's ontology 1.2. A novelistic ontology? 1.3. Cinema: novelistic consciousness qua actual nothingness 1.4. An art of space 1.5. An art of appearance for appearance's sake 1.6. Space vs. language 1.7. An art more novelistic than the novel itself 2. Alexandre Astruc: An Early but Decisive Influence 2.1. Kant's transcendental aesthetics - and Heidegger's reinterpretation 2.2. 'Dialectique et cinema' 2.3. With and beyond Sartre's Heideggerian perspective 2.4. The 'Caméra-Stylo' 3. Under and On the Volcano: Rohmer's Conversion 3.1. The Other 3.2. The triumph of exteriority over interiority 3.3. Pulling phenomenology back to its Kantian roots 3.4. Ethics 3.5. God? 3.6. Echoes of the conversion 4. The Art of Nature 4.1. To show and not to tell 4.2. Natural beauty 4.3. Immediate mediation 4.4. Movement and narrative 4.5. Mechanism as the background for freedom 5. Ethics at the Heart of Aesthetics 5.1. On abjection: The Wages of Fear 5.2. Films with a soul 5.3. Tragedy 5.4. Solitude morale 5.5. The vertiginous moment: the reversal between inside and outside 6. After Modernity: Rohmer's Classicism and Universalism 6.1. Beyond modern art 6.2. Classic = Modern 6.3. An anti-evolutionist approach 6.4. Universalism 6.5. Authorship and mise en scene 7. Conclusion