The Japanese Society for Aesthetics

Aesthetics No.19 (2015): 65-77

The Legitimization of Movies:
Stanley Cavell on the Classical Hollywood Cinema
KIHARA Keisho

The Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University, Tokyo

Introduction
For American philosopher Stanley Cavell (1926- ), when it comes to considering “reflections
on the ontology of film,” he has always looked to the classical Hollywood cinema from 1930 to1940 as his subject of analysis. This is evident in all of his major publications; The World Viewed(1971), Pursuits of Happiness (1981), and Contesting Tears (1996), which deal with the classical
Hollywood cinema from the period. Although Cavell has done some analysis of French films(Renoir, Truffaut, Godard et al.), he has continually discussed them in relation to Hollywood.
Here we can find some unity in Cavell’s writings, as Stephen Mulhall argues Cavell’s work on
cinema is divided into two parts, that is analyses of specific films, and examinations of themedium of cinema itself. According to Mulhall, Cavell’s work nevertheless possesses a real unity.
“[I]n part, this is because he finds that the films he studies themselves study their relation totheir medium and its audience, but it is also because his work focusses upon precisely the same
issue at both levels—that of scepticism” (Mulhall 223). The positions of The World Viewed as a“theoretical base” which reflects on the nature of cinema in fundamental ways, and Pursuits ofHappiness and Contesting Tears as texts on “genre studies” consisting of analyses of individual
films, seem to be generally accepted. However, does Cavell’s philosophy of film surely constitutea real unity of theoretical base and practical criticism?
The aim of this paper is to discuss the decisive change in Cavell’s attitude towards theclassical Hollywood cinema between The World Viewed and Pursuits of Happiness. The sign ofthe coming change can be seen in the latter half of the chronologically ordered The World Viewed,
or more precisely, from his analysis of the films known as New Hollywood and Nouvelle Vague.
In his analysis of these “modern cinemas” he acquired a new method and then applied thismethod to the classical Hollywood cinema retroactively in his later books. Although Cavell
previously considered that the avoidance of modernism was what characterized the classical
Hollywood cinema despite it being a product of modernity, he changed to the position of
acknowledging that cinema is, and always has been, a condition of modernism along with theother arts. John Mullarkey has already pointed out the amendment of Cavell’s position itself(Mullarkey 120), but we need to investigate its significance in more detail. For it is a decisive
conversion for Cavell’s study of film. More importantly, in acknowledging that cinema is acondition of modernism, he thought that it could be legitimized as art. This conversion, on the
one hand, encouraged development of not only his film philosophy but also academic film
studies as a discipline. On the other hand, he also abandoned his assumption that cinema is aworthwhile art form for analysing mass culture. In the following, firstly, I will investigate Cavell’s

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earlier film philosophy regarding his analysis of classical Hollywood films. Secondly, I will
discuss the period of modern cinema in The World Viewed. And finally, I will review Cavell’slater period, that is, his analysis of classical Hollywood films as modernism, especially concerning
the analysis of The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940) in Pursuits of Happiness. [1]

1. The Classical Hollywood Cinema as Mass Culture
One of the most significant concepts in Cavell’s film philosophy is arguably that ofautomatism. First of all, it indicates the mechanical quality of cinema that originates from thecamera; yet, at the same time it also means “convention” which often signifies the concept of“genre” typical to Hollywood cinema. Although the concept is often unclear, the two meanings
are basically regarded as the underlying principles of automatism. However, it is only in The
World Viewed that we can see Cavell use the term automatism quite frequently. The fact that it
rarely appears in his later books on film clearly indicates his change in approach to cinema.
Therefore, to begin with, we need an investigation of the content of The World Viewed in which
he analyses the classical Hollywood cinema in terms of this concept of automatism. [2]As previously stated, Cavell consistently reflects on the classical Hollywood cinema in his
books on film, and the underlying theme of The World Viewed is that of how we should
understand cinema as mass culture. In other words, how the classical Hollywood cinema could
have avoided modernism? For Cavell, modernism is a condition that means each medium is
conscious of its own characteristics. Despite the fact that other arts evolved into a state ofmodernism in twentieth century, cinema, as he argued in The World Viewed, remained
traditional without questioning the nature of its own medium, thus continuing as popular culture.
Yet if art includes cinema, the concept of art must be transformed, or as Cavell states, “[i]f film
is seriously to be thought of as an art at all, then it needs to be explained how it can have avoided
the fate of modernism” (WV 14). In addition to this, Cavell raised the essential question of why
film undoubtedly has artistic value despite that it might not be considered as art. Or that is tosay, why are films so interesting? Moreover, why is it that not only film masterpieces but also
“ordinary films” are worthy of academic investigation? It is exactly this mysterious mode ofcinema that has intrigued Cavell and he states in chapter one of The World Viewed:[T]he more we learn (from the Hollywood memoirs of Ben Hecht, say) of the corruptions
and stupidities in the industry that formed to produce those objects, the more we are likely
to wonder how the films we care about can ever have been made. This is not a problem if
the only films you care about are carefully chosen masterpieces: few regimes are so
perfectly terrible and efficient that they prevent every drop of originality from leaking
through their clutches. But if one’s range of care is wider, then how is one to explain theeffect of those ordinary instances, which seem just to have been made for the industry to
make? What is the power of film that it could survive (even profit artistically from) somuch neglect and ignorant contempt by those in power over it? What is film? (WV 15, myemphasis)

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From the above we can see that cinema has become a critical philosophical problem for Cavell
due to the fact that not only are there masterpieces that align with the other arts, but a numberof “ordinary instances” that are just as valuable. We might assume that Cavell was sympathetic
to the idea of film as a “culture industry” which Adorno and Horkheimer despised in The
Dialectic of Enlightenment; however, he could not help but concede the artistic value of “theproducts” coming out of the studio system. The critical question of Cavell’s “What is film?” uses
André Bazin’s argument of the ontology of the photographic image as his point of departure in
The World Viewed, considering the characteristics of cinema that make it different from otherarts such as the mechanical quality, or automatism, as Cavell puts it (WV 16-25).
In addition, Cavell also raised the question of how did cinema acquire artistic qualities soeasily, and he suggests this was due to the mechanical property of the medium. He cited JamesAgee, who for Cavell was the most distinguished critic that properly understood the automatic
nature of cinema. In The World Viewed, Cavell referred to Agee’s criticism and praised “[h]is gift
for finding and describing something to like, in no matter of what yards of junk” (WV 7, author’s
emphasis). He later acknowledged Agee again bearing in mind the power of the camera; “theobjects it manufactures have for us the same natural interest, of fascination, or boredom, or
nothing, or poignance, terror, as the world itself” (WV 104). It is no coincidence that Agee wasreferred to above in the chapter on automatism with Cavell arguing that Agee’s criticism is notjust outstanding, but also contains a full understanding of the automatic nature of cinema.
The World Viewed might be sometimes considered as abstract or too theoretical, and thatit lacks a close analysis of individual films due to the argument being centred on the mechanicalquality of cinema. However, according to Cavell, unlike other arts, cinema cannot be understoodby analysing individual films. Following Cavell’s argument, we must grasp it as a kind of mass,
because, as he states, “[t]he impact of movies is too massive, too out of proportion with theindividual worth of ordinary movies” (WV 154, my emphasis). In chapter one of The World
Viewed, for instance, Cavell enumerates monotonously about thirty classical Hollywood films
that he watched when he was younger (WV 10). Yet this does not merely present his nostalgia forhis youth or give credit to his cinephiliac knowledge. This style of writing is Cavell’s uniquerhetoric that clearly shows that classical Hollywood films must be recognized as not individual
films but as a whole unity. [3] Thus Cavell’s argument inevitably led to genre theory.
Cavell considered the concept of automatism to contain also the concept of genre, the studiosystem and tradition of classical Hollywood. He considered this mass-produced system equallyas important:[T]he familiar historical fact that there are movie cycles, taken by certain movie theorists asin itself a mark of unscrupulous commercialism, is a possibility internal to the medium; one
could even say, it is the best emblem of the fact that a medium had been created. For a cycle
is a genre (prison movies, Civil War movies, horror movies, etc.); and a genre is a medium.
(WV 36)
The fact that Hollywood made not one masterpiece but equivalent works in a certain period
regularly means that the cycle or genre determined its own significance of existence. Cavell

