The Thought of Stanley Cavell and Cinema: Turning Anew to the Ontology of Film a Half-Century after The World Viewed

Description

Stanley Cavell was, by many accounts, America’s greatest philosophical thinker of film. Like Bazin in France and Perkins in England, Cavell did not just transform the American capacity to take film seriously as a subject for philosophical criticism, he had first to invent that legitimacy. Part of his efforts involved the creation of several key—now canonical—texts in film studies, among them the seminal The World Viewed along with Pursuits of Happiness and Contesting Tears. This collection offers a concerted group effort to analyze and reflect anew upon Cavell's still-scintillating contributions to the very thought of film—and its philosophical significance. Mounted by some of today’s most compelling writers on cinema, these investigations take careful account of Cavell’s legacy, once and ongoing. In these pages, seasoned scholars and emerging talent artfully and expertly explore what precisely Cavell bequeathed— what endures, what stands in need of revision or updating, and how his writing remains vital and essential to any contemporary approach to the philosophy of film Cover Series Editorial board Title Copyright Dedication Contents Foreword: Stanley Cavell and Cinema Introduction: Philosophy’s Claim to Film, Film’s Claim to Philosophy I Underwriting and Overhearing: Reconceiving Cinematic Ontology and Genre 1 “Assertions in Technique”: Tracking the Medial “Thread” in Cavell’s Filmic Ontology 2 Revisiting The World Viewed 3 The World Heard 4 What a Genre of Film Might Be: Medium, Myth, and Morality II Interlude: Temperaments for Film 5 My Troubled Relationship with Stanley Cavell: In Pursuit of a Truly Cinematic Conversation 6 Film as Film and the Personal III Philosophy, As If Made for Film 7 Between Skepticism and Moral Perfectionism: On Cavell’s Melodrama of the Unknown Woman 8 Overcoming Skepticism in Casablanca 9 A Skeptic’s Reprieve: Cavell on Comedy in Shakespeare and the Movies IV Film, As If Made for Philosophy 10 Film Exists in a State of Philosophy: Two Contemporary Cavellian Views 11 The Conception of Film for the Subject of Television: Moral Education of the Public and a Return to an Aesthetics of the Ordinary 12 On Film in Reality: Cavellian Reflections on Skepticism, Belief, and Documentary 13 On the Aesthetics of Amateur Filmmaking in Narrative Cinema: Negotiating Home Movies after Adam’s Rib Acknowledgments Contributors Index