Abstract
As a philosopher writing film criticism, and as a movie fan doing philosophy, Stanley Cavell posed his own challenge to disciplinary boundaries. Having begun his cinema teaching during the ascendancy of High Theory, Cavell turned to other sources, especially Wittgenstein and Thoreau, developing a method for studying films based on a preliminary intuition about a cinematic moment’s significance and a subsequent tuition that finds the words to express it. Less theoretical than descriptive, less ideological than speculative, Cavell’s approach appears in its most succinct version in his essay, “A Capra Moment,” a discussion of a scene from It Happened One Night.
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Notes
- 1.
Quoted in Giovanna Borradori, The American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putman, Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, MacIntyre, and Kuhn (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994), 131. Cavell’s “assignment” was a colloquium with Harold Bloom and William Gass.
- 2.
Subsequent references are cited parenthetically.
- 3.
Quoted in Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Penguin, 1990), 297.
- 4.
Metz’s essay first appeared in French in 1975.
- 5.
MacCabe’s essay can be found in his book Tracking the Signifier: Theoretical Essays on Film, Linguistics and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1985), 33–57. Mulvey’s essay can be found in Bill Nichols, ed., Movies and Methods: An Anthology, Vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 303–315.
- 6.
Eckert’s piece is an “addendum” to his “The Anatomy of a Proletarian Film: Warner’s Marked Woman,” which also appears in Nichols’s collection (407–428).
- 7.
See, for example, Cavell and Klevan, “What Becomes of Thinking on Film?” 175.
- 8.
Wallace Stevens’s line comes from his poem “Description without Place,” Stanza VI. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson, eds. (New York: Library of America, 1997), 301.
- 9.
Fox Talbot cited Ian Jeffrey, Photography: A Concise History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 13.
- 10.
The literal wording of Godard’s proposition of photography’s relationship to the cinema comes from his film Le Petit Soldat: “Photography is truth … and the cinema is the truth twenty-four times a second.” See Cavell and Klevan, “‘What Becomes of Thinking on Film?’” 169.
- 11.
Hemingway cited in William Balassi, “The Trail to The Sun Also Rises: The First Week of Writing” in Frank Scafella, ed. Hemingway: Essays of Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 44.
- 12.
See Cavell and Klevan, “‘What Becomes of Thinking on Film?’” 169–172.
- 13.
I am indebted to Craig Cieslikowski for providing me with both this definition of “practical” and its potential use.
- 14.
Thoreau’s “shores of America” comes from “Ktaadn,” the first chapter of The Main Woods, in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 654; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner, 1925), 152.
- 15.
Cavell’s formulation appears in Cavell and Klevan, “‘What Becomes of Thinking on Film?’” 137: “In classical comedy people made for one another find one another; in remarriage comedy people who have found one another find that they are made for each other.”
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Ray, R.B. (2020). Cavell, Thoreau, and the Movies. In: The Structure of Complex Images. Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40631-8_5
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