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argues that it is our faith in automatism (of genre) that the classical Hollywood cinema is basedon.
It is likely that there was little room for the views Cavell held toward cinema within the academic field of film studies in the early seventies. Mainstream film studies were caught up with thecriticism of bourgeois ideology built into cinematic mechanism such as “apparatus theory” (JeanLouis Baudry, Jean-Louis Comolli) and textual analysis of films such as John Ford’s Young Mr.
Lincoln by the editors of Cahiers du Cinéma. Therefore, it is not surprising that Cavell—who
argued affirmatively for the convention of the classical Hollywood cinema—received little
attention in those days. Rosalind Krauss, for instance, criticized The World Viewed severely
because it exclusively focused on classical Hollywood films so that avant-garde films, that did not
put emphasis on convention, were not taken into consideration (“Dark Glasses and Bifocals”). [4]However, Robert Warshow, one of the most acclaimed critics in the United States,
contributed to Cavell’s argument and went against the trend of the times. Although Cavell did
not clearly refer to Warshow in The World Viewed, in the epilogue to the 2001 edition of
Warshow’s posthumous book The Immediate Experience (1962), Cavell wrote about the
influence Warshow had on him and his way of viewing popular culture (Warshow 289-300).
Warshow insisted that both the sociological critic such as Siegfried Kracauer and the aesthetic
critics such as Rudolf Arnheim or Sergei Eisenstein were so far incompetent as an approach tocinema and sought a new methodology of criticism. Admittedly he had an affinity for theaesthetic critic because they dealt with individual films straightforwardly, that is, they needed“immediate experience” of works. However, on the decisive difference of his stance he stated:
The aesthetic critic […] may be perfectly willing to acknowledge his relation to the object—but only after he has transformed the object. For what he seeks in the films is almost always
something that he can recognize as “legitimate” to the world art forms—which is to say,analogous to the effects of other art forms on their highest levels. (Warshow xl, myemphasis)
Although the aesthetic critic understands films as art, they fundamentally change the nature offilms. Instead, Warshow insisted that we must understand films as not art but as film itself, or
following his expression, as “the bastard child of art” (Warshow xli). It is a similar notion to what
Cavell called “the value of illicitness” which he proposed in The World Viewed (WV 11). [5]2. End of the Classical Hollywood Cinema and “Creation of a Medium”
In The World Viewed, the understanding that the classical Hollywood cinema had avoided
modernism was a precondition for considering the cinema’s unique nature that threatens the
traditional concept of art. In the enlarged edition of The World Viewed published in 1979,
however, Cavell changed the precondition fundamentally:
I am prepared to modify my claims about film’s modernism by saying either that movies
from their beginning have existed in a state of modernism, from the beginning have had to

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achieve their power by deliberate investigations of the power of their medium; or else thatmovies from their beginning have existed in two states, one modern, one traditional,
sometimes running parallel to and at varying distances from one another, somethingcrossing, sometimes interweaving; or else that the concept of modernism has no clear
application to the art of film. My feeling is that none of these modifications need weaken
my insistence on film as the last traditional art, but on the contrary that each would be away of explaining that insistence. (WV 219, my emphasis)
As this quote clearly indicates, Cavell radically changed his attitude towards the classical
Hollywood cinema, that is, from the understanding that it had avoided modernism to theviewpoint that modernism intervened in it, or more precisely, that we should deal with theclassical Hollywood cinema as modernism. In his context, “traditional art” means art that has apotential for shifting the modernistic state. While he emphasized the particularity of cinema insaying it is the last traditional art, at any rate, he qualified cinema as art. In the first edition of
the book, Cavell said with a conditional clause, “if it is art, it is the one live traditional art, theone that can take its tradition for granted” (WV 15, my emphasis). As the quote above showed,
however, he changed his opinion and insisted that film has always been art.
By this conversion, Cavell came to consider that great classical Hollywood films were notworks that follow a tradition (automatism) but “those films that most clearly and most deeply
discover the power of the medium itself,” that is, “those that give complete significance to thepossibilities and necessities of its physical basis” (WV 104). Here the critics are required to
discover and establish “a new medium” or “a new automatism” in analysing the individual films
and the value of film was no longer assured automatically. Instead, we need deliberate
investigations of the medium, in other words, our voluntary participation in making meaning offilms.
Why, then, did Cavell change his opinion of the classical Hollywood cinema so radically? In
facing the historical fact of the decline of the studio system—which had supported the classical
Hollywood cinema for years—Cavell broadened his perspective by seeking new methods forevaluating modern cinema appropriately. We can understand his change as a result of applying
new perspectives and knowledge to the classical Hollywood cinema retroactively. This new
methodology stemmed from the concept of “creation of a medium.”
Because I have argued the concept at length elsewhere (“‘Automatism’ and ‘Creation of a
Medium’”), here I will only briefly confirm the main thesis. Creation of a medium is, first andforemost, a critical succession of “medium specificity” which is an idea unique to modernism.
For Cavell, although modernism in art is almost the same as Greenbergian reductive thought(which puts emphasis on the physicality of each medium) it was the crucial problem of how did
we get rid of the sense of stagnation of “medium specificity,” and he was going to overcome thisby using the concept of “creation of a medium.” That is to say, he did not deal with the modernism
of art as the argument of medium specificity which determines the nature of the medium
according to each material basis in advance, but as a process which the filmmakers or the critics
discover and create new possibilities of the medium each time. [6]The essential point is that this concept was introduced for understanding modern cinema

