Image from the 'incessant[ly] questioning' film (Adrian Martin) The Thin Red Line (directed by Terrence Malick [former student of Stanley Cavell], 1998)
Today, Film Studies For Free casts its penetrating gaze at the freely accessible, online manifestations of the film-studies influence of Harvard philosopher Stanley Cavell.
Cavell's work has frequently informed and, at times, inspired film studies by anglophone scholars as varied as William Rothman, George Toles, George M. Wilson, Stephen Mulhall, Gilberto Perez, V.F. Perkins, Lesley Stern, Michael Grant, Steven Jay Schneider, Thomas Wartenberg, Edward Gallafent, Adrian Martin, Christian Keathley, Daniel Frampton, Douglas Pye, John Gibbs, Jacob Leigh, and Andrew Klevan.
Klevan, who was responsible for one of the most enlightening of published interviews with Cavell, very eloquently sets out some of the discipular attractions, for him (and, by FSFF's extension, for other film scholars, although not for all of those listed above, or below), of Cavell's philosophical criticism as follows:
Below are FSFF's weblinks to openly-accessible, film-related works by or about Cavell, as well as to other, notable, online film studies or discussions inspired or informed by his work:One aspect of Cavell’s method is that it does not presume there is a self-evident way to approach a text or assume what a revelatory instance in a text might look like. Cavell is especially alive to moments, possibly ordinary or straightforward, which he reveals to be quietly mysterious.
This approach is particularly telling with regard to film where the ordinary lucidity of film dramatisation means significance may be readily available but not immediately easy to see. For Cavell, a single dramatic action, a posture, a gesture, or a seemingly perfunctory line of dialogue triggers an open-ended investigation, and is unexpectedly fecund. Cavell writes, ‘The work of such criticism is to reveal its object as having yet to achieve its due effect. Something there, despite being fully open to the senses, has been missed’ [Cavell, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 11]. One turns to the moment, initially perhaps with only the vaguest intuition of its worth, and returns, repeatedly testing its components and one’s own experience of it.
Through an intricate, and intimate, investigation of how the elements of a moment, a scene or a sequence work, one endeavours not simply to reveal meaning but to trace the movement of meaning. Secondly, there is the very act of writing, especially description, which is a means of revelation. Because film has a special capacity to embody the metaphorical in the literal, in the physical and in the real, we may describe the actual in such a way that discloses the symbolic. Thirdly, there is the question of how the moment relates to the film as a film: observing how the style of this film works is also a way of reflecting on how this film uses the medium, how it reflects on the medium; indeed our modes of reflection, quite appropriately, reflect each other.
There is also, finally, and crucially, a critical dimension, or more accurately an appreciative one to philosophical criticism. Cavell writes about, ‘a particular form of criticism…after the fact of pleasure, articulate[s] the grounds of this experience in particular objects’ [ibid.] This appreciative dimension is often missing from academic film analysis, philosophically minded or otherwise. As Adrian Martin writes, ‘appreciation is what the spectator must rise to and what she or he can create…in an interplay of description, evocation and analysis’ [Martin, 'Secret Agents', Fipresci, Issue 4 , 2007].
Andrew Klevan, Online Abstract for the 'Philosophy and Film / Film and Philosophy' Conference, July 2008 – Arnolfini Arts Centre & UWE Bristol. [Hyperlinked references added by FSFF]
- Nathan Andersen, 'Is Film the Alien Other to Philosophy?: Philosophy *as* Film in Mulhall's On Film', Film-Philosophy. 7.23, August 2003
- Julian Baggini, 'Alien Ways of Thinking: Mulhall's On Film', Film-Philosophy, vol. 7 no. 24, August 2003
- Daniel Barnett, 'If a Film Did Philosophy We Wouldn’t Understand It', Film-Philosophy, 11.3, December 2007
- Michael William Boyce, 'Re-imagining the War in British Film, 1945-155', PhD Thesis, University of Manitoba, April 2007
- Rex Butler, 'An "Exchange" with Stanley Cavell', Senses of Cinema, February-April 2001
- Stanley Cavell, 'The Uncanniness of the Ordinary', The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Delivered at Stanford University April 3 and 8, 1986
- Stanley Cavell, 'A Capra Moment', Humanities, Vol. 6, No. 4 (August 1985), pp. 3-7
- Stanley Cavell, 'Reply to Grant', Film-Philosophy, 9.50, December 2005
- Stanley Cavell, "A Philosopher Goes to the Movies," 2/7/02 video link here (Cavell joined UC Berkeley's Harry Kreisler to talk about his life as a philosopher and his passion for movies as part of Kreisler's Conversations with History series)
- Richard Eldridge, 'Introduction: Between Acknowledgement and Avoidance", in Stanley Cavell, ed. by Richard Eldridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
- Richard Eldridge, 'Review of Russell Goodman (ed.), Contending with Stanley Cavell, Oxford University Press, 2005', Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2008
- Thomas Elsaesser. 'Presentation: Stanley Cavell and Cinema', in Eloe Kingma et al (eds.), ASCA Yearbook (Amsterdam: ASCA 1999) 107-115
- Michael Fischer, 'Using Stanley Cavell', Philosophy and literature, 2008, 32: 198–20
- Dan Flory, 'Introduction: Philosophy and the Blackness of Film Noir', Philosophy, Black Film, Film Noir, Penn State University Press, 2008
- Alexander R. Galloway, 'The Anti-Language of New Media', forthcoming in Discourse, currently at cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/
- Daniel Garrett, 'Seeing, Thinking, and Writing: Daniel Shaw’s book Film and Philosophy: Taking Movies Seriously', Offscreen Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 7, 2009
- Richard A. Gilmour, 'John Ford’s The Searchers as an Allegory of the Philosophical Search', Doing Philosophy at the Movies (State University of New York Press, 2005)
- Michael Grant, 'Cities of Words, Cities of Cinema: Stanley Cavell's City of Words', Film-Philosophy, 9.49, December 2005
- Michael Grant, 'Fulci’s Waste Land: Cinema, Horror and the Abominations of Hell', Film Studies, Issue 5, Winter 2004
- Michal Grover-Friedlander, 'Introduction', Vocal Apparitions (Princeton University Press, 2005)
- Matthew Guy, 'Review of Russell Goodman, ed., Contending with Stanley Cavell. New York, USA, Oxford University Press 2005', Consciousness, Literature and the Arts, Volume 6, Number 3, December 2005
- Michael Jarrett, 'Walden + Railroad + Sound', Rhizomes, Issue 18, Winter 2008
- Kent Jones, 'Can Movies Think?', Rouge, 12, October 2008
- David Large, 'Unknown Men and Unknown Women: Reading Cavell', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1997
- Christian Keathley, 'Otto Preminger and the Surface of Cinema', World Picture Journal, 2, 2008
- Andrew Klevan, 'A Reply to Adrian Martin', Undercurrent, Issue 4, 2008
- Andrew Klevan, 'Expressing the In-Between', Rouge, forthcoming 2009/2010
- Gary MacLennan, 'Rothman and the Challenge of Critical Realism', Film-Philosophy, vol. 1 no. 10, October 1997
- Carla Marcantonio, 'Letter from an Unknown Woman', Senses of Cinema, Issue 39, March 2006
- Jacob Leigh, ‘The Caprices of Rosine or the Follies of a Fortnight: Parallel Intrigues in Eric Rohmer’s Conte d’automne’, Undercurrent Issue 2, July 2006
- Adrian Martin, 'Secret Agents [Review of Andrew Klevan, Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation], Undercurrent, Issue 4, 2008
- Adrian Martin, 'Things to Look Into: The Cinema of Terrence Malick', Rouge, 10, December 2006
- Steve Masters, 'Review of Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation by Andrew Klevan', Scope, Issue 9, October 2007
- Linda Mizejewski, 'Chapter 1: Rules and Unruliness: Romantic Comedy' in It Happened One Night (Wiley, forthcoming December 2009)
