Stanley Cavell and Film: Scepticism and Self-Reliance at the Cinema, by Catherine Wheatley

Abstract

Stanley Cavell and Film is Catherine Wheatley’s entry in Bloomsbury’s “Film Thinks”, a series dedicated to explorations of cinema’s influence on thinkers such as Noël Carroll, Roland Barthes and Georges Didi-Huberman. Wheatley offers a thorough evaluation of Cavell’s canonical place in the history of Film Studies, and in doing so charts the tortuous trajectory of how Film Studies in turn has critically understood and misunderstood his work. Fortified by the idea that film is central to all of Cavell’s thought, Wheatley takes a chronological approach, with each chapter charting the evolution of main Cavellian concepts/principles (the promise of ordinary language philosophy; problems of everyday scepticism and acknowledgement; the reconceptualisation of moral perfectionism) by delving into works in which they receive their fullest consideration. The ultimate aim is to reveal the full depth behind Cavell’s longstanding claim that, rather than treating film as an immutable object, his work is an “accounting for his own experience of movies”, which in turn requires “taking responsibility for his responses” (14).

Keywords

• stanley cavell
• film
• scepticism
• perfectionism