How Movies Think: Cavell on Film as a Medium of Art

Richard Eldridge

doi:10.33134/eeja.113

Abstract

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.

Highlights

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 art investigate conditions of accomplished selfhood and interest in experience in medium-specific ways
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
The main title of this essay is ‘How Movies Think’. This title claims that some movies manage to address some of the deepest and most important problems of human life – problems of selfhood, of meaning in experience, and of social conflict, among many others – in ways that are specific to the medium of moving photographic images