Must We Mean What We Film?: Stanley Cavell and the Candid Camera

I. The Promise of Candor

Stanley Cavell's 1971 The World Viewed is a preposterous work of film theory and philosophy. Writing against the trends of what would emerge in the 1970s as apparatus theory, the pedagogy of the New Left, and its radical cinemas, Cavell celebrated Hollywood, extolled the virtues of "traditional" movies, and placed emphasis not on what the image concealed as a result of ideology and technology but rather on what even fictional films revealed of the world and its people.¹ Whereas the New Left would soon celebrate a countercinema of estrangement and unpleasure (putting Jean-Luc Godard at its center), Cavell took seriously the pleasure and reality of narrative cinema, and he marveled at the ease with which Hollywood had maintained a conviction in its genres and a connection with its audiences for as long as it had without the self-consciousness associated with the condition of modernism.² In the incantatory chapter titled "The End of Myths," Cavell eulogizes what Hollywood had meant by enumerating what "we no longer grant, or take it for granted," about American cinema and the political promise of the country itself.³ As signaled by the rise of a certain strain of modernist (including politically modernist) cinema, Hollywood had lost its connection to history and its traditions after decades of producing a common, though hardly inclusive, culture. In the context of the late 1960s, Cavell observed that most Americans were in denial of the harm the state carried out in their name, especially with the rise of a hawkish anticommunism at home and abroad. Cinema's fall into modernism and the country's fall into extreme forms of political violence and denial are not in causal relation in Cavell's account. They are among several sites or responses to "a sense of withdrawing candor" and waning world belief.⁴ It is this sense of candor and the stakes of its withdraw that occasioned the writing of this difficult book on film and philosophy. Rather than embrace a radical cinema for radical times or blame old Hollywood as the apparatus of political denial, Cavell makes a case for what traditional cinema and a conviction in film's reality had still to teach us about our commitments to the world and to each other.

Teresa de Lauretis reflects that 1970s film theory targeted Hollywood and its aesthetic of realism as "hopelessly compromised with bourgeois ideology." The politically attuned filmmaker was expected to break with "narrative 'illusionism' in favor of formalism." Moreover, she writes that "foregrounding the process itself, privileging the signifier, necessarily disrupts aesthetic unity and forces the spectator's attention on the means of the production of meaning."⁵ For Cavell, however, the anti-illusionist approach to cinema along with the impulse to deny the reality that film projects both presumes that we take these images as real and, from this presumption, sets out to destroy the illusion. This approach sidesteps the more difficult challenge of accounting for our convictions in reality as anything other than an illusion, which is one of the reasons perhaps that so many Americans failed to account for a failing American state or were duped by illusions of its success. This denial of film's reality "seems to remember that skepticism concludes against our convictions in the existence of the external world, but it seems to forget that skepticism begins in an effort to justify that conviction." To simply refute the reality of film's drama demonstrates "that we do not know what our convictions in reality turn upon." More to the point, the antirealist criticism diminishes the importance and opportunity of art to teach us about our sense of reality and thus how we might change it. "This idea of the illusion of reality dims the differences in the role of reality posed in painting, in theater, and in film, and it closes out the wish of art to address reality in order to combat, or suspend, our illusions of it."⁶ One could say to Cavell that an art form that exposes as an illusion...