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Stanley Cavell The Contingencies of Film and Its Theory DANIEL MORGAN
A philosopher by profession, Stanley Cavell (b.
wrote three books on film. The first, The World Viewed (), is the one most explicitly involved in theories of cinema. Subtitled “Reflections on the Ontology of Film,” it continues a tradition of approaching cinema by inquiring into its defining properties, mainly its photographic base, and seeing in that inquiry the source of a range of philosophical problems. The two other books, while explicitly works of interpretation, are likewise philosophically inclined. Pursuits of Happiness () analyzes seven Hollywood comedies from the s and s, finding in them a genre Cavell calls “the comedy of remarriage.” It is a revision of Shakespearean comedy: rather than getting a young couple together, the task is to get an older, more experienced couple back together. together. Cavell argues that this is done by presenting the institution of marriage as a special form of conversation, a way of taking pleasure in each other’s company and of taking responsibility for each other’s ongoing development. Contesting Tears () explores the genre that operates as the dark side to remarriage comedies, the “melodrama of the unknown woman.” The pathos of these films—and what Cavell argues are their feminist impulses—comes from the failure of a man and a woman to achieve a state of shared existence; their sadness and power comes from the woman’s remaining unknown to the man. Cavell has also written essays on television and video as well as on specific films, and his late Cities of Words () weaves philosophy and philosophical accounts of literature with studies of films to provide a moral articulation of a democratic society. While these works do not form a strict and unified system, there are deep connections among them, resonating not only across themes and arguments in Cavell’s philosophical work—a topic too broad for this chapter, involving issues of epistemology and ethics organized around a longstanding engagement with the legacy of skepticism—but also in the mode of analysis. Within film studies, 162
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Cavell is frequently seen as the end of a tradition of classical film theory, a label that places him as the last major film theorist to write outside the academic study of film. It also carries two deep assumptions that have shaped how Cavell’s work has been understood, first that the basic task of the study of film is an elucidation of the essential feature of the medium—here, its photographic basis; secondly that the films that matter, mainly narrative fiction films of the classical period of Hollywood cinema, directly and explicitly respond to that feature (see Carroll , ff). So understood, Cavell’s writings on film can appear nostalgic in their taste and retrograde in their theoretical commitments (a charge made by Tania Modleski and others), a naïve and uncritical embrace of a bygone era of filmmaking and film theory. Yet, as I will argue, these assumptions miss the mark. Cavell’s writing on film in fact provides a way of thinking about cinema marked by flexibility and openness; rejecting the idea that cinema is best understood through a single key feature, his approach is committed to ongoing developments in the fluid life of films. If we are to understand what Cavell is doing—what his arguments and methods are, and how they might matter to the contemporary situation of films and film theory—we need to change the framework in which he has been placed. My principal focus will be on The World Viewed, since it underlies his general approach to cinema. Cavell does value and emphasize classical Hollywood cinema: The World Viewed begins by recounting his own experience of going to these movies, and from this experience launches into broader reflection on cinema. The two books of film criticism and interpretation bear this out, as Cavell not only claims the films as the best instances of American cinema but also defends their insights into questions of gender and cinema over and against instances of more explicitly political and modernist cinema. The specific powers of cinema, Cavell suggests, were most evidenced in the films made in the years when, as it happened, he had a “natural relation” to movies and movie-going. Yet Cavell’s critical interests are more complicated. The chapter that is at the center of The World Viewed —there are nine chapters before and nine after it—announces “The End of Myths,” claiming that traditional forms of Hollywood cinema have lost their force. Where the first half of the book represents an attempt to account for cinema’s past, to understand the conditions that allowed for a certain kind of cinema to emerge and thrive, the second half, by contrast, attempts to understand the filmmaking of Cavell’s present, the rise of modernist cinema in the s. Thus, of the films he discusses for any length of time, all are from the period after classical Hollywood cinema ended: Vertigo (), L’Avventura (), The Children’s Hour (), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (), Jules and Jim (), The Graduate (), and Rosemary’s Baby (), not to mention broad surveys of Jean-Luc Godard’s films. Despite appearances to the contrary, The World Viewed is essentially a book about cinema