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after the classical Hollywood cinema had gradually declined. For Cavell, modern cinema
undoubtedly embodied modernism in cinema that did not follow traditions but renewed them.
Of course it is true that in a state of modernism that changed rapidly, we cannot argue cinema
as a whole as before. Each film struggles to establish their distinctive originality. Thus, Cavell
analysed “auteurist” individual films such as those from the directors Godard, Truffaut, Resnais
and Antonioni, and investigated how they created (or failed to create) a new medium.
For example, in chapter eighteen of The World Viewed entitled “Assertions in Techniques,”
Cavell discussed cinematic devices such as slow motion and freeze frame, and he pointed out
how great films realized the potential of such devices by noting specific scenes. Above all, his
analysis of the Nouvelle Vague film that is Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1962), the longest analysis ofindividual films in the book, is very important in that he paid particular attention to a scene
which used freeze frame, a privileged device that invokes and reveals photography (photogram)as the material basis of film. Furthermore, not only that scene, he expanded the analysis toinclude an interpretation of the whole narrative over “community” which formed the characters.
As I will argue in the next section, it is the very same method of criticism that Cavell practiced in
Pursuits of Happiness. He amplifies the significant details of films that reveal the possibilities ofthe medium on the analysis of the whole narrative. Therefore, if we want to find the connection
between The World Viewed and Pursuits of Happiness, we need not point out the fact that bothbooks analysed classical Hollywood films (Rothman 211-12). Rather, in terms of themethodology used in the analysis of individual films, we should emphasize the connection
between the analysis of the Nouvelle Vague films and the films discussed in Pursuits ofHappiness. That is, Pursuits of Happiness is an attempt to prove that classical Hollywood films
can be analysed by the same methods as the Nouvelle Vague films. [7]Thus Cavell achieved a new method for evaluating modern cinema by introducing theconcept of “creation of a medium” in his thought and then applied the concept to the classical
Hollywood cinema so that he regarded those films as artistic masterpieces and chose to analyseeach film individually. Through the analysis of modern cinema, Cavell discovered after the factthat the classical Hollywood cinema had always been modernistic works of art that revealed thepossibility of the medium.
How, then, did Cavell’s attitude to the classical Hollywood cinema change exactly? In thenext section, as a typical example of his textual analysis, I will discuss Cavell’s investigation of
The Philadelphia Story that is included in Pursuits of Happiness. Cavell clearly shows thatfinding new possibilities in the medium is the most crucial criteria for evaluating the films byanalysing the intervention on photography (and camera) in the last sequence of this film. In
other words, he dealt with the film not as “the bastard child of art” that follows a tradition(automatism) of Hollywood, but as a masterpiece of modernistic film that pursued thepossibilities of the medium and discovered its new significance as a legitimate work of art.

3. The Classical Hollywood Cinema as Modernism: Interpreting the Ending of
The Philadelphia Story
In Pursuits of Happiness which analyses six films—generally referred to as “screwball

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comedies”—such as It Happened One Night (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), and The Awful
Truth (1937), Cavell posits a new genre for these films, that is, the “comedy of remarriage,” andhe has a great interest in interpretations of the narrative of each film rather than the cinematic
technologies and devices. Although this fact might mean that his study of film has shifted fromthe theoretical reflection in The World Viewed to the criticism of narrative, as Yoichiro Ishihara
who translated The World Viewed in Japanese noted, there are many cases in Pursuits ofHappiness where Cavell pays attention to the scene which film itself is conscious of the natureof its own medium. [8] In the analysis of The Philadelphia Story, he also paid attention to a
photograph used in the last sequence and discussed the meaning of its emergence. At first sight,
his analysis appears rather unclear and unsatisfactory in terms of elaboration, but the emergenceof photography is a crucial point for Cavell. While the photograph works to assist the narrative,it also shows that film can invoke in us a reconsideration of the meaning of “viewing” in film.
The film that revolves around the romance of C. K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant) and Tracy
Lord (Katharine Hepburn)—a recent divorcee whom is“remarried” in the end—has an impressive last sequence
prior to the couple’s wedding ceremony. Being that Tracy
comes from a distinguished family, at that moment,
Sidney Kidd (Henry Daniell)—who plays the role ofeditor for the gossip magazine Spy—presses the shutter
and takes a sudden snap-shot as he wants to get the scoopon this ceremony. Dexter, Tracy, and Mike Macauley
Conner (James Stewart) notice the shutter sound andFigure 1
turn their eyes toward the camera located in left side of
the foreground off-screen (figure 1), then the film cuts toan image of the photograph just taken (we can assume)(figure 2). Actually, the photograph is part of a magazine,
the page is turned and another photograph is presented
that shows Dexter and Tracy alone embraced in a kiss(figure 3). The page is turned again to reveal the closing
still marked with “The End.” Considering this final scene
Cavell questions why Dexter and Tracy continued toallow Kidd to take a picture of their embrace as if they
had desired it after the first unexpected photograph.
While Cavell came to interpret this question in termsof acknowledgement of marriage, we need to discuss the
problem with a full understanding of the importantquality of a comedy of remarriage that marriage is anenterprise that only the two persons concerned take partin. That is, the barrier on the way to marriage is not fromthe outside—society, community and their parents, buton the inside, in themselves, so that they must overcome
it alone. Therefore, there is also no guarantee on the

Figure 2

Figure 3

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outside that the marriage will succeed, thus they must acknowledge the justice of marriage alone,a fact that emphasizes why Cavell regarded remarriage as important. That is, such unsponsored,
unstable situation barely maintained its justice by only the repetitive act of remarriage as heoften said elsewhere (Cavell “Benjamin and Wittgenstein” 243). Therefore, the endings of the
comedy of remarriage films are by no means happy endings but they are a disquieting restart ofmarried life which continues to acknowledge the justice of marriage constantly for pursuing
happiness, and at the same time, the endings mean that married life is always subject to thethreat of divorce (PH 2). According to Cavell, the fact that the protagonists in Bringing Up Babyor The Awful Truth went into the “the green world” [9] located far from society in the latter halfof the story also supports his argument that marriage is their personal private matter. The
protagonists in The Philadelphia Story, however, do not go into such a world. Instead, theacknowledgement of marriage has more to do with being accepted socially and through thecommunity act of a wedding. Despite the fact that they are in the existing society, then, how cantheir marriage be confirmed if we follow Cavell’s argument? Here Cavell insists that thephotograph made it possible. That is to say, the photograph of their embrace excludes the othercharacters in the narrative from the screen image, and as a result, he interpreted this photographas proof that marriage was a private matter for only the couple (PH 123). Although Cavell showsthat the specific quality of the medium of photography (and film)—which excluded the beholder
from the world of the film image—is used as part of the narrative, we must always keep in mind
that he never applied the determined nature of the medium of photography to the interpretationof narrative. In fact the reverse is true. It was this film itself that specified the nature of themedium of photography (or still images). [10]What’s more, his interpretation of the photograph continues. By inserting the still image
into the film, we are withdrawn from the diegetic world in which we have been absorbed andthen we recognize after the fact that the narrative which we have seen was a past event. As Garrett
Stewart says, contrasting two media, Cavell often emphasizes “the prevailing lifelike kinesis offilm […] over against the stasis of photographic mummification,” so that “[i]t [the still image of
The Philadelphia Story] thus operates to divorce us, so to speak, from the thrall of the medium’s
prevailing effect” (131). In other words, the audiences here are allowed an opportunity forreflecting on the moving images they have seen so far. Cavell states as follows:[W]hat does it mean to say that these final two shots are pictures or photographs? How is
the rest of what we have seen different? The rest was every bit as much a function of thephotographic. Of course the rest was in motion whereas these are still. But that is thequestion. What is the difference? This question directs us to think about the ontologicalstatus of what we have seen and hence about the mode of our perception. (PH 160)
Considering the above and the impossibility of the meaning of the rhetorical question “What isthe difference?” it clearly shows, that we are forced to continue to ask the unending question
about the difference of cinema and photography. As a result, Cavell thought that cinema andphotography led us to the madness of skepticism that of course is a loop of repetition in seeking
certainty. Moreover, Cavell interpreted that this ambiguous state of perception, namely, the fact

