HOW MOVIES THINK: CAVELL ON FILM AS A MEDIUM OF ART

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.

oriented and left unconnected to his more general remarks about film as photographic art. 5 One important point to begin with is that Cavell's thought about movies is not directly concerned with all things that are rightly called movies: not with Shrek, The Little Mermaid, or otherwise digitally produced or drawn movies, and not so much with movies where special effects, matte paintings, chromakey composition, and the like are predominant features of the way images are presented; that is, not with movies as spectacle. Of course the borderlines here are very rough, with lots of overlaps; nowadays, almost all photographically produced commercial movies incorporate some special effects, matte paintings, and so forth. The questions concern rather what is central to the production of the movie as a whole and how the significance of the images is achieved. Cavell's thought is concerned principally with centrally photographically based movies, that is, movies wherein the exposure of film stock 6 to light rays emanating from things and persons that are of our world is central to the significance and interest of the movie as an artistic achievement. Certain makers of photographic movies have discovered how to use moving photographically produced images as a medium of art, and it is the nature of that discovery and of those artistic achievements that are of central interest to Cavell. To say this, however, is not to say that Cavell regards film as an essentially documentary or reproductive medium; it is not to say that he favours a simple-  'Cavell on Film, Television, and Opera' , in Stanley Cavell, ed. Richard Eldridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 206-38. 6 Or more recently, the digital recording of light rays. While film stock's ways of registering light are distinctive and open to significant artistic-expressive uses, most of the points about photographic capturing of reality transfer also to at least digital image recording, though not to CGI production, which is quite another matter. It is noteworthy that, like cartoons, CGI feature films have so far been most successful when in the registers of fairy tale or fantasy. For a useful investigation of the similarities and differences (especially with regard to continuous shooting) of digital recording versus film-stock recording, see the PBS documentary Side by Side: The Science, Art, and Impact of Digital Cinema (dir. Chris Kenneally, Los Angeles: A Company Films, 2012), first aired on US television on 30 August 2013, after a première at the International Filmfestspiele Berlin, 15 February 2012. explicitly incorporates in his theory the significance of both director's decisions and symbolic meaning. 7 Bazin does argue that film (like photography) to some extent involves 'a mechanical reproduction in which man plays no part' . 8 But Bazin's point here is just to emphasize where decisions are made and how photography and film differ from painting. Unlike painting (and ignoring cropping and other darkroom editing), once the camera is aimed, the film stock chosen, and the aperture and the shutter speed are set, then the film stock receives and registers light rays reflected from its subject matter automatically, without the intervention at that point of the human hand. The film stock registers at that point what the camera has been aimed at. Film then adds to this mechanical capturing of subject matter the capturing of motion, thus solving 'the problem of movement' . 9 These two points -mechanical reproduction (subsequent to photographers' decisions) plus solving the problem of movement -then have the consequence that film 'completely satisf[ies] our appetite for illusion ' . 10 Crucially, for Bazin this is a psychological fact about our experience of film.
The psychological concern to capture or render likeness is one of the two tendencies that have given shape to all plastic art, according to Bazin. The other is the aesthetic-symbolic tendency to express the meanings of things. Once freed from the psychological 'obsession with likeness' , the plastic arts, and film in particular, were able to turn to the essentially aesthetic ambition of art: 'namely the expression of a spiritual reality wherein the symbol transcended the model' , so as to achieve 'the preservation of life by a representation of life' . 11 This latter, aesthetic aim -'the primordial function of art' -is already partly, but only partly, achieved in mummies buried along with corn and terracotta statuettes, or in cave paintings that present 'a magic identity substitute for the living animal [in order to] ensure a successful hunt' . 12 According to Bazin, 'the great artists, of course, have always been able to combine the two tendencies' 13 that give shape to all art: the psychological tendency to duplicate reality and the aesthetic tendency to represent continuing meaningful life symbolically. for the duplication of reality -an automatism that is operative, Bazin admits, only after the photographer's 'selection of the object to be photographed […] and the purpose he has in mind' -is that photography and then film are able 'to present [the object in a situation, an aspect of the world] in all its virginal purity to my attention and consequently to my love ' . 14 In presenting the object by means of 'a kind of decal or transfer' , the photographic and filmed image takes on 'the irrational power to bear away our faith' , 15 specifically the power to make visually palpable and to sustain a faith that the world continues beyond or without us as a locus of life where things mean something. This power will be effectively achieved, however, only when the photographic duplication of reality is coupled with the aesthetic-symbolicexpressive rendering of things as meaningful to human subjects. In film, according to Bazin,16 this is better accomplished stylistically by means of 'invisible montage' , which involves 'the creation of a sense or meaning not objectively contained in the images themselves but derived exclusively from their juxtaposition' , in contrast with either 'intellectual montage' or 'montage attraction' , where the meaning is only intellectually or associatively generated by the director-editor, rather than being derived from the juxtaposed images themselves, that is, by following the meanings of the things that are (4) the crime and gangster film, (5) psychological and social dramas, (6) horror or fantasy films, and (7) Westerns. 