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under the condition of modernism (Rothman and Keane ff). Cavell is a theorist of cinema in crisis and transformation. What makes Cavell’s openness hard to recognize is his apparent commitment to a theory of cinema in which a film’s fundamental feature is the relation to reality given by its photographic basis. There are several reasons for the prominence of this view of his work, not the least of which has been the reprinting of chapters – of The World Viewed in Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen’s popular Film Theory and Criticism. In that context, and with only those chapters reprinted, The World Viewed is positioned as a direct inheritor of a line of thinking that emerges from Erwin Panofsky and André Bazin and continues through Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film, according to which film emerges at the end of the nineteenth century as a technological solution to an increasing demand for realism across the arts. In Bazin’s account, for example, whereas painting is always dependent on human skill, with photography “for the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man” (). The result is a medium uniquely oriented toward reality, whose emergence thereby “freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness” ( ) and opened the way for abstraction in painting. Cinema is thus photography plus time, “change mummified as it were” ( ). Cavell certainly contributes to this reading, calling Panofsky and Bazin “the two continuously intelligent, interesting, and to me useful theorists” ( World Viewed ). And when the first chapter of The World Viewed ends with the question “What is film?” the second chapter begins by taking up the relation of film to reality. Nevertheless, Cavell sharply diverges from this tradition in three important ways. 1. Cavell resists the idea that photography and painting are competing solutions to a wish for realism. Instead, he argues, “so far as photography satisfied a wish, it [was] the human wish, intensifying in the West since the Reformation, to escape subjectivity and metaphysical isolation” ( World Viewed ), a problem of Cartesian doubt about the relation of self to world. This is, for Cavell, the beginning of modern skepticism, which resonates across philosophy, art, and literature. Painting negotiates skeptical doubt through an increasing emphasis on the act of painting itself, the romantic vision of “the acknowledgement of the endless presence of the self” ( World Viewed ). Photography, by contrast, takes the reverse approach, mechanically “overcoming” the role of the self in establishing the surety of the world—not defeating but escaping the terms of painting altogether. 2. Classical film theory often proceeds by way of a deduction: if film is twentyfour still photographs per second, then the thing to do is to ask what photography does; photography, it turns out, involves a relation to reality; hence film is about reality. Cavell rejects such views as making a fetish of
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technology, arguing that the answer to the question “What is film?” cannot be determined simply by thinking about the technical means by which images are generated. This argument can be hard to see. When he writes, for example, “A photograph does not present us with ‘likenesses’ of things; it presents us, we want to say, with the things themselves” ( World Viewed ), it seems to be a straightforward claim about photography—and one that is obviously false. But the “we want to say” is crucial, not a rhetorical affectation but a central piece of method. Cavell is making an argument not about what photography, as a technology, is or does but about what we, as ordinary viewers of photographs, think and say about photography. This is the data on which he erects his entire argument. What’s at issue here is Cavell’s commitment to a philosophical approach known as “ordinary language philosophy.” Associated with J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein, it holds that many philosophical puzzles arise because philosophers have removed language from its everyday contexts and uses. Paying attention, as Austin put it, to “what we should say when, and so why and what we should mean by it,” provides the tools by which philosophical “field work” can be done (Austin , ; see also Cavell, Must We Mean –). This does not mean that solutions come readymade in language. When Cavell says that “we want to say” that photographs present us with “the things themselves,” he offers not an end so much as a beginning. It’s true that the position cannot be upheld, but it matters that we are tempted by it (as, for instance, when in looking at a photograph of the Eiffel Tower I say that I see the Eiffel Tower, not a representation of it). Part of his goal, Cavell says, is to get us, his readers, to recognize how “mysterious” photographs are by seeing how difficult it is to talk about them; their familiarity shouldn’t mask their essential strangeness. 