How Movies Think: Cavell on Film as a Medium of Art

• Main Author: Richard Eldridge
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Helsinki University Press 2014-05-01
• Series: Estetika
• Online Access: https://estetikajournal.org/articles/113

Stanley Cavell’s writing about movies, from the more theoretical and general 'The World Viewed' (1971) to the later works on specific genres ('Pursuits of Happiness, Contesting Tears'), has a unifying theme: some movies as (successful) art investigate conditions of accomplished selfhood and interest in experience in medium-specific ways. This claim is explained and defended by explicating the details of the medium-specificity of the moving photographic image (and its history of uses) and by focusing on Michael Verhoeven’s film 'The Nasty Girl' (1990). Though the very ideas of accomplished selfhood and interest in experience naturally prompt some suspicion in a commercialized, pluralistic society, our responses to some movies show that we continue to aspire to a life that embodies them.