18 In each case, Bazin is struck by 'a complete harmony of image and sound' and by the effectiveness of 'analytic' or 'dramatic' editing in contrast with the expressionist-symbolist 'ambition of [associative] montage' . 19 Bazin further notes that Citizen Kane (1941) achieves a distinctly realist use of depth of focus, wherein the audience is required to scan a large, focused image and to choose where to direct its attention, thus mimicking the necessity of our scanning and focusing in ordinary viewing of the world. 20 Cavell roughly assumes all this from Bazin. Following Bazin, Cavell argues that movies screen reality; they present persons and things on film -not images of things only, that is, not what Cavell calls likenesses 23 as in realist painting -but things and persons themselves, albeit not in their direct quiddity in our space and time, but rather on film. Presentation of things on film is quite compatible with -in fact it requires -that they be presented from a point of view, with the camera placed somewhere by the director, with lighting, focus, and close-up all decided by those who are making the film rather than by the things themselves. As William Rothman and Marian Keane aptly note, Cavell's view 'is that there is an inescapable element of mechanism or automatism in the making of photographs, not that there is nothing but mechanism or automatism in their making' . 24 This view, moreover, does not require that the persons presented be other than fictional characters. 18 Ibid., 317. 19 Ibid., 319.  instead they are created by 'giving significance to specific possibilities of photographic presentation via framing, lighting, mise-en-scène, cutting, editing, and so on' (WV, 31, 32; see also WV, 145). These movies explore the deepest problems of human selfhood: for example, intimacy and its failure, heroism, the special beauty of some natural scenes and some persons, the odd beauty and visual interest of nearly anything in certain lights (what one might call the beauty of the world as a whole in its smallest details), and how people look at and respond to one another. Movies do this in and through photographic attention to the smallest nuances of look, glance, presence, and tone. For example, conveyances, fashions, gaits, stances, and faces may be 'lovingly studied' by film (WV,43). Cavell notes that some directors use the camera 'to let the world happen, to let its parts draw attention to themselves according to their natural weight' (WV, 25), listing Dreyer, Renoir, and Antonioni, among others; since The World Viewed, we can add Malick and Herzog and Mendes.
Extending this thought just slightly, we can say that some directors also use the camera to let the being of the person happen, specifically to let the star in It is important that in the moment in the movie that is stopped in this still photograph the Cary Grant character, Jerry, is taking a delighted interest in something he has just arranged that is about to happen in front of him: his estranged wife Lucy (Irene Dunne) jitterbugging with her new 'country' admirer Dan (Ralph Bellamy), a jitterbug champion. Here Jerry is taking an interest in this specific woman in this specific situation, and it shows.
Art, according to Cavell, explores in its various material media how taking an interest in one's life is possible. 'Apart from the wish for selfhood (hence the always simultaneous granting of otherness as well), I do not understand the value of art' (WV, 22), Cavell writes. To say that we wish for selfhood is to say that we often live with a sense of selfhood unachieved, in silent melancholy or quiet desperation, caught within conformities -grammars, routines, repertoires -that are not ours, not alive for us, not animations for us or of us. Yet it is possible to overcome such melancholy conformities and to 'consent to our present state as something we desire, or anyway desire more than we desire change' , 29 as, for example, the Marx Brothers do in their gloriously manic undoing of Il Trovatore in A Night at the Opera or as the remarrying pairs of the films considered in Pursuits of Happiness do. By having powers of reflection, activity, and will, we are as human persons fated to take an interest in our experience or to fail to. Photographic movies as art investigate photographically (through the photographing centrally of persons, since 1927 of speaking persons) how interest in experience may be either achieved or lost. This is why Cavell remarks that 'American film at its best participates in [the] Western cultural ambition of self-thought or self-invention. ' 30 (Other art media take up this topic of human interest in experience in their own distinctive ways: in opera, for example, 'the intervening or supervening of music into the world [is] revelatory of a realm of significance that either transcends our ordinary realm of experience or reveals it under transfiguration, ' 31 Cavell notes.) An astonishing thing about movies -certain dramatically edited narrative movies between 1930 and 1960 -is that they absorb us into their perfect attentions to their subjects and into their discoveries of significances in things without any distinctions 'between high and low audiences, and between their high and low instances, […] without having assumed the burden of seriousness' (WV,14,15). This is to say that (mostly) Hollywood movies constituted for a period of time a modern art that was not yet modernist. In them, significance was achieved as if naturally, without paroxysms of authorial self-display and in a way that was open to being readily experienced by all, free of 'modernism's perplexities of consciousness, its absolute condemnation to seriousness' (WV, 118).