3. Criticism occupies a strikingly central place in Cavell’s understanding of what theory consists in: “It is arguable that the only instruments that could provide data for a theory of film are the procedures of criticism” ( World Viewed ). Indeed, Cavell acknowledges that the appeal of the realist tradition of classical film theory, and the reason he begins with its terms, is the quality of the criticism it produced ( World Viewed ). But Cavell doesn’t follow models of criticism usually found in film studies, whether that’s ideological analysis, reading larger social and political meaning off the surface of films, or doing close readings on structuralist or neo-formalist terms. Instead, for him criticism involves finding words with which to account for his own experience of movies; criticism is empty, he argues, without this orientation. Pursuits of Happiness thus begins with a declaration that each chapter “contains an account of my experience of a film made in Hollywood between and ” (). And the preface to The World Viewed speaks of technical details as mattering only “so far as they were relevant
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to the experience of particular films” (xxi), and of his attempts to find “some words I could believe in to account for my experience of film” (xxiii). What emerges is not another essentialist account of cinema but a way of thinking about cinema that is responsive to changes in technology, techniques, and the social forms of movie-going. As Cavell repeats over and over again, it is impossible to tell in advance what will count as a salient feature of the medium. It is only the production of films, the viewing of them, and the criticism, whether written in print or spoken in conversations, that can tell us what cinema is. Cavell’s emphasis on criticism brings the openness and mutability of experience, of movie-going in general and of individual films, into the orbit of problems of film theory. Cavell is certainly aware of, and at times anxious about, the fact that there is nothing to ground his arguments other than the contingency of his experiences and the conclusions he draws from them. “I hope I am not alone,” he worries in the midst of a discussion of character actors (World Viewed ); else where, he wonders if he has “the right to speak” about contemporary trends in films (). But, for Cavell, to speak for his own experience is necessarily to make a claim that others have a similar kind of experience, that they will recognize themselves in his words. As he puts it, “The alternative to speaking for myself representatively (for someone else’s consent) is not: speaking for myself pri vately. The alternative is having nothing to say, being voiceless, not even mute” (Claim ). In speaking of his own experience, Cavell is thereby speaking for us as well, assuming that the relations he had (or has) to movies are shared. We are invited, as readers, to go to the movies with him. Based on his experience, Cavell defines cinema as a “succession of automatic world projections” ( World Viewed ). Three of the terms are relatively straightforward. “Succession” and “projection” cover the basic features of movement of things onscreen and the continuity of the image. “World” is the intuitive idea, and marks an explicit difference from a tradition of realist theory. Where Bazin says “the photographic image is the object itself” ( ), a relation between a mechanical apparatus and the particular objects it records, Cavell argues that “what is manufactured is an image of the world” ( World Viewed ). Not this or that individual thing, but all the things that together comprise a world, that shape our experience of a film. The difficult term is “automatic”—and the cognate “automatism.” Mostly, Cavell uses this term to describe what happens “by itself” in photographic media: presenting the world automatically, without the intervention of human agency. “Reproducing the world is the only thing film does automatically” (World Viewed ). But, as The World Viewed develops, new and more expansive genealogies of the term come into play. Automatism is cited as a feature of both surrealist and Abstract Expressionist painting; it is also, Cavell suggests, related
