Stanley Cavell and Film: Scepticism and Self-Reliance at the Cinema, by Catherine Wheatley

Abstract

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).