Turning to Nature: Cavell and Experimental Cinema

Devotees of experimental cinema must periodically confront the problem of encountering a theorist whose writings on movies speak to the concerns of avant-garde filmmakers but who themselves ignore this tradition. Emblematic in this regard is Stanley Cavell, as the question of why he did not address works of experimental cinema raises issues thoroughly woven into the fabric of his thought, milieu, and period. As a friend of Robert Gardner, one of the tradition's most forceful proponents and his cofounder at Harvard's Carpenter Center for the Study of Film, Cavell's protestations that he was not familiar enough with the field to pass judgment are hardly tenable.¹ Such abdications are compounded by the fact that Cavell does not actually opt for an agnostic position but instead mildly dismisses the films of this tradition in a fashion that is especially unconvincing in light of the rest of his writings on modernist art. Anthony Caro, Jules Olitski, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Ernst Kreneck all receive detailed examination and criticism in Cavell's work, while Samuel Beckett receives the treatment of an entire essay. The frustration mounts in the face of the fact that the philosophical concerns that compel Cavell's reflections on avant-garde painting or music—in particular the struggle with the concept and tradition of a medium—are central to (at least) Anglo-American experimental cinema in the postwar period.²

Pursuing this problem leads to an account of some elements of Cavell's theory of cinema's relationship to modernism and in turn foregrounds some peculiar tensions within, which is the first ambition of this essay. However, beyond merely highlighting some oddities of Cavell's account, examining his rejection of experimental cinema can also provide the materials necessary to reframe some key films in the postwar Anglo-American tradition. At the moment that Cavell was affirming in The World Viewed his conviction, or faith, in the power of cinema to dodge the need to "establish presentness to and of the world" because "the world is there," filmmakers and theorists across the avant-garde were experiencing a crisis of aesthetic faith, one related yet opposed to Cavell's claims for cinema.³ The recurrent doubt of whether cinema really represented reality had again exploded by 1970, and experimental filmmakers largely dedicated their work to the effort of destabilizing the apparently commonplace myth of presence (notably the British structural/materialists and to a lesser extent North American structural filmmakers) or finding new logics and raisons d'être for film (e.g., Stan Brakhage).

This part of the avant-garde tradition is well known and accounted for. What I want to do here is examine the cinematic responses of some experimental filmmakers who negotiated this crisis not by heightening its contradictions or exposing how deep its rot had spread but instead by forging a particular relationship between natural phenomena and film that affirmed the latter's capacity to establish the presentness of the world. Such a rapprochement emerges, I argue, only by exploring a fundamental term in Cavell's criticism that is less central to his philosophy of movies than it is to his thoughts on painting: "nature." I want to show how such a strain of experimental film responds to the central concern of how it is that art can come to a point of strenuously achieving for its viewer a connection to the reality of nature. This is something Cavell explicitly denies is necessary for film to do, but it is a task taken up by artists of the period. The point of such an exercise is to demonstrate that while experimental cinema may not represent the clearest case for what Cavell thinks is important about movies, it nevertheless responds cinematically to some important issues that he thinks are integral to art more broadly. In doing so, experimental cinema achieves a significance for movies that lies outside of Cavell's claims for them that rest largely on the importance of persons.

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My argument begins with Cavell's rejection of experimental cinema, which receives its justifications scattered in small comments throughout The...