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to an ethical desire for autonomy ( –). At its broadest, “automatism” comes to describe any part of a film that is experienced as “happening of itself”: something that carries with it meanings shared by filmmakers and viewers alike (). It’s not just photography that is automatic but “artistic discoveries of form and genre and type and technique” ( ). Film noir is an automatism, as we readily recognize its characters and visual style; so is Humphrey Bogart, who brings a set of tendencies, behaviors, and expectation to every role he inhabits. So, too, are things like shot/reverse-shot constructions, since their appearance allows us to recognize, without thinking, that we should be oriented around a specific character. This argument is breathtaking in its scope, uniting under one label a range of radically disparate features of cinema. Cavell recognizes that each feature has its own history and its own specific meanings—at times, he describes each as its own “medium” (World Viewed )—but he brings them together because of the way we experience them; types, forms, and genres are as natural to cinema as photography is. Cavell’s insight is that this idea of automatism explains how films work: plots progress and characters develop without the need for full psychological explanations simply because we expect certain actions, meanings, and implications from the types, genres, and conventions being used. We require no explanation that Jimmy Stewart behaves in a certain way other than the fact that he is Jimmy Stewart. That’s part of the “natural magic” of Holly wood cinema. It’s also the source of its flexibility: that a type or star functions as an automatism does not mean that it, he, or she is set in stone; filmmakers innovate within a tradition by producing variations on automatisms, playing with expectations they generate (as is done, for example, with Stewart in films like The Naked Spur [] and Vertigo). When Cavell spends several chapters uncovering precursors to cinematic types in Charles Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life , it is to find “stores of cinematic obsession” ( ) that move beyond their original contexts. Thus, the Dandy is not an aristocratic character but a way of being in the world, a “hidden fire” that heroes from Alan Ladd in Shane () to Peter Fonda in Easy Rider () adapt to their own ends ( –). The Lady from Shanghai
Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai () offers a lesson on how automatisms work. For example, Rita Hayworth’s preexisting status as a pin-up girl, a star whose picture was produced in an alluring pose for mass consumption, is repeatedly evoked. One shot, taken from above, shows her lying full-length on the deck of a yacht, bathed in luminous light, her glamour simply called into being, part of the way she is constructed as an object of desire. A slightly later scene satirizes this function, as Hayworth wears a sailor’s costume, jauntily taking the wheel while a fake advertising jingle plays on the radio: she is an image, as
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much a commodity as the product being hawked. Other automatisms are also present. The film employs an array of recognizable types: a rugged sailor with a violent past; a woman in need of saving; a shrewd lawyer whose brains make up for physical frailty; a duplicitous private detective; even a Shakespearean fool. Genres emerge with similar rapidity: an adventure yarn, doubling as a tour of exotic sights; a melodrama of romantic entanglements; a courtroom drama; and a crime thriller. These automatisms are part of the organizing logic of the film. Once we recognize Bannister (Everett Sloane) as a crooked lawyer, we know what he is doing; once we see his wife Elsa (Hayworth) as a femme fatale, her actions no longer need explanation. Psychological interiority is not a necessary postulate for understanding why things happen as they do. Welles goes one step further. The Lady from Shanghai shows that, however natural automatisms feel, they are only conventions. Types and genres are not dispersed by the film to reveal, underlying them, some essential and defining quality. Each pattern opens only onto other patterns, other automatisms: Michael O’Hara (Welles) is not just a rugged sailor or hero but also a fool; Elsa is not just a woman in distress but also the organizer of the events. Neither of them is any one thing but all of their roles together: nothing is behind convention, no automatism proves viable on its own. The film teaches us to recognize the shaky ground on which we stand. There are two further lessons about automatisms here. One has to do with modernism. Where Cavell argues that a successful use of automatisms is a way of being in a tradition (World Viewed ), Welles holds the range of automatisms up to scrutiny to determine which still hold force. While this suggests a strategy of disillusionment, The Lady from Shanghai never wholly enters “the modernist predicament” ( ) in which conviction in the viability of a technique or device must be secured at each moment. We may be aware that automatisms are being used but the absorptive pleasure of the film is never lost. Welles’s game with realism, his virtuosity with forms, lies in maintaining the power of automatisms even as we recognize their contingent status. Even if they are no longer secure, the automatisms still work. This is the tension in which Cavell is interested. One of his most impassioned arguments is that cinema’s reflexivity predates its modernism, taking a more subtle and supple form (see World Viewed ). Take his discussion of the “walls of Jericho” in It Happened One Night (), where the blanket hung by Clark Gable between his bed and Claudette Colbert’s, “blocking a literal view of the figure, but receiving impressions from it, and activating our imagination of that real figure as we watch in the dark . . . [works] as a movie screen works” ( Pursuits ). Or the home movie placed within the narrative of Adam’s Rib (), which works with the idea of the surface of the screen and the fundamental fact of projection: a fantasy of marriage appears not just as a fact of the world but in the guise of cinema ( –). These devices are within the world
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of the film, never breaking its absorption while also being fully about the fact that we are watching a film. A second lesson has to do with photography. A dance between reality and illusion runs throughout The Lady from Shanghai, from the scene where Michael and Elsa embrace in an aquarium and the tanks behind them resemble a film strip to the final (and much celebrated) mirror sequence in which reality becomes indistinguishable from illusion. These are virtuosic moments of cinematic display that call on film’s photographic power even while suggesting its inadequacy, that photography does not grant us privileged access to reality. In a sense, while Welles never explicitly questions photography in terms of its mechanical aspect, he suggests that it has no deeper grounding than any other automatism in the film. This is the key ambiguity surrounding the automatism of photography in The World Viewed. Generally, Cavell treats film’s relation to reality as constitutive of its identity as a medium, and goes so far as to say that while a celluloid film can succeed as art without engaging with its photographic base, “movies cannot so be made” (World Viewed –). Thus, “cartoons are not movies” () because they evade the significance of the relation to reality that makes the movies what they are (on animation and automatism see Pierson). Yet he also puts forward an expansive model of automatisms—which he calls “perverse” at one point—that suggests something entirely different, that photography is merely
In the hall of mirrors, reality is indistinguishable from illusion. Rita Hayworth and Everett Sloane in The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles, Columbia, ). Digital frame enlargement. FIGURE 14.1
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one automatism among many, and not even a privileged one. Cavell connects this view to the rise of modernism in cinema: when what was taken for granted loses its binding force, not even “photographed reality” is spared such questioning. Holy Motors
The openness of automatism is part of what has led to renewed interest in Cavell’s work in an age where celluloid is increasingly rare, and digital technologies of image production and manipulation overwhelming present (see Krauss; Rodowick, Virtual Life). Cavell’s relevance in this context is built into the structure of his engagement with modernism. For much of film history, photography was its central automatism, seemingly as essential as possible. The rise of new kinds of films in the s, however, leads him to suggest that it was never more than a convention, its importance appearing as necessary but in reality historically contingent ( World Viewed ; on convention, see Claim –, esp. ). This recognition is what not only enables Cavell’s theory to survive the emergence of digital media, a post-photographic condition, but gives it explanatory force in these new circumstances. We don’t leave cinema, or its appeals, despite changes around them, even as those appeals are transformed. Again, this comes down to criticism. For Cavell, the various factors that can produce changes—historical events, technological innovations—become meaningful only through the achievements of individual films. Although there is no shortage of recent films that make explicit, thematize, and even allegorize the shift from analog to digital technologies, there are fewer that join these allegories to reflections on the legacy of cinematic traditions, conventions, and automatisms to look at how new technologies of image production and manipulation fit within, and change or sustain, other cinematic appeals. Fewer still do so with such depth, care, and complexity as Leos Carax’s Holy Motors (). The narrative of the film is at once straightforward and baroque. It follows Oscar (Denis Lavant), an actor of sorts who goes through a range of “appointments” over the course of the day, driven in a white limousine by Céline (Édith Scob). Each appointment requires that he inhabit a particular character and engage in a scene taking place in the world. The scenarios get increasingly bizarre: from a banker at the beginning of the day, he becomes an elderly woman begging on the streets, an actor in a motion-capture suit, a violent tramp emerging from the sewers, a father disappointed in his daughter, an assassin (twice), a dying uncle, an ex-lover, and finally the father of a family made up of chimpanzees. After each scene, Oscar returns to the limousine to change into his next role.
