The World Viewed

Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Enlarged Edition

Stanley Cavell

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 1979
• Print ISBN: 9780674961968, 9780674961975
• eBook ISBN: 9780674253353
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Stanley Cavell looks closely at America's most popular art and our perceptions of it. His explorations of Hollywood's stars, directors, and most famous films—as well as his fresh look at Godard, Bergman, and other great European directors—will be of lasting interest to movie-viewers and intelligent people everywhere.

1

An Autobiography of Companions

When Tolstoy asked, “What is art?” his answer was to dismiss most of the great art of the past. There’s the unflinchingness of genius for you. And why should one care about it? What reason is there to care about any radical criticism of one’s culture—about, say, the fact that Plato and Rousseau wished to dismiss poetry and theater from their republics; or that Matthew Arnold thought poetry had lost its voice; or that Hegel and Marx thought philosophy had come to an end, or ought to; or that Wagner and Walt Whitman and Thoreau and Nietzsche thought that man and his society would have to be transformed before the thing they had it at heart to say could be understood? The trouble is, we are sometimes unsure whether we have survived these prophecies or whether our lives now are realizing their worst fears. My question, therefore, is not whether we ought to care about Tolstoy’s answer, but whether we can avoid caring and, in particular, what explanation we give ourselves for his answer—when, that is, we find ourselves caring about it. Shall we say Tolstoy was wrong about art? Could we really believe that? Shall we say that he was crazy when he wrote his book about art? The book doesn’t sound or feel like the work of a crazy man. An answer I used to give myself was: Tolstoy is asking himself not about the nature of art, but about the nature of the importance of art. It was when I came to see that these are not separate questions—that the answer to the question “What is the importance of art?” is grammatically related to, or is a way of answering, the question “What is art?”—that I came to an understanding of what Tolstoy was talking about, and came to comprehend further ranges in my caring about art. Tolstoy knew its saving importance; that is how he knew that whatever importance the rich are likely to attach to art, it is not the true importance of art; and why he cared that the poor (most people) attach no importance at all to it. I assume that what Tolstoy saw was there to be seen, and that it is more evident now than when he wrote, if less apparent. Then how can it not raise the question of the importance of art? Are we so sophisticated that the inaccessibility of art is of no concern to us? Or are we in possession of a theory that explains to our satisfaction why art need not be of importance?

Why are movies important? I take it for granted that in various obvious senses they are. That this can be taken for granted is the first fact I pose for consideration; it is, or was, a distinctive fact about movies. Music, painting, sculpture, poetry—as they are now sought by artists of major ambition, artists devoted to the making of objects meant as the live history of their art—are not generally important, except pretty much for the men and women devoted to creating them. For them, the arts are of such importance, and that importance raises such questions, that no one free of the questions is free to share their arts with them. These artists have virtually no audiences any longer, except in isolated or intermittent cases. The arts will differ in the extent of their isolation from audience and in the extent to which they suffer from this isolation. Painting seems to be in the most fortunate position at the moment, music in the least. Perhaps this indicates that there are now more ways of responding to paintings than there are of entering music. But rich and poor, those who care about no (other) art and those who live on the promise of art, those whose pride is education and those whose pride is power or practicality—all care about movies, await them, respond to them, remember them, talk about them, hate some of them, are grateful for some of them.

This first fact is paired with a second. The movie seems naturally to exist in a state in which its highest and its most ordinary instances attract the same audience (anyway until recently). Anyone ought to be able to rise to the occasion of recognition at the end of City Lights, to the eloquence of Garbo’s moods, to the intelligence and manliness of Olivier’s Richard the Third, to the power of justice in Henry Fonda’s young Lincoln, to Carole Lombard’s wit, to Emil Jannings’ despair, to Marilyn Monroe’s doomed magnetism, to Kim Stanley’s sense of worthlessness, to the mutual pleasure and trust William Powell and Myrna Loy give one another, to Groucho’s full and calm acceptance of Harpo’s raging urgencies, to the heartbreaking hesitations at the center of an Astaire routine. And the highest sensibility must thrill at the knowledge with which Fonda interrupts the mythical question—“Say, what’s your name, stranger?”—looking around straight into Walter Brennan’s eyes, dropping it as he walks out, “Earp. Wyatt Earp”; and hate and fear Basil Rathbone’s courtly villainies or Richard Widmark’s psychotic killers or Lee Marvin’s Liberty Valance, at once completely gratified and perfectly freed of guilt at their lucid and baroque defeats; and participate in the satisfaction of one of Kirk Douglas’s or Burt Lancaster’s rages. Merely to think of the way Bette Davis makes her entrance in Jezebel—bursting into view on a rearing horse, her elegant riding habit amplifying the dash with which she dismounts, then jamming the point of her whip back into the side folds of her skirt to free her boot for the step into the house where she knows she is awaited with dazzled disapproval—merely to think of the way, in Now, Voyager, her restoration to sanity is signaled by an opening shot on her sheer-stockinged ankles and legs, released from the thick, shapeless, dark cotton wrappings and health shoes into which her wicked mother had charmed her—these moments provide us with a fair semblance of ecstasy. (Anyone who thinks such responses are “camp” either is camping himself or else grew up in a different world from mine.)