When one views a photographically produced movie, then -when things go well; when 'the integrity of a given work […] make[s] out the significance of a given possibility' (WV, 142) -the plot that is forwarded through the words and photographic images is experienced as necessary, mythical. An artistically successful sequence of automatic world projections is a means, as Rothman and Keane put it, of 'magically satisfying our wish to view, unseen, the world re-created in its own image' . 32 This means that we see the world obeying its own logic, with everything -every glance, every posture, every thing presenting itself, every word -happening by immanent necessity, without me being present to the events. To be sure, this happens only when things go well. It is a criterion of art to achieve satisfyingly felt necessity in the internal relation of its compositional elements: in music, each note requiring every other; in painting, each patch of pigment requiring every other; in poetry, each word requiring every other, or at least our feeling continuously that this is so. In movies, however, since the material medium is the world itself -things and persons themselves -presented on film, this felt necessity seems to be of the whole world or at least whatever is in this filmed portion of it, as though its meaning were being presented. Again, following Rothman and Keane, 'the projected world is, we might say, the past mythically' . 33 This is, I take it, a way of saying, as Aristotle says, that in a successful dramatic presentation, events that are possible or probable are presented as necessary.
They are presented as the working out of the necessities of achieving or failing to achieve humanity's telos, where the achievement or failure happens as a result of character and in and through action in a situation. The universal -for Cavell, concrete, free human life, or achieved interest in experience, plus the kind of difference characters in actions in situations make to either achieving it or missing it-is presented in the particular, in just this sequence of human subjects in action. This is true in photographic movies, too, in virtue of their having what Cavell calls 'narration itself, whose tense is past' (WV, 26). But in film narration, unlike drama on the stage, the necessities include everything in the photographed world, and the telos that is typically in question is interest in experience, which means interest in the experience of at least some others too. Again the crucial passage about art from The World Viewed: 'Apart from the wish for selfhood (hence the always simultaneous granting of otherness as well), I do not understand the value of art. ' (WV,22) That the pursuit of this telos is presented mythically -in the past tense, and with everything a matter of necessity, at least when the movie is very good and has succeeded in establishing its particular narratively sequenced moving images as art -explains why Cavell has focused primarily on the two genres that have most occupied his attentions and on why the second is the inversion of the first.
In the comedies of remarriage considered in Pursuits of Happiness, we see, as William Rothman puts it, 'a marriage between a woman and a man that also "marries" the realities of the day and the dreams of the night, the public and the private, and city and country' . 34 In Cavell's words, this amounts to 'a new step in the creation of the human, ' 35 'as if the sexual and the social are to legitimize one 33 Ibid. 34 Rothman, 'Cavell on Film' , 212. 35 Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, 140. In the melodrama of the unknown woman, by contrast, 'a woman achieves existence (or fails to), or establishes her right to existence (or fails to), apart from (or beyond satisfaction by) marriage (of a certain kind) […] where something in her language must be as traumatic in her case as the conversation of marriage is for her comedic sisters -perhaps it will be an aria of divorce, from husband, lover, mother, or child' . 41 And so we see Stella Dallas turning away from the window at which she has witnessed her daughter's wedding from outside, walking towards us in the rain, alone, eyes shining and looking up, half-haunted, half-satisfied at being on her own and at having successfully let her daughter go, possessed of a power for interest in experience and for relationship that has shaped, for her, in her material situation, only a life apart.
