Synopses & Reviews
Review
It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to think of Stanley Cavell's The World Viewed as simply a film book...Cavell's book is about films...at a thoroughly engaged level of reflection...It does not move one to rush to the nearest movie theater for a new immersion in films; rather, it prompts one to reexamine one's own past experiences of films...With Cavell the sense of the claims which movies make upon us is intense. He does not linger over any particular one, in a spirit of impatience roughly analogous to the one which prompted T. S. Eliot to say the `The poetry does not matter.' The poetry does not matter, poetry matters. The film does not matter, film matters. College English
Review
Perhaps more than in any other country, film studies in the United States have been hampered by a tradition of casual reporting and a smuggish academic refusal to allow a mass entertainment art any serious intellectual status. Stanley Cavell's The World Viewed is an important a valuable counter to this tradition and its journalistic judgments...As a philosopher of art, Cavell is clearly not only a rigorous thinker but an imaginative one who can convincingly integrate phenomenological concepts into film studies or translate figures from Baudelaire's Painter of Modern Life into illuminating categories of film analysis. Timothy Corrigan
Synopