Cavell's Ontology of Film - (Anthem Film and Culture) by Jeroen Gerrits (Hardcover)
About this item
Highlights
- Cavell's Ontology of Film presents ten essays by some of the most prominent international scholars of Stanley Cavell's work with a double purpose: to look back, half a century after its original publication, at Cavell's now seminal film-philosophical book The World Viewed (1971, enlarged 1979), and to draw on its concepts to assess the world in the current age of digital media and climate change.
- About the Author: Jeroen Gerrits is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Binghamton University (SUNY) and author of Cinematic Skepticism: Across Digital and Global Turns (2019).
- 200 Pages
- Art, Film & Video
- Series Name: Anthem Film and Culture
Description
About the Book
Cavell's Ontology of Film presents ten essays that reflect on The World Viewed, Stanley Cavell's now seminal film-philosophical book from 1971, and project its concepts and ideas into our future.
Book Synopsis
Cavell's Ontology of Film presents ten essays by some of the most prominent international scholars of Stanley Cavell's work with a double purpose: to look back, half a century after its original publication, at Cavell's now seminal film-philosophical book The World Viewed (1971, enlarged 1979), and to draw on its concepts to assess the world in the current age of digital media and climate change.
The volume opens with a series of essays that revisit Cavell's discussion of film--crucially including classical Hollywood movies--in the context of modernism. Several authors consider whether this preoccupation with modernism in Cavell's early work ultimately (and anachronistically) gave way to an embrace of romanticism or whether Cavell conceives these frameworks as offering different responses to the persistent problem of skepticism. Others consider how popular filmmakers or film genres outside Hollywood might contribute to, or alter, Cavell's thoughts on the movies. Moreover, taking to heart that some of Cavell's main lines of thought are premised on the idea of film as an analog medium that projects and screens the world inside a theater, several contributions to this volume nevertheless project The World Viewed's concepts onto the future of our televisual and digital culture. The volume finally loops back to Cavell's discussion of modernism in The World Viewed so as to find the seeds of a Cavellian politics for the age of climate disaster.
Thus, beyond celebrating the past through a collection of reviews and reflections on The World Viewed--a book of "ontological reflection" that themselves conceive the world on screen as "a world past"--the present volume is best understood as a series of Cavellian meditations on media and mediated relations to the world, sustained, in the wake of Cavell's own passing (2018), by an ongoing current of thought on the idea of temporality itself.
About the Author
Jeroen Gerrits is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Binghamton University (SUNY) and author of Cinematic Skepticism: Across Digital and Global Turns (2019).