In both the comedy of remarriage and the melodrama of the unknown woman, photographic narrative film's investigation of every visible nuance of the pursuit of interest in experience -including every visible manifestation of thought and feeling, and including communication by posture, glance, style, tone, and lookfocuses in particular, according to Cavell, on the specific body of the actor. In general, Cavell finds, 'the actor is the subject of the camera' . 42 The body is taken as 'a field of betrayal' 43 to the camera and thence to the viewer (and to any character in the movie who has eyes to see). The screen performer 'is the subject of study, and a study not his own' (WV, 28), where 'the only thing that really matters [is] that the subject be allowed to reveal itself' (WV,127). 'The distinction  Stanley Cavell, 'What Photography Calls Thinking' , Raritan 4 (1985): 14. between actor and character is broken up on the screen' (WV,175), so that we talk of the Humphrey Bogart movie, the Clint Eastwood movie, the Katherine Hepburn movie, the Barbara Stanwyck movie, and so on, with the sense that the same person is being studied and revealed across roles in different films. Character as type -the mythical figure of the star or, alternatively, the special presence of the character actor -is 'established by the individual and total physiognomy  (The Sopranos, 1999-2007The Wire, 2002-8;Friday Night Lights, 2006-11;Breaking Bad, 2008-13) 3. The camera, director, and writer dwell on the protagonist Sonja's distinctive spirit or eros, shown first in her resistance to convention in the names of nature and embodied activity, as in throwing the Friday fish dinner into the river, dancing, and whistling. Sonja's difficulty is that she expects and demands that society and her energy inform and express one another. As a child, she had had an instinctive faith that this would be so, centring on the life of her family. (Early on, her mother, a teacher of religion, is shown teaching, while pregnant with Sonja, the story of Jesus throwing the money-changers out of the temple. Later a five-year old Sonja is shown beaming with pride as her father reads the Scripture lesson during a worship service.) As a child, her energy is cathected to routine and to the way things are done. She is unable to participate in making fun of a teacher, and she invariably prepares her lessons well and gives the right answers. Notably, however, she also likes to dance to rock-and-roll. 8. As this research develops, Sonja is forced to file lawsuits for the release of documents. Even without a lawyer or any support from the town, she wins each case. As the townspeople become increasingly aware of her work, she repeatedly receives telephone threats, her cat is murdered and nailed to her front door, her apartment and that of her parents are firebombed, and she is beaten by thugs.
9. The movie focuses closely on the question of how, in such circumstances, anyone can go on at all, or whether anyone should continue with such a project. In a crucial scene, Sonja looks at a photograph of Father Schulzea priest who had denounced Nazi policies and, contrary to law, preached in the camps, prior to his execution. As she holds the photograph, its glass cracked from the bombing, she thinks, in a past-tense voice-over that has loves Martin and he loves her, Martin nonetheless shows himself unable to stand with her in her integrity. He fails to find happiness in her adventure, but instead leaves for Munich, settling for a mere ordinariness rather than adventure and a (potentially) redeemed ordinariness.
11. The movie ends, shockingly, with Sonja left outside the conventionalized social sphere, all but alone with her demands, intelligence, and ego. When her book is at last published, it receives very favourable reviews in leading German newspapers outside her hometown. She is then awarded honorary doctorates from Vienna, Stockholm, and Paris. At last, the townspeople once again begin to regard her as their 'dear Sonja' . Her book appears in the shop window of the pharmacist who had earlier refused to sell her eardrops for her daughter. The town officials commission a bust of her, by a sculptor who has already done Steffi Graf and Princess Stephanie, to be placed in the town hall. At the unveiling ceremony, however, Sonja abruptly screams no, she will not let them do this to her, not participate in their shit.
She slaps her mother, grabs her younger daughter, and runs desperately to the 'tree of life' -a shrine tree on the top of a hill outside town.
Nearly the last words of Cavell's The World Viewed are: 'The knowledge of the self as it is always takes place in the betrayal of the self as it was. That is the form of self-revelation until the self is wholly won. Until then, until there is a world in which each can be won, our loyalty to ourselves is in doubt, and our loyalty to others is in partialness. ' (WV, 160) The Nasty Girl tracks, I would say, the immanent logic of such a world -our world -, as Sonja finds herself forced by the world to betray her past self and its achievements -specifically, to stand on her apartness, repudiating an acceptance by others that strikes her as all too contrived. She knows that this is not -not yet -a world for her powers, a world in which she can be interested in her own experience, yet she is unable to give up the demand that this should be so, and she persists in recognizing and claiming her powers, in ways we follow and honour visually, despite continuing hypocrisies and conflicts.
She is, if not quite an unknown woman, at least a woman outside, but in possession of human powers and capacities for interest that this movie investigates, in tracking their partial exercise and frustration, so that this movie achieves a full narrative photographic presentation of a subject in the world.
That a movie, that this movie, does this, in ways that compel continuous conviction in its words and images and in their development, from moment to moment to moment, shows, perhaps, that an aspiration to fullness of selfhood, interest in experience, and lived freedom are not quite yet dead for us, not quite as empty as all that, and not quite unfilmable, even if not wholly and How Movies Think: Cavell on Film as a Medium of Art