Cavell on Film

Edited by William Rothman
Introduction by William Rothman

Subjects: Philosophy, Film Studies, Aesthetics
Series: SUNY series, Horizons of Cinema
Paperback : 9780791464328, 427 pages, April 2005
Hardcover : 9780791464311, 427 pages, May 2005

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Table of contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: William Rothman
1. What Becomes of Things on Film? (1978)
2. On Makavejev on Bergman (1979)
3. North by Northwest (1981)
4. The Fact of Television (1982)
5. The Thought of Movies (1983)
6. What (Good) Is a Film Museum? What Is a Film Culture? (1983)
7. What Photography Calls Thinking (1985)
8. A Capra Moment (1985)
9. The Fantastic of Philosophy (1986)
10. Two Cheers for Romance (1988)
11. The Advent of Videos (1988)
12. Prénom: Marie (1993)
13. Nothing Goes without Saying: Reading the Marx Brothers (1994)
14. Seasons of Love: Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night and The Winter’s Tale (1994)
15. Words of Welcome (1996)
16. Groundhog Day (1996)
17. Something Out of the Ordinary (1996)
18. The World as Things: Collecting Thoughts on Collecting (1998)
19. Concluding Remarks Presented at Paris Colloquium on La Projection du monde (1999)
20. On Eric Rohmer’s A Tale of Winter (1999)
21. The Image of the Psychoanalyst in Film (2000)
22. Opera in (and As) Film (2000)
23. Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (2000)
24. The Good of Film (2000)
25. Moral Reasoning: Teaching from the Core (2001)
26. Crossing Paths (2002)
27. After Half a Century (2001)
Index

Stanley Cavell's most important writings on cinema, collected together for the first time in one volume.

Description

This extensive collection offers a substantially complete retrospective of Stanley Cavell's previously uncollected writings on film. Cavell is the only major philosopher in the Anglo-American tradition who has made film a central concern of his work, and his work offers inspiration and new directions to the field of film studies. The essays and other writings in this volume, presented in the order of their composition, range from major theoretical statements and extended critical studies of individual films or filmmakers to occasional pieces, all of which illuminate Cavell's practice of philosophy as it has developed in the more than three decades since the publication of The World Viewed. All periods of Cavell's career are represented, from the 1970s to the present, and the book includes many previously unpublished essays written since the early 1990s. In his introduction, William Rothman provides a useful and eloquent overview of Cavell's work on film and his aims as a philosopher more generally.

Stanley Cavell is Walter M. Cabot Professor Emeritus of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. His most recent book is Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life.