Cinematic Skepticism

Across Digital and Global Turns

Jeroen Gerrits

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781438476643, 9781438476636
• eBook ISBN: 9781438476650
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Drawing on the film-philosophies of Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze, argues that skepticism is an ethical problem that pervades contemporary film.

Because of its automatic way of recording reality, film has a privileged relation to the problem of skepticism. If early film theorists celebrate cinema for overcoming skeptical doubt about the power of human vision, recent film-philosophers argue that our postphotographic, digital cinema is heading toward a general acceptance of skepticism, as though nothing on screen has anything to do with reality any longer. Emerging from the interaction of Stanley Cavell's and Gilles Deleuze's film-philosophies, Cinematic Skepticism challenges both these views. Jeroen Gerrits takes the issue of skepticism beyond concern with knowledge, turning skepticism into an ethical problem that pervades film history and theory. At the same time, he rethinks a Cavello-Deleuzian approach across the digital and global turns in cinema. Combining clear explanations of complex philosophical arguments with in-depth analyses of the contemporary films Grizzly Man, Amélie, Three Monkeys, and The Headless Woman, Gerrits traces how cinema invents ways of dis/connecting to the world.

Chapter 1

Broken Links

A Cavello-Deleuzian Approach to Film

The concept of cinematic skepticism, as I use it, can be found neither in Cavell’s nor in Deleuze’s work on film: it rather emerges from their encounter. To draw out that concept (1.7), this chapter will establish a common ground between Cavell and Deleuze’s approach to cinema by placing them in the context of some of their broader philosophical interests. I will first outline Cavell’s work, which contains the most explicit and extensive investigations into skepticism in relation to the medium of film. While Cavell’s engagement with Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is generally explicit and pervasive—the Investigations inform Cavell’s work all the way from the first collected papers published in Must We Say What We Mean (1969) through to his autobiographical Little Did I Know (2010)—I will attempt to connect the significance of a Wittgensteinian ontology to Cavell’s The World Viewed, from which Wittgenstein, at least in name, is strikingly absent.

In the chapter’s second half, I will turn to Deleuze (1.5–1.6; I will continue elaborating his take on modern film and cinematic skepticism in chapter 3). Almost a mirror image of Cavell’s, the impact of Deleuze’s career-long embrace of Henri Bergson’s philosophy on the two volumes of his Cinema book (1: The Movement-Image and 2: The Time-Image) is at once explicit and well established, but it might seem less immediately obvious that these books should have any direct bearing on cinematic skepticism. Indeed, because of the importance of Bergson, whose seminal texts establish a form of philosophical intuition that could easily be read as an attempt at foregoing, if not at refuting philosophical skepticism, I imagine that my endorsement of Deleuze will appear counterintuitive to various readers. In this chapter, I take up the challenge to argue why Deleuze’s cinema books are crucial to cinematic skepticism, not in spite of Bergson’s take on intuition (a concept Deleuze rarely discusses directly), but thanks to it.

1.1. Resisting Resistance: Cavell and Film Theory

In the more than five hundred dense pages of his magnum opus, The Claim of Reason (1979), Cavell argues that skepticism of other minds is a special case of skepticism, and not merely a subcategory of epistemological skepticism. Inquiring whether we can know that a human mind exists inside a body, Cavell argues, requires a different set of criteria than addressing the question of whether we can know that the world (including the body) exists outside of our minds. From this basic distinction, Cavell later develops this “moral perfectionism,” which relies on a fundamental difference between moral and epistemological arguments. In that light, the works on film from his middle period—especially Pursuits of Happiness (1981) and Contesting Tears (1996)—are probably the most relevant to discuss (as I have done elsewhere).¹

I find that there is an important attempt in recent film-philosophical studies at covering this gap between the two kinds of skepticism, or at any rate at thinking through the relation. Daniele Rugo, for example, argues that Cavell himself sought to reconcile the initial distinction in his later texts, and discusses Cavell’s take on romanticism as a way of bridging the two kinds of skepticism (Rugo 2016a). Robert Sinnerbrink makes a similar attempt at linking Cavell’s “moving image of skepticism” and his moral perfectionism in Cinematic Ethics (2016). In what is to come, I will not engage Cavell’s moral perfectionism directly. Indeed, I will focus primarily on Cavell’s early “little book on film,” as Cavell himself describes The World Viewed in its preface (xxv). Yet here it already becomes clear that epistemological, ontological, and ethical questions go hand in hand for Cavell. And when I get to discuss the digital-global turn later on (esp. chapter 5), the question of other minds will re-enter the discussion as well.²

While published as a cheap paperback outside academia in 1971, The World Viewed originated in a seminar taught at Harvard eight years earlier, in 1963, when Cavell had hoped to draw “pedagogical advantages” from discussing a medium in the absence of an academic discipline and established canon of criticism (Cavell 1979, xx). The time between the book’s conception and its publication marks the establishment of film studies in the United States, and the young discipline did not greet the book warmly. For example, Leo Braudy wrote in Film Quarterly, mocking Cavell’s own qualification: “This little book seems designed to make anyone interested in good film criticism very unhappy” (Braudy 1972, 28).

In many ways, The World Viewed is indeed a muddled, convoluted, and “obscure” piece of writing, as Braudy, among many others, complained. But the primary cause for its hostile reception consists in the book’s insistence on the importance of reality in the medium of film. Braudy, at any rate, stopped pulling any further pieces from the book after two or three citations to prove that Cavell takes the question of reality seriously—noting that fact alone apparently settled the issue for him.

Given the dominance of the neo-Marxist critique of reality as a social construct emanating from Althusser and the Frankfurt School during the implementation of film theory as an academic discipline, Cavell indeed expected this resistance to what must have seemed an anachronistic, if not retrograde book. In terms of the now commonly accepted differentiation between classical and modern film theory, The World Viewed was made to fit squarely into the classical paradigm at a time when the modern paradigm was establishing itself in an attempt to reject the former’s preoccupation with questions of art and photographic realism—then re-coined under the header indexicality. In his lengthy essay “More of The World Viewed,” published two years after The World Viewed itself and appended to the later editions thereof, Cavell counters the ideological critics with an ironic twist, calling their resistance to the pressure of reality upon art itself a “natural inclination.” The inclination here—a “natural” one no less—is to follow a “vague and pervasive intellectual fashion according to which we never really, and never really can, see reality as it is” (Cavell 1979, 165, emphasis added). With this objection, Cavell is not defending the opposite view, one according to which we would have an unmediated access to reality in itself (more on that later). Rather, Cavell dismisses the idea that we could “never really” see reality, and that photographic film could never really project it, as a “fake” form of skepticism, one that, under the pretense of a skeptical argument, avoids the actual pressure of skepticism in the context of film by jumping to conclusions. For Cavell, it is obvious that photographic film has something to do with reality; it is much less obvious just how that relation is to be understood. The broad (“vague”) gesture of denying reality to play any role at all (like the one Braudy was making) is a way of foregoing the discomfort the latter question could cause. In his attempts to resist this resistance to the pressure of reality upon art, Cavell embraces Panofsky and Bazin, despite his own discomfort regarding their “unabashed appeals” to nature and to reality (Cavell 1979, 166).

I shall return to this idea of a fake form of skepticism later on in this chapter. As for now, it is worth noting that Cavell’s book has recently undergone a revival, as can be seen from the growing body of scholarship that takes The World Viewed to heart, both in the United States and abroad (e.g., D. N. Rodowick, William Rothman in the United States, Stephen Mulhall and Daniele Rugo in the United Kingdom, Robert Sinnerbrink and Mathew Abbott in Australia, Sandra Laugier and Élise Domenach in France, and Josef Früchtl in Germany). To some extent, this revival goes at the expense of his erstwhile critics. Referring to the ideology-dominated period of the 1970s and 1980s by the term “the October moment”—a reference to the leading journal in the humanities at the time (and, of course, to its namesake, the Bolshevik revolution)—Robin Kelsey and Blake Stimson wrote in 2008:

When we entered the professional ranks of the academy, we took up our inherited task of ushering photographic indexicality from promise to myth, of explaining how photography always pointed, both fore and aft of the camera, to its own discursive constructions. But for us recent events have cast the relevance and timelines of this critical project into doubt. (xi)

Retrospectively casting doubt on the ideological critique of indexicality, the “recent events” mentioned by Kelsey and Stimson—they mean the digital turn—by the same token rehabilitate Cavell’s insistence on the importance of reality in film. However, Kelsey and Stimson’s specific way of phrasing their “inherited task” points out an interesting and, at the time at least, entirely overlooked element of Cavell’s take on the movies. As I shall elaborate in the course of this chapter, the indexical quality of analog photographic film stands out to Cavell not merely for its ability to convince us of the (past) existence of its subject matter, but also for the pressure this existence exerts onto human myths lodged deep in philosophical skepticism. And to Cavell, unlike Kelsey and Stimson, this latter ability, this mythological character, is cause for alarm, not for rejection.

At the same time, the capacity for film and photography to tap into human myths (and, with that, into human uncertainties,) relies significantly on the material condition of the analog form. So it is unavoidable to approach Cavell’s take on the medium in its current, postfilmic, or postanalog condition with caution, not now for ideological, but for technological reasons.

No longer tied to an automatic kind of causation on the photochemical level, the digital evoked sighs of relief as well as of lament. In Death 24x a Second, Laura Mulvey states, for example, that digital film is an “abstract information system … finally sweeping away the relation with reality” (Mulvey 2006, 18, emphasis added).³ In an article that appeared around the same time, entitled “The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity,” Mary Ann Doane points out how others, on the contrary, bemoan the loss of believability and trust resulting from the manipulability to which digital images lend themselves so well.⁴

Doane addresses an important aspect of this change to the digital by connecting the sense of trust attributed to analog photography to the specific relation indexicality bears to contingency. It may sound surprising to find contingency not opposed, but wedded to necessity; we would likely expect anything to occur by chance because it eludes the laws governing necessity. But necessity, in this context, qualifies the indexical relationship that ties a person or object to an analog photograph (whose subject it becomes): whatever occurs in front of the camera at the moment of recording will, ipso facto, find its way into the print. Doane’s point is that this form of causality secures a certain believability concerning the subject’s (past) existence. “Automatic analogical causation”—to use D. N. Rodowick’s term—necessitates that the slightest detail manifests itself in the developed product and may catch the attention of a particular observer (Rodowick 2007, 113). Think not only of the “annoying” details we would now “Photoshop away,” but also, say, of the once fashionable but now singularly striking shape of a shirt’s design, of a dirty-nailed hand resting on a doorknob, or of any background matter that seems to have escaped the intentional message the photographer or filmmaker had wished to convey.⁵

The link between necessity and contingency, then, consists in the fact that any analog photograph necessarily implies the mutual presence of the photographer (or the camera at least) and whatever he or she (it) takes a picture of; and further that the very desire to arrange and control the setting—if such desire be there—only indicates just how susceptible photographs are to anything exceeding intentionality and artistic concern. In Death 24x a Second, Mulvey had called this the inhuman aspect of the medium.⁶

This relation between contingency and necessity is implied in Cavell’s conception of automatism, which is equally concerned with the supposedly “inhuman” nature of analogue photography and film and forms a crucial aspect of the fundamental relation a film (viewer) bears to skepticism. However, Cavell’s appeal to the force of skepticism is not reducible to the (loss of) trust and believability Doane attributes to the digital turn. On the contrary, I want to claim that Cavell’s take on skepticism crucially precedes the digital turn and that it is not warded off by the necessity that ties an object to its analog representation. This is the reason I think Cavell’s “little book” is ultimately relevant today: it intervenes in current debates about the presumed loss of believability in digital photography, not by making a case for trustworthiness of the digital, but by pointing in the opposite direction. The analogue should manage to evoke an even more profound confrontation with skepticism, causing an “ontological restlessness” we ought to take seriously. Far from denying the relevance of the digital turn for my discussion of cinematic skepticism, in the following sections on Cavell, I intend to deepen it.

To grasp Cavell’s take on ontology and skepticism in relation to film, we will first need to elaborate on his engagement with ordinary language philosophy, especially the later Wittgenstein.⁷

1.2. Linguistic Confusion and Ontological Restlessness

By subtitling The World Viewed as Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Cavell does not mean to suggest that he is after the essence of the medium, not, at least, when this is understood as some “fixed, mysterious thing underlying all [its] manifestations” (Cavell 1984, 194–95).⁸ And although the subtitle does hint at Bazin’s influence on Cavell—Cavell explicitly discusses essays like “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” and the privileged relation photography bears to the existence of its subject matter—the reference to the ontology of film should also be read (despite the sheer absence of his name throughout the book) as Cavell’s attempt to bring Wittgenstein’s thought to bear on the movies.

It was Wittgenstein, after all, who warned in the Philosophical Investigations not to hold on to the idea that “there must be something common” to all instances that fall under a general rubric. Instead, he affirmed that there are likely to be many overlapping and crisscrossing similarities (“family resemblances”), which, like so many threads, form a fabric that holds together even if it is not tightly knotted (Wittgenstein §66 and §67).⁹ And he also holds, perhaps more pertinently, that “it is grammar that tells us what kind of object anything is” (§ 373). Wittgenstein uses the term “grammar” not in the conventional sense of an external set of rules for the correct use of language, but in the specific sense of investigating what linguistic moves are (or are not) allowed as making sense. Grammatical investigations involve questions such as the following: In what ways and in what contexts are words actually used in our daily lives? In what circumstances and particular cases do we confidently employ certain expressions, and how do we distinguish or relate them to other expressions? Far from determining the meaning of words once and for all, such investigations often lay bare the conventionality, flexibility, and dynamic nature of language, without, however, reducing linguistic conventions and movements to totally arbitrary decisions. This dynamic aspect, or, if you will, this inexactness of ordinary language is not, for Wittgenstein, an objection against it—it is precisely what keeps languages alive and makes them work. Another implication here, and one relevant to Cavell, is that in cases in which we do not feel comfortable with a certain expression or confident in a specific use of a word, it is not necessarily the case that something is wrong with our (knowledge of a) language. It more likely indicates that we hit on something we do not understand quite as well as we thought we did.

This, Cavell claims, is often the case when we talk and think about the movies. In order to know what film is, Cavell investigates its grammar and its grammatically related expressions. Thus, The World Viewed examines what we say—or do not tend to say—about photographs, about screens, about projections, about audiences, and so on. I will focus here primarily on the first of these investigations—the one examining our language use regarding photography—as it immediately puts ontology up front and so ties back to the question of reality. What kinds of expressions do we use that should make us reflect upon our knowledge of its nature?

Taking up Erwin Panofsky’s claim (from his 1934 essay “Style and Medium in the Moving Pictures”) that “the medium of the movies is physical reality as such,” as well as Bazin’s many declarations along those same lines (as in: “Cinema is committed to communicate only by way of what is real”), Cavell intends to follow their basic assumptions, though he immediately modifies (or moderates) their claims by understanding them to be saying, in his reformulation, that “the basis of the medium of movies is photographic, and that a photograph is of reality” (Cavell 1979, 16).¹⁰ Cavell underlines the obvious difference between being taken of reality and physical re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A “Still” New “Moving” Image of Skepticism?
• Chapter 1 Broken Links: A Cavello-Deleuzian Approach to Film
• Chapter 2 Renoir’s Key to Cinematic Skepticism
• Chapter 3 What Cinema Calls Believing, or: Deleuze beyond Skepticism?
• Chapter 4 A Seem-less Digital Skepticism in Grizzly Man and Amélie
• Chapter 5 Digital, Global, Ontological Turns
• Chapter 6 Reveiling the Gap in The Headless Woman and Three Monkeys
• Conclusion: The Digital Will or a New Romanticism?
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Back Cover