The World Heard

The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. The world viewed. The title seems so clear. And when followed by the subtitle, the implication is plain: this is a book that will ask what film is and will answer in terms of vision and the world. Moreover, it is the world, not a world. The book will be about not some indefinite fictional world but instead the definite one. Its answer will then likely have to do with reality too. And accordingly, for almost fifty years, Stanley Cavell's book has functioned as part of "classical film theory," because it has been read as offering a view of the filmic medium rooted in indexical realism in visual terms.¹ The World Viewed, though, is anything but plain. I want to disrupt the ubiquitous understanding that Cavell conceptualizes cinema as a visual art form, even if he devotes the majority of his pages to such visual matters as the import of film's photographic roots and the aesthetic legacies of painting. Tracing where the concepts of sound, dialogue, and silence hold on to, and let go of, one another in The World Viewed clarifies Cavell's idea of cinema and the limits that cinema must explore if it is to achieve the modernist aims he endorses. This approach also unearths connections that allow us to see that the meanings of "world" and "viewed" change over the course of the book, that they undergo a process—that the book is itself cinematic in its unfolding. Furthermore, accounting for the importance of the sound of speech generates an important link between The World Viewed and Cavell's broader Wittgensteinian body of work, in which we cannot claim to know the world without wording it.²

Yet my interest in Cavell's discussion of sound arises not simply from the desire to understand an important work of film theory and redress readings that run the fool's errand of partitioning ontology and epistemology. The study of film sound has grown in popularity in recent decades, yet it is often in the thrall of a theoretical picture that attending to The World Viewed loosens. First, contemporary scholars tend to emphasize continuities between silent and sound cinema, considering how the addition of a sonic register affected editing patterns, performance styles, audience reception, and so forth. Second, and relatedly, they focus on the relation of sound and image.³ (That this scholarship concentrates on noise, music, and voice surely contributes to the penchant for treating the elements as somehow beside each other.)⁴ In doing so, they attest that sonic aesthetics model ways of apprehending the world akin to visual aesthetics, and insist that sonic representation's neglect is a result of bias in a field whose history encourages readers to conceptualize the medium as primarily, even properly, visual. Through Cavell, I want to ask whether this analogization of cinematic sights and sounds is adequate, for even if one can theorize (as Gilles Deleuze does) that a sound is like an image in that we register it sensorily, we do not, say, experience speech as we do music, although there are aspects of musicality to it.⁵ Instead, I want to suggest that how sights and sounds hang together is a condition of the medium and to thereby resist the usual impulse in film theory to consider these elements in relation but as nonetheless discrete. That is, I want to argue for the value of leaving a film intact, for acknowledging cinema as audiovisual. My reading strategy departs from the typical critical-analytical impulse to isolate constituent components, but it is nevertheless philosophical, seeking to explain things as they are.⁶ It also demonstrates that the advent of the talkie is far more than a simple technological advance for Cavell and opens up a way of connecting his film historiography to his philosophical project.

Ontological Peace

The judgment that The World Viewed is chiefly concerned with visual matters stems from the book's first chapter. Cavell begins by asking what art is. He praises painting for furnishing "more ways of responding" than other arts at the time...