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A degree of reflexivity thus runs throughout Holy Motors, since it is to a large extent a reflection on the relation between actor and character. Part of this is the way that we pay heightened attention to performance, to the way Oscar manipulates his body into various roles (and thus to Levant’s ability to do the same). In this, Carax seems to follow Cavell’s insistence that the condition of acting in cinema is such that the actor does not wholly disappear into the character: “The screen performer is essentially not an actor at all; he is the subject of a study, and a study not his own” (World Viewed ). Carax’s attention to the actor’s craft is given a contrast in the motion-capture scene, where the exertions of Oscar and a woman are rendered seamlessly onto a giant screen as an encounter between bizarre dragon-like creatures. Technological changes, the film suggests, affect not only the referential capacities of images but performance as well. Toward the middle of the film, an unnamed man, seemingly in a position of power, tells Oscar that his work lacks conviction; an unspecified audience is disappointed. Oscar notes that it’s hard to perform for small digital cameras (like those on which Holy Motors itself was shot): they do not allow for the kind of satisfaction in performance as did older, larger cameras. Carax’s concern over a lost audience is not a sociological lament. Holy Motors stages an extended and virtuosic exploration of the minimum conditions necessary for the creation of an immersive fictional narrative world, stripping away seemingly necessary features of cinema. The necessity of each automatism for the creation of a successful film is tested and rejected. It’s partly the way we are reminded of the presence of Oscar behind each character, so that the ontological boundary between actor and character seems porous but is firm: Oscar is killed twice while in character, for example, each time returning unharmed to the limousine to prepare his next role. In his dying-man scene, we are further astonished to realize that other characters may also be actors like him: the “niece” is performing on an appointment, too. Carax’s great achievement is that despite what we know, what we cannot help but know, each time a scene begins we are drawn into it. Even when Oscar ends the day by going to a suburban home with “his” wife and daughters and they turn out to be chimpanzees—even when, in the film’s final shot, all the limos are left alone for the night and proceed to have a “conversation”—we remain absorbed in and by this world. Holy Motors shows that our relation to the world of a film can survive the disappearance of the conditions that seemed to make it possible, the drama of what happens to reality when it is filmed, screened, and projected. This does not come without a cost. The film opens with a man, played by Carax himself, waking up in bed and opening a door that leads into a packed movie theater: it’s a scene not least about the natural conditions of movies, a way of experiencing cinema that is already lost. In its absence, Carax mobilizes a range of cinematic automatisms: familiar genres, the byplay between actor and character,
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Even though we focus on the actor, we can’t help but believe in the role. Denis Lavant in Holy Motors (Leos Carax, Pierre Grise/Théo, ). Digital frame enlargement. FIGURE 14.2
recognizable stylistic devices, and the deployment of types. A history of obsolete cinematic form is also evoked as automatisms. There is an entr’acte, an extraordinary sequence in a church where Oscar plays an accordion with a group of musicians, itself introduced by a clip of a bird from the photographic experiments of Etienne-Jules Marey: both the entr’acte and the clip are residual automatisms, brought into this film to evoke a history. Actors and characters likewise appear from elsewhere: Oscar’s tramp is from a short film Carax made as part of an omnibus collection, while Eva Mendes, Kylie Minogue, and Michel Piccoli bring their own star personas into the film. Most of all there is Scob in the role of Céline: famous for her role in Georges Franju’s Eyes without a Face (), in Carax’s final scene she dons her familiar mask—aquamarine now instead of white—and exits, either into or out of film history. These features compensate for the ease of absorption in “traditional” forms of cinema that is now gone (on compensation see Pursuits ff). Holy Motors is a film made within what Cavell describes as the modernist condition: when “an art has lost its natural relation to its history [and] an artist . . . is compelled to find unheard-of structures that define themselves and their history against one another” ( World Viewed ). Cavell’s central gamble in The World Viewed is that modernism, understood this way, is not merely a passing feature but the best way to understand cinema’s ongoing changes and developments. Holy Motors suggests that such an account retains its power in the digital age. The film does this not through mere reflexivity but by creating scenarios that give significance to possibilities of the medium even as we learn about its (new) conditions. In Pursuits of Happiness, Cavell uses the metaphor of night
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and day to describe the complementary parts of a relationship: the explicitness of conversation and the mystery of desire. Discussing The Lady Eve (), he describes Jean’s lesson to Charles, that of telling her entire (if fabricated) sexual past, as a threat: “I’ll turn the night into an endless day for you” ( ). The endless day is a danger for cinema, too, one represented for Cavell by any response to a crisis in cinema that seeks to render explicit all of its illusions. Against this threat, Holy Motors brings illusions into daylight, showing them to be only con ventions, yet still keeps alive the night, the mystery of cinema. It returns us to the natural condition of being in wonder at the kind of thing movies are, the pleasures they afford, and the power of their appeals.
