The 'Hidden Fire’ of Inwardness: Cavell, Godard and Modernism (original) (raw)
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Philosophical Inquiry in Education, 2023
Several approaches using movie viewing have emerged for training teachers in professional ethics (Robichaud, 2022). Mainly oriented by training in critical consciousness, reflexivity or the development of different identification processes, these uses invite us to deepen the very notion of cinematographic experience as well as the way in which it can participate in teacher’s training. The philosopher Stanley Cavell (1926-2018) offers a vision of the cinematic experience that foregrounds the idea of an ethical sensitivity of a transformative nature. This sensitivity manifests itself in Cavell’s philosophy through a circular conception of the experience which leads the subject from the first reception of a film to the viewing of other films which enable him to describe what matter to him morally (Cavell, 1971/1999:12). This moral education through this continuous cinematographic experience implies, on the one hand, to consider the criteria to be used to form corpuses of films in the context of training in ethics and, on the other hand, to provide theoretical foundations to found the student's interpretation within works of the cinematographic repertoire. We address these aspects in this article through Cavell's experience of cinema and in particular to the way in which he perceives the notions of interpretation and of "cinematic genre".
HOW MOVIES THINK: CAVELL ON FILM AS A MEDIUM OF ART
Stanley Cavell's writing about movies, from the more theoretical and general The World Viewed (1971) to the later works on specific genres (Pursuits of Happiness, Contesting Tears) has a unifying theme: some movies as (successful) art investigate conditions of accomplished selfhood and interest in experience in medium-specific ways. This claim is explained and defended by explicating the details of the medium-specificity of the moving photographic image (and its history of uses) and by focusing on Michael Verhoeven's film The Nasty Girl (1990). Though the very ideas of accomplished selfhood and interest in experience naturally prompt some suspicion in a commercialized, pluralistic society, our responses to some movies show that we continue to aspire to a life that embodies them.
‘Cinema’ as a Modernist Conception of Motion Pictures
AM Journal of Art and Media Studies
In the 1960s and 1970s the Clement Greenberg’s Modernist ideology of ‘purity’ played a central role in the definition of ‘avant-garde cinema’ as a serious, major genre of film. This transfer between ‘fine art’ and ‘avant-garde film’ was articulated as ‘structural film’ by P. Adams Sitney. This heritage shapes contemporary debates over ‘postcinema’ as digital technology undermines the ontology and dispositive of historical cinema. Its discussion here is not meant to reanimate old debates, but to move past them. Article received: March 12, 2018; Article accepted: April 10, 2018; Published online: September 15, 2018; Original scholarly paperHow to cite this article: Betancourt, Michael. "‘Cinema’ as a Modernist Conception of Motion Pictures." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 16 (2018): 55−67. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i16.254
Introduction: A Modernist Cinema - Special Issue of Modernist Cultures
Modernist Cultures, 2010
From the time of Eadweard Muybridge's first successful experiments with stereoscopic fast motion photography in 1878, the history of cinema has been indissolubly linked with those of modernity and modern art. The rapid development of the new medium by Muybridge, William Friese-Greene, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, Thomas Edison, and Auguste and Louis Lumière in the 1880s and 1890s occurred during a period of artistic ferment and formal innovation in literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, opera and music. Even as the 'cinematograph' of the Lumière brothers (and Jean Aimé Le Roy), the 'Vitascope' of Edison, and the 'Bioscop' of Emil and Max Skladonowsky enjoyed their initial public triumphs in Paris, New York and Berlin in the mid-1890s, a bewildering variety of new movements in the arts-naturalism, symbolism, aestheticism, impressionism, decadence, modernismo, art deco, modernisme (the Catalan architectural movement) and verismo, to name only a few of the most prominent-flourished in Europe and the Americas. The subsequent worldwide success first of the silent movie and then after 1927 of the sound film significantly coincided with what has been traditionally regarded as the heyday of literary (and more generally artistic) modernism. At a time when the traditional boundaries of modernist studies are undergoing a radical and decisive remapping, and when the emergence of new media prompts us to reconsider the relationships among new technologies, cultural production and artistic expression, it seems altogether appropriate, and a matter of critical and theoretical importance, to pose (once again) the question of what the relationship is (or was) between modernism and cinema.