But people who attend to serious music do not attend to light dinner music, say, or movie music. They may admire Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Jerome Kern, the Beatles, jazz. But then everyone should admire inspired inventiveness, true sentiment, rocking joy, passionate honesty, and the turning of captivity and grief into radiant shouts and virtuoso murmurs of community. And people who read serious novels do not on the whole read potboilers (with the occasional exception of the detective story and science fiction, sociological curiosities of their own). There are, of course, in literature a few instances of very great artists who are at the same time popular. But my claim is that in the case of films, it is generally true that you do not really like the highest instances unless you also like typical ones. You don’t even know what the highest are instances of unless you know the typical as well.

This necessary region of indiscriminateness creates three separable nightmares: (1) For the conscientious movie reviewer who feels, or whose editor assumes, that he must cover every opening, taking with him a little high hope and some handy cynicism, not knowing whether he is to report on another sign of the times or to summon words to praise a new ambition. (2) For the fastidious writer about film who takes an indiscriminate attention to movies as a manifestation of bad taste and of a corrupt industry and society, rather than as a datum in understanding the appetite for film. (3) For those trying to awaken both from empty indiscriminateness and from futile discrimination.

About (1): It was not the least of James Agee’s talents to live with this nightmare graciously. He had no need for the seedy pleasure of feeling superior to drivel, or for the grudging admiration of those no better than oneself who happen to have got the breaks, or for the hatred and fear of (other) intellectuals who were just coming around to movies or talked inflated incomprehensibilities about them. His gift for finding and describing something to like, in no matter what yards of junk, adapted an old line of literary criticism, the “praise of beauties,”¹ to the most unpromising territories. In Agee’s hands, this gift established a significant fact about movies: that there is always something to find, often enough to justify a hundred minutes of speculative solitude.

The significance of this fact is brought out against the light of the auteur theory of film.² It was a clarifying shock to realize that films were directed, that some human being had undertaken to mean, or was at any rate responsible for, all the angles of a movie. I certainly felt rebuked for my backwardness in having grown to fatherhood without really knowing where movies came from, ready to admit that I must have had an idea that they sprang full grown from iron-gated sunglassed heads of studios. But then, apart from the great directors and a few eccentrics and specialists, the evidence of relation between a film and its director—after the titles—is often no more than that one can find something to attribute to the man. So I became interested again in my former backwardness. How could anyone not have known what the auteur theory forces us to know? Is it explanation enough to cite the money conspiracy of Hollywood production, and the build-up of a star system that overshadowed its makers? There may be many such explanations, but they will not answer the first question, which is how such a setup could so often have yielded movies worth possessing and questioning.

The auteur emphasis turns us away from an aesthetic proposition even more unnoticeable in its obviousness—that a movie comes from other movies. Each of the arts knows of this self-generation, however primitive our understanding remains about the relation between tradition and the individual talent. But with movies the idea looks too good, or bad, to be true; movie directors haven’t got an established history behind them to remind them that they exist, that a tradition is something in which individuals work out their individuality. An immediate block to the thought of movies having an internal history is that we know, or ought to know, their origin. There was a time in living memory when there were no movies at all, and the first one surely couldn’t have come from others. Very well, I concede the first. But how are the other arts different? Whatever the original state of an art, a new work is born in civilization from the powers of the art itself. The obscurity about “the first” painting or piece of prose or movie is no more historical than conceptual. It may seem that a terrible literalization of aesthetic history took place in Hollywood, that the steps a tradition takes to continue itself were leveled and occupied by legions of precise slaves, with no leader and no memory but a bank. Still, you can’t deny the monuments. One remembers a remark of Ingmar Bergman’s, likening the making of movies to the construction of a medieval cathedral: a mass of craftsmen, each perfect at his work, together mounting an aspiration no man could achieve alone. But he was pretty clearly thinking of himself as the unknown master builder. Neither a romanticism of anonymity nor a romanticism of individuality is going to account for the power that movies have or have had for us.

About (2): Some people have now stopped worrying and started loving the unminding devotions of the eye and ear, claiming them as a natural reaction to the demise of the printed word. This claim has an ugly effect on certain professors of literature who believe their day either done or to have dawned with a new call to save the books from the barbarians. No doubt it is true that more people than ever do not read. In my experience it is also true that more people read, and read better. There are more people, from more places. And some among the people I know who like movies best are among the best readers I know. The question for me—and it prompts and pervades the occasions I have found to speak concretely about particular films—is why the standards of rigor and range that we have learned to take for granted (or criticize) when we give or are given readings of books are ignored or unavailable when we give or are given readings of movies. (I do not deny that there is a problem about the idea of “reading a movie.” Is it greater, or other, than the problem about the idea of “reading a poem,” when, of course, that is not the same as reciting the poem?)

About (3): A standing discovery of the auteur theory was of the need for a canon of movies to which any remarks about “the movie” should hold themselves answerable. Without this, the natural circle of theory and evidence will not inscribe the knowledge we want; for example, some generalization will be ruled out or in on the ground that some work or other counters or exemplifies it, even when we know nothing about why we give weight to that work. The danger is not so much that evidence will be lacking as that there will be evidence for everything and nothing, that theory will not warrant enough confidence to repudiate ill-gathered evidence to test what tests it. Organization by directors’ oeuvres is a beginning, but it will include too much and too little; or else “organization” will only start meaning “arranged alphabetically by director,” keeping dumb about the ranking in quality or centrality we assign a given work within an oeuvre, and about the relation of a given oeuvre to the medium that has made place for it.

I am not in a position to establish such a canon, hardly even the modest collection of talkies at my disposal and from which I begin. But since I am bent on going ahead anyway, I will take what bearings I have, trying at each point to meld the ways of thinking that have invited my conviction with the experiences of films that I have cared about.

It is the nature of these experiences to be lined with fragments of conversations and responses of friends I have gone to movies with. And with the times of sharing just afterwards—running across lots as Indians, or in formation as biplanes, gradually giving way to sessions in which for hours we reconstructed the movie’s score or dialogue or plot, or to the contentment in simply naming moments, with the pure unwanting for more than small syllables of joy or disgust or the creeps. I am merely amused or embarrassed or tender when I remember what I thought the first time I read a book I later followed to another depth; but I remain faithful to responses I first had to movies, even if I can no longer share them. The events associated with the experiences of books and music are only occasionally as important as the experience of the works themselves. The events associated with movies are those of companionship or lack of companionship: the audience of a book is essentially solitary, one soul at a time; the audience of music and theater is essentially larger than your immediate acquaintance—a gathering of the city; the crowd at a movie comprises various pools of companions, or scattered souls with someone missing. I don’t care whether anyone quite knows the week of awe I spent at the age of twelve reading Les Misérables; there are always twelve-year-olds and there is always that book for them. But movies, unless they are masterpieces, are not there as they were. The hours—through the Laughton-Gable Mutiny on the Bounty; The Crusades; Union Pacific; Dawn Patrol; Captain Blood; Algiers; Charlie Chan; Wuthering Heights; Stella Dallas; King’s Row; Ball of Fire; the Ronald Colman Prisoner of Zenda; Random Harvest; Lost Horizon; Juarez; Dead End; The Last of the Mohicans; Broken Arrow; The General Died at Dawn; Mildred Pierce; The Phantom of the Opera; Strike Up the Band; Singin’ in the Rain; The Cat People; Phantom Lady; Cry of the City; Murder, My Sweet; White Heat; and a hundred others—were hours and days of awe; momentous, but only for the moment; unrecapturable fully except in memory and evocation; gone. If you see them now for the first time, you may be interested and moved, but you can’t know what I know.

