Abstract
Stanley Cavell is the only major American philosopher who has made the subject
of film a central part of his work. Film has figured centrally in four of his books and
in numerous essays and occasional pieces. He has also reflected, philosophically, on
other artistic media, such as theater, television, and opera, which bear an intimate
relationship to film. To many philosophers, however, the relation of Cavell’s writings
on film to his explicitly philosophical writings remains perplexing. And within the field
of film study, the potential usefulness of Cavell’s writings – the potential usefulness of
philosophy as he understands and practices it – remains generally unrecognized.
Cavell’s philosophical perspective diverges in virtually every respect from the
succession of theoretical positions that have gained most prominence in the field.
Within academic film study, for example, it remains an all but unquestioned doctrine
that “classical” movies systematically subordinate women, and, more generally, that
movies are pernicious ideological representations to be decoded and resisted, not
treated as works of art capable of instructing us as to how to view them. Film students
are generally taught that in order to learn to think seriously about film, they must
break their attachments to the films they love. Cavell’s writings on film, by contrast,
bespeak
a sense of gratitude for the existence of the great and still-enigmatic art of
film, whose history is punctuated as that of no other, by works, small and
large, that have commanded the devotion of audiences of all classes, of
virtually all ages, and of all spaces around the world in which a projector has
been mounted and a screen set up. (Cavell 2005: 281)
It remains another largely unquestioned doctrine of academic film study that the
stars projected on the movie screen are “personas,” discursive ideological constructs,
not real people; that the world projected on the screen is itself an ideological
construct, not real; and, indeed, that the so-called real world is such a construct, too.
By providing convincing alternatives to such skeptical positions, Cavell’s writings on
film are capable of helping academic film study free itself to explore regions that have
remained closed to it – capable of inspiring the field to think in exciting new ways
about film and its history.