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vni • • • • CHAPTER 19: "THE ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF SILENCE" NATURALNESS HAS BEEN withdrawing—nature itself has been withdrawing —from film. But "nature's absence," as Cavell puts it in Chapter 15, "is only the history of our turnings from it." If nature has been turning away from film, film has been turning away from nature, indeed, from its own nature. Increasingly, Chapter 16 argues, film itself has come to take over the task of exhibition, denying its nature; "film's growing doubt of its ability to allow the world to exhibit itself" has led film to a "new theatricalizing of its images." We now have a new sense offilm,Chapter 17 in turn suggests, a sense that the camera must now, in candor, acknowledge not its being present in the world but its being outside its world. Chapter 18 argues that the "new rush of technical assertions . . . are, insofar as they are serious, responses to [this] sense of withdrawing candor." It lists some uses of these devices to determine the limits, the conditions of film's existence, they discover. Recapitulating this survey in Chapter 19, The World Viewed's final chapter, Cavell finds that he has emphasized silence, isolation in fantasy, and the mysteries of human motion and separateness. "This new emergence of the ideas of silence and fantasy and motion and separateness takes us back, or forward, to beginnings"—to film's origins, to The World Viewed's own obscure promptings. 233 READING THE WORLD VIEWED For it isn't as if, long after our acceptance of the talkie, we know why the loss of silence was traumatic for so many who cared aboutfilm.What was given up in giving up the silence of the voice? Why suppose there will be some simple answer to that question, that there was some single spell broken by the sound of the human voice? For the voice has spells of its own. I think this issue now underlies all the explorations infilmto which I have alluded. (147) In Must We Mean What We Say?, Cavell made clear his understanding that ordinary language philosophy is about whatever ordinary language is about—"the necessities common to us all, those necessities we cannot, being human, fail to know. Except that nothing is more human than to deny them." In exploring the "silence of the voice," movies are exploring the limits of ordinary language, which is what modern philosophy, as Cavell understands and practices it, is exploring as well. No one appreciates more fully than Cavell, whose work is committed to raising the procedures of ordinary language philosophy to an explicit self-consciousness, the diversity of roles speaking plays in our human form of life. Why should silence be expected to play fewer roles than speaking? If talkies gave up the silence of the voice, that silence, in the so-called silent cinema, was an endless source of aesthetic possibilities. The title of the final chapter of The World Viewed, "The Acknowledgment of Silence," is yet another formulation with almost punning double meaning: silence is to be acknowledged, but silence is also the form the acknowledgment is to take. And, we might note, Cavell understands the silence of the voice not only to be a feature of movies, a feature movies seemed to lose when they became talkies, but a feature of moviegoing, too. The conversation of companions was internal to the natural relation to movies whose loss prompts the writing of The World Viewed. There is a silence internal to that relation, too—a silence Cavell is breaking by undertaking this writing. (There is also a silence that the writing of The World Viewed aspires to achieve by trusting its words to lead to its necessary conclusion.) The technology of sound recording soon overcame the actor's stiff bondage to the microphone, and the camera was free to stray again. But the technology did not free it from a deeper source of bondage in the idea of synchronization itself. On the contrary, the possibility of following an actor anywhere with both eye and ear seemed to make their bonding necessary. No doubt that source has to do with the absolute satisfaction of a craving for realism, for the absolute reproduction of the world—as if we might yet be present at its beginning. But there is a further reality that film pursues, the farther, continuous reality in which the words we need are not synchronized with the occasions of their need or in which their occasionsfleethem. (147...

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