Film and Skepticism: Stanley Cavell on the Ontology of Film

Abstract

The present essay analyzes the reflections on the ontology of cinema in the works of Stanley Cavell. In particular, it highlights the way in which Cavell foresees in the philosophy of ordinary language as in Hollywood comedy, as many forms of that effort of redemption from the human condition which he calls skepticism, understood not so much as a philosophical position but rather as an underlying condition, as a reaction to the knowledge conceived as human knowledge, that is, experienced as potentially imperfect. Cinema, therefore, turns into an unveiling of the inadequacy of systematic philosophical frameworks and underlines the insufficiency of the interpretative patterns of research that either end up at an intellectualistic level or return, instead, to a mystic-intuitionist one.