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that the film ended by not an embrace but a photograph of the embrace suggested less theirhappiness than their uncertainty.
Although Cavell vaguely put forward the uneasiness in this scene, it is not entirely due to theemergence of the still image. We can make up for his argument more specifically by pointing out
a sort of distortion that was invoked by the insertion of the still image. To elaborate further, the(moving) image of the moment that the three characters turned around to look at the camera is
not the same as the photograph that followed (Note the candle is missing in the left foregroundof the screen). There is a clear difference in the direction of Mike’s eyes in the moving image thanin the photograph. Just before the photograph is taken Mike turns his eyes to the left of thescreen (figure 1), but in the still, his eyes are to the front of the screen facing the audience (figure2). Although Cavell undoubtedly noticed this subtle difference, he did not explore this differenceor base his argument on the fact any further. [11] Given that gap, however, we can compensate
and support his idea that he comes to find by reconsidering cinema itself through the analysis ofindividual films. The Philadelphia Story is a story about the staff of a gossip magazine trying to
get a scoop in the mansion of Tracy’s wedding ceremony. That the three eyes turned from thecamera in the diegetic world to the movie camera which is now shooting the very this film places
us—the audience, in the same position as the photographer Mr. Kidd. That is, the presence ofKidd who is peeping in on the event of this film from the outside, as an outsider, allows for the
possibility that we interpret this film as a sort of metacinema by indicating the presence of us(the viewer) who is peeping in on the film itself from the outside literally.
In fact, Cavell treated the whole film as a work of metacinema in interpreting that Dexter’s
absolute power of controlling the narrative—he took back the bride on the very day of her
wedding—represented the films directorial power (PH 139-40). [12] Cavell’s argument of
metacinema is not that of a film about film but a film about “cinéma” which means the whole
institution of cinema including the individual films, the structure of the industry, and the role ofthe spectator. For example, in the analysis of Bringing Up Baby in which the same actors of The
Philadelphia Story appear, Cavell suggests that the perspective of metacinema is reflected in therelationship between Grant and Hepburn. The questions Grant has of his relationship; what onearth am I doing here? Or why am I in such a predicament and why do I remain here, are closely
connected with our doubt as to why we continue to see this film (PH 130). As Cavell stated, “eachof the films in the genre of remarriage essentially contains considerations of what it is to view
them, to know them” (PH 159), and this states means that it is one of the proof of his insistencethat good films is inherently self-reflexive (PH 13-4).
What I have attempted to show is not exactly a validity of Cavell’s interpretation itself; rather,
it is more important that we should recognize that photography as a material basis of film also
has a crucial role in interpreting the narrative of the classical Hollywood cinema as well as
modern cinema. That is, in the interpretation of The Philadelphia Story Cavell found the natureof cinema itself the very moment that he discovered the possibility of the medium of photographythat is consistent with the narrative of this film. [13] It shows that this film can be understood interms of not only the content of this narrative but also the reflective nature that invokes us toreconsider the meaning of the act of viewing a film. Thus, the classical Hollywood cinema is nolonger considered “the bastard child of art” that threatens the very concept of art, but should be74

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regarded as sheer “works of art” that are worthy praise and criticism.

Conclusion
In “Film in the University,” the appendix to Pursuits of Happiness, Cavell noted that if hehad known the work Walter Benjamin—in particular his seminal essay “The Work of Art in theAge of Its Technological Reproducibility”—when he was writing The World Viewed, he would
have gained plenty because their ideas were similar (PH 266). Cavell confirmed Benjamin’s
insistence that we should think about not whether film (and photography) is art or not, but how
film and photography transformed the concept of art, because, as I showed in section one, theinsistence was more crucial for him than we might imagine. [14]In his essay on Benjamin published in 1998, however, Cavell had come to have more of anaffinity for Benjamin’s doctoral dissertation The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism
which deals with the “criticizability” of works of art, and argues that criticism is a part of the workand needed to complete it. In contrast “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility” which does not analyse any individual works in detail by a means of criticism(“Benjamin and Wittgenstein” 242-44). Cavell’s change of interest in Benjamin clearly indicatesthe idea that the classical Hollywood cinema as art replaced the idea of the classical Hollywood
cinema as mass culture in his study of film as this paper has presented.
Moreover, we should also pay attention to Cavell’s study of television, which was publishedat almost same time as the publication of Pursuits of Happiness, to further understand hischange of thought. In the essay entitled “The Fact of Television” (1982), Cavell noted thedifference between cinema and television as the difference of the concept of work by which eachmedium can be applied:
To say that masterpieces among movies reveal the medium of film is to say that thisrevelation is the business of individual works, and that these works have a status analogous
to traditional works of art: they last beyond their immediate occasions; their rewards bearup under repeated viewings; they lend themselves to the same pitch of critical scrutiny as
do any of the works we care about most seriously. This seems not to be true of individual
works of television. What is memorable, treasurable, criticizable is not primarily theindividual work, but the program, the format, not this or that day of “I Love Lucy,” but the
program as such. (“The Fact of Television” 62-3, my emphasis)
As the title indicates, the main point of this essay is to argue the nature of television, tounderstand its medium specificity; likewise, he also reconsidered the specificity of film andargued the difference as a medium. [15] Among those considerations, he clearly stated that,
unlike television, good film could be a work of art worth analysing individually. [16]Needless to say, we should not accept the philosopher’s matters so easily. We cannot insist
that Cavell abandoned the fascination of cinema as popular culture completely after he regarded
the classical Hollywood cinema as works of art, and vice versa. That is, it is not impossible toconsider the influence of a modernistic idea in his early thought because Cavell wrote on theThe Legitimization of Movies

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classical Hollywood cinema in The World Viewed after his experience of modern cinema (yet heclaims this had no affect and he wrote with ignorance to the experience). At any rate, however,
we should recognize the fact that his attitude to the classical Hollywood cinema has two phases,
and moreover, we can begin to finally discuss the meaning of his analyses of individual films.
Notes
[1]

[2]
[3]

[4]
[5]

[6]

[7]

[8]

[9]

[10]

[11]
[12]

In recent years, one of the main criteria of evaluating Cavell’s study of film takes the form of anargument of spectatorship. Since Linda Williams’ “body genres” and Steven Shaviro’s The
Cinematic Body, the research on film and body has increased rapidly. The revaluation of Cavell’s
study of film has probably been relevant to this stream, for Richard Rushton and Gabriele Pedullà
argued that the spectator’s body when viewing a film is the essential point of Cavell’s study of film
(Rushton 106-25; Pedullà 101-22).
As for the concept of automatism, See Rodowick, 41-73; Trahair.
Therefore, as I will discuss in section two, the main reason why the concrete analyses of individual
films increase in the latter half of The World Viewed which deals with modern cinema seems to be
by a natural process of the collapse of the classical Hollywood cinema.
Later, Krauss herself overturned this criticism on The World Viewed, and she found the new
possibility of the concept of medium in the book (Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea 5-7).
In this sense, while I use “the classical Hollywood cinema,” it seems that Cavell himself neveraccepted the title fully. The term “illicitness” may provide an alternative to the “classical” in
Hollywood cinema. For inadequacy of calling the Hollywood cinema at the time as “the classical
Hollywood cinema,” see Miriam Hansen’s influential argument of the concept “vernacularmodernism.”“The first successful movies—i.e., The first moving pictures accepted as motion pictures—were notapplications of a medium that was defined by given possibilities, but the creation of a medium by
their giving significance to specific possibilities” (WV 32, author’s emphasis).
Cavell interpreted this freeze frame of face of Jeanne Moreau that appeared early part of the film
as men’s desire to maintain women as statue. As I discuss in the next section, he pointed out thefact that Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story was also acknowledged as a “goddess madeof stone” by men. However, he also emphasized the significance of woman as “flesh and blood”
which propelled the narrative (PH 140-42).
“‘Screen’ which partitions off the bedroom of man and woman in It Happened One Night, themirror in The Lady Eve (1941), and the home movie, the motif of film-within-film in Adam’s Rib(1949). Because of the self-reflective structures, these films are very conscious of their own medium,as it were, these films know themselves ‘to have been written and directed and photographed andedited’” (Ishihara 341).
Because Cavell understands the comedy of remarriage as a successor of the tradition of Shakespeare’s
works he calls the place which transforms the protagonists “the green world” following theargument of Northrop Frye. According to Cavell, in more than half of the remarriage comedies theplace is Connecticut (PH 49).
Of course, because we can readily recall the nature of photography that excludes the beholder fromthe image, it is difficult to think that he didn’t keep the nature in mind in advance. Cavell calls thisinteractivity of the “element” of medium and its significant use “cinematic circle.” For him, it is theinvestigation of the cinematic circle that is the meaning of investigation of medium (WV 6-7).
“The first photograph is of the trio, Dexter, Tracy, and Mike, startled by, and looking in the directionof, the camera (which camera? Kidd’s or Cukor’s?)” (PH 159, my emphasis).
Andrew Klevan, whose criticism has been greatly influenced by Cavell’s methodology, analyses the

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[13]

[14]

[15]

[16]

KIHARA Keisho

scenes of The Philadelphia Story in terms of Cary Grant’s power to control the narrative in moredetail (Klevan 38-46).
Since Pursuits of Happiness, Cavell has often analysed a “moment” of film in the same way. For
example, he argued Stella’s self-absorptive appearance when she stood with her back facing thescreen in Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937) as a critical moment when she transformed herself andbegan her strategy to find happiness for her daughter (CT 203). As for his criticism of a moment in
Stella Dallas, see also my essay “The Woman without a Physiognomy.”
Monica Dall’Asta pointed out that Bazin might read Benjamin through the André Malraux’s text,
and argued their latent connection over montage (Dall’Asta). Given that perspective, it is possible
to assume The World Viewed that is based on Bazin’s ontology also potentially connects Benjamin.
Samuel Weber argued that whereas we need to consider the specificity of television, it is a task todiscern not the “essence” but the “difference” of medium. In this sense, certainly Weber regarded
Cavell’s argument of television highly but he criticized Cavell in that he didn’t describe thedifference of television and cinema thoroughly, especially the perspective of reception (Weber 10810).
From another point of view, we can understand that his attitude to cinema in The World Viewed
was replaced by television. This indicates that we can reread not only “The Fact of Television” butalso The World Viewed as a book on the theory of television.

Works Cited
Abbreviations[WV]: Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Enlarged edition,
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1979.
[PH]: Cavell, Stanley. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1981.
[CT]: Cavell, Stanley. Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. Chicago:
Chicago UP, 1996.
---. “Benjamin and Wittgenstein: Signals and Affinities.” Critical Inquiry 25.2 (1999): 235-46.
---. “The Fact of Television.” Cavell on Film. Ed. William Rothman. Albany: SUNY Press, 2005. 59-85.
Dall’Asta Monica. “Beyond the Image in Benjamin and Bazin: Aura of the Event.” Opening Bazin. Eds.
Dudley Andrew and Hervé Joubert-Laurencin. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. 57-65.
Hansen, Miriam. “The Mass Production of Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism.”
Reinventing Film Studies. Eds. Linda Williams and Christine Gledhill. New York: Arnold, 2000.
332-50.
Ishihara Yoichiro. “Why Can Film be a Subject of Philosophy?” (Translator’s commentary) Me ni utsuru
Sekai (Japanese translation of The World Viewed). Tokyo: Hosei UP, 2012. 328-47.
Kihara Keisho. “‘Automatism’ and ‘Creation of a Medium’ in Staley Cavell’s The World Viewed.” Theatreand Film Studies vol. 1 (2012): 185-203.
---. “The Woman without a Physiognomy: Criticism of “Moment” in Stanley Cavell’s Reflections on Stella
Dallas.” Theatre and Film Studies (2013): 187-99.
Klevan, Andrew. Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation. London: Wallflower, 2005.
Krauss, Rosalind. “Dark Glasses and Bifocals, A Book Review.” Artforum, May 1974. 59-62.
---. “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition. New York: Thames andHudson, 1999.
Mullarkey, John. Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009.
Mulhall, Stephen. Stanley Cavell: Philosophy's Recounting of the Ordinary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.

The Legitimization of Movies

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Pedullà, Gabriele. In Broad Daylight: Movies and Spectators after the Cinema. London & New York:
Verso, 2012.
Rodowick, David Norman. The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007.
Rothman, William. “Cavell on Film, Television, and Opera.” Stanley Cavell. Ed. Richard Eldridge,
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 206-38.
Rushton, Richard. The Reality of Film: Theories of Filmic Reality. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2011.
Stewart, Garrett. Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1999.
Trahair, Lisa. “Being on the Outside: Cinematic Automatism in Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed.” FilmPhilosophy 18 (2014): 128-46.
Warshow, Robert. The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre & Other Spaces of Popular
Culture. Enlarged edition, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001.
Weber, Samuel. “Television: Set and Screen.” Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 1996. 108-28.

List of Illustration
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3

The Philadelphia Story (1940), DVD, Warner Home Video, 2008.
The Philadelphia Story (1940), DVD, Warner Home Video, 2008.
The Philadelphia Story (1940), DVD, Warner Home Video, 2008.

This paper is based on the Japanese version printed in Eizogaku, No. 89 (2012): 5-21, published by theJapanese Society of Image Arts and Sciences.