- Daniel Morgan, ‘No Trickery with Montage’: On Reading a Sequence in Godard’s Pierrot le fou', Film Studies, Issue 5, Winter 2004
- James F. Moyer, 'Film and the Public Memory: The Phenomena of Nonfiction Film Fragments', Contemporary Aesthetics, May 24, 2007
- Stephen Mulhall, 'Ways of Thinking: A Response to Andersen and Baggini', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 7 No. 25, August 2003
- John Mullarkey, 'Introduction: Nobody Knows Anything!', in Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)
- Steven Peacock, 'Holding onto Moments in The Age of Innocence', Film Studies, Issue 9, Winter 2006
- V.F. Perkins, 'Same Tune Again! Repetition and Framing in Letter from an Unknown Woman' (originally published in CineAction! no. 52), 16:9, September 2003
- Michael Peters, 'Stanley Cavell and Philosophy of Education', Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Education, June 1999
- Douglas Pye, 'In and Around The Paradine Case: Control, Confession and the Claims of Marriage', Rouge, 4, 2004
- Daniel Ross, 'Review of Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the day after tomorrow. Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard University Press, 2005', Screening the Past, Issue 19, 2006
- Rupert Read, 'What theory of film do Wittgenstein and Cavell have? (Introduction II)', DRAFT eventually published in Film as philosophy: essays on cinema after Wittgenstein and Cavell (edited book, jointly edited with Jerry Goodenough; London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005)
- William Rothman, 'Response to Tepper', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 6 No. 13, June 2002
- Philipp Schmerheim, 'Film, not Sliced up into Pieces, or: How Film Made Me Feel Thinking (Review: Daniel Frampton [2006], Filmosophy London: Wallflower), Film-Philosophy, 12.2, September 2008
- Steven Jay Schneider, 'Review of On Film', Aesthetics Online, 2002
- Steven Jay Schneider, 'Introduction: Psychoanalysis in/and/of the Horror Film', Horror Film and Psychoanalysis - Freud’s Worst Nightmare - Edited by Steven Jay Schneider (Cambridge University Press, 2004
- Joshua Shaw, 'A Second Look at On Film', Film-Philosophy, 13.1, April 2009
- Robert Sinnerbrink, 'A Heideggerian Cinema?: On Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line', Film-Philosophy, 10.3, December 2006
- Wim Staat, 'Unlikely Candidates for Paradigmatic Cases of Intercultural Communication, reply to Van Brakel', R&R 2006 / 3
- Lesley Stern, 'Excerpt from Paths That Wind through the Thicket of Things', Critical Inquiry, Fall 2001, Volume 28, Number 1
- Craig Tepper, 'The Cavell Cavil [review of William Rothman and Marian Keane, Reading Cavell's The World Viewed: A Philosophical Perspective on Film (Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 2000)], Film-Philosophy, Vol. 6 No. 12, June 2002
- David Tkach, 'Book Review: Contemporary Philosophers in Focus: Stanley Cavell, edited by Richard Eldridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003', Gnosis, Volume VIII, Number 1
- Ludger H. Viefhues-Bailey, 'Introduction', in Beyond the philosopher's fear: a Cavellian reading of gender, origin and religion in modern skepticism, by Ludger H. Viefhues-Baile (London: Ashgate, 2007)
- Ludger Viefhues-Bailey, 'Bearing the Beyond: Women and the Limits of Language in Stanley Cavell', Gender Forum, Gender and Language 20 (2008)
- Charles Warren, 'Cavell, Altman, Cassavetes', Film International, Vol. 4, No. 4, (Issue 22), 2006
- Thomas E. Wartenberg, 'Film, Philosophy, and the Ordinary: A Response to Butler', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 5 No. 23, July 2001
- Greg Watkins, 'Seeing and Being Seen: Distinctively Filmic and Religious Elements in Film', Journal of Religion and Film, Vol. 3, No. 2 October 1999
- Stephen J. Whitfield, 'Cinéma Verité [on Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. By Stanley Cavell]', Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 1983
- Cary Wolfe, 'When You Can't Believe Your Eyes: Voice, Vision, and the Prosthetic Subject in Dancer in the Dark', Electronic Book Review, September 1, 2001
- Christopher S. Yates, 'A Phenomenological Aesthetic of Cinematic 'Worlds'', Contemporary Aesthetics, October 22, 2006
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