Stanley Cavell and Film, 2019
Stanley Cavell and Film is Catherine Wheatley's entry in Bloomsbury's "Film Thinks", a series dedicated to explorations of cinema's influence on thinkers such as Noël Carroll, Roland Barthes and Georges Didi-Huberman. Wheatley offers a thorough evaluation of Cavell's canonical place in the history of Film Studies, and in doing so charts the tortuous trajectory of how Film Studies in turn has critically understood and misunderstood his work. Fortified by the idea that film is central to all of Cavell's thought, Wheatley takes a chronological approach, with each chapter charting the evolution of main Cavellian concepts/principles (the promise of ordinary language philosophy; problems of everyday scepticism and acknowledgement; the reconceptualisation of moral perfectionism) by delving into works in which they receive their fullest consideration. The ultimate aim is to reveal the full depth behind Cavell's longstanding claim that, rather than treating film as an immutable object, his work is an "accounting for his own experience of movies", which in turn requires "taking responsibility for his responses" (14). Cavell's thought has long been notoriously, even self-admittedly (see The World Viewed 162) difficult to fully comprehend, which makes this a much-needed and welcome compendium, especially for students and scholars not versed in the traditions of what Wheatley calls his "problematic relationship to a dominant philosophical divide" (19). Cavell's analytic background often clashes with his more continental concerns and writing style, resulting in a hybrid which some read as "excessive" and "self-indulgent" (13). All this to say Cavell remains "a somewhat divisive, elusive figure for Film Studies" (21). This divisiveness is reflected in an uncritical yet enduring alignment of his thought with, on one hand, a lineage of so-called "realists" stemming from André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer, and on the other, with Gilles Deleuze as part of Film Studies' philosophical turn. While the former is attributed to the canonisation of "three short and largely unrepresentative chapters" in the standard anthology Film Theory and Criticism (23), it is more difficult to pinpoint what brings Cavell and Deleuze together beyond their shared vision of "cinema split in two" between a classical and modernist impulse just after World War Two (83). Wheatley seems to agree, and therefore avoids exploring connections between Cavell's ideas on cinematic modernism and Deleuze's time image. Neither a proponent of realism nor some merely esoteric philosopher, Wheatley's claim is that Cavell should instead be "discussed as a theorist of spectatorship" (71).
Being on the Outside: Cinematic Automatism in Stanley Cavell's World Viewed
The presentation of an unseen world has historically been extolled as one of the powers, indeed, the virtues of cinema. Jean Epstein, for one, demonstrated a wide-eyed fascination with film's unparalleled capacity to convey the truth of life in its illogical, non-teleological, open-ended, and infinitely mutating glory. In 'Bonjour Cinema', Epstein hails cinema as '[a] new poetry and philosophy' (1981, 9), an art whose truth is different from the story's because it despises convention, considers staging absurd and eloquence dead (1981, 11). Instead of pursuing the drama of action, the truth of cinema will be found in suspended tragedy: True tragedy remains in abeyance. It threatens all the faces. It is in the curtain at the window and the handle of the door. Each drop of ink can make it bloom on the tip of the fountain-pen. In the glass of water it dissolves. The whole room is saturated with every kind of drama. The cigar smoke is poised menacingly over the ashtray's throat. The dust is treacherous. The carpet emits venomous arabesques and the arms of the chair tremble. (Epstein, 1981, 11) This suspension of tragedy was made possible by the non-interference of the human-being in the capture of that reality. As Jacques Rancière puts it: film, for Epstein, was 'an art' in which human intelligence 'is subject to another intelligence, the intelligence of the machine that wants nothing, that does not construct any stories, but simply records the infinity of movements that gives rise to a drama a hundred times more intense than all dramatic reversals of fortune' (Rancière, 2006, 2). The name given to this power is cinematic or cinematographic automatism. Numerous other thinkers-Walter Benjamin, André Bazin, Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière, to name the most prominent-have focussed their investigations of cinema on understanding the power of this automatism. 2 Cavell, however, is the one who most explicitly takes it on and makes it the fulcrum on which his entire argument about the ontology of cinema pivots.