I have mentioned my increasing difficulty over the past several years to get myself to go to new movies. This has to do partly with an anxiousness in my response to new films I have seen (I don’t at all mean I think they are bad), but equally with my anxiousness in what I feel to be new audiences for movies (not necessarily new people, but people with new reasons for being there), as though I cannot locate or remain together with my companions among them. I take this as something of more than clinical interest.

One could say that movie showings have begun for the first time to be habitually attended by an audience, I mean by people who arrive and depart at the same time, as at a play. When moviegoing was casual and we entered at no matter what point in the proceedings (during the news or short subject or somewhere in the feature—enjoying the recognition, later, of the return of the exact moment at which one entered, and from then on feeling free to decide when to leave, or whether to see the familiar part through again), we took our fantasies and companions and anonymity inside and left with them intact. Now that there is an audience, a claim is made upon my privacy; so it matters to me that our responses to the film are not really shared. At the same time that the mere fact of an audience makes this claim upon me, it feels as if the old casualness of moviegoing has been replaced by a casualness of movie-viewing, which I interpret as an inability to tolerate our own fantasies, let alone those of others—an attitude that equally I cannot share. I feel I am present at a cult whose members have nothing in common but their presence in the same place. Matters are otherwise—not necessarily pleasanter—if the film is already part of history and is itself something around which a transient cult has formed. I suppose that the old casualness harbored the value of illicitness that from the beginning was part of moviegoing. But the strictures of the new audience do not dispel illicitness or make it unnecessary; the audience is not a gathering of citizens for honest confession and acceptance of one another. The new need for the gathering is as mysterious as the old need for privacy; so the demand that I forgo privacy is as illicit as my requirement to preserve it.

The importance of memory goes beyond its housing of knowledge. It arises also in the way movies are remembered or misremembered. That will be a live topic in what follows, because my way of studying films has been mostly through remembering them, like dreams. Unlike dreams, there are other equally essential ways of getting at movies, like reading their scripts and learning their outer history and viewing them again and counting and timing their shots. I am going to press my way here, not just because I am not equipped for or provided with any other alternative, but because I wouldn’t at this stage know what further documentation would be documentation for. My business is to think out the causes of my consciousness of films as it stands.

From this lack of scholarship I expect three kinds of advantages: first, that what I have to remember will be recalled by others; second, that since my remembering is itself a datum that wants accounting for, and since a book cannot reproduce, or quote, the images or scenes remembered, I will always be pushed to an account, however brief, of the object as a whole from which they stand out. This is a special advantage, because it is arguable that the only instruments that could provide data for a theory of film are the procedures of criticism. Third, in allowing the thinking to have its head, I should at least avoid those embarrassed bursts of theory that writing about film typically lets out; and at most I will have examples from which to ask why movies seem naturally to produce their metaphysical outcries, often supported by a mere conjunction of technical details together with a plot outline of roughly the consistency of opera programs. In the paucity of humane criticism dealing with whole films, and in the lack of fit between their technical description and a phenomenological account of them, movies have achieved the condition of music. At the moment, I remember three instances of what I mean by “humane criticism dealing with whole films” by which I have been instructed: James Kerans on Grand Illusion; William Hedges on Children of Paradise; Annette Michelson on 2001: A Space Odyssey?³ But it is generally true of the writing about film which has meant so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword to the Enlarged Edition
• Preface
• 1. An Autobiography of Companions
• 2. Sights and Sounds
• 3. Photograph and Screen
• 4. Audience, Actor, and Star
• 5. Types; Cycles as Genres
• 6. Ideas of Origin
• 7. Baudelaire and the Myths of Film
• 8. The Military Man and the Woman
• 9. The Dandy
• 10. End of the Myths
• 11. The Medium and Media of Film
• 12. The World as Mortal: Absolute Age and Youth
• 13. The World as a Whole: Color
• 14. Automatism
• 15. Excursus: Some Modernist Painting
• 16. Exhibition and Self-Reference
• 17. The Camera’s Implication
• 18. Assertions in Techniques
• 19. The Acknowledgment of Silence
• More of The World Viewed
• Notes
• Index