Notes on stanley cavell and philosophical film criticism

Abstract

As well as being the leading practitioner of philosophical film criticism, Stanley Cavell has sought to explain and elucidate it. This chapter aims to bring together observations by Cavell, often in the form of quotation, from across his many writings on film and aesthetics, especially his more recent work, to note some of the characteristics of philosophical criticism, and to illuminate the value of it.1 I do not think it is Cavell’s intention to erect a special category of philosophical criticism to distinguish it from criticism per se. Indeed, for Cavell much of what we understand and value as criticism has a philosophical flavour. Not only may the criticism of texts be understood as a form of philosophy, but also the philosophy that he most values can be understood as a form of criticism of texts (philosophical or otherwise). Much of what follows may in fact be a way of revisiting (perhaps as a way of reviving) the somewhat lost art of academic criticism, coming to see it again in the light of Cavell’s (philosophical) understandings and in comparison to other forms of analysis more commonly in use today. His demonstrations and demarcations have partly arisen in an endeavour to articulate explicitly what criticism may offer in an academic environment (especially Film Studies) increasingly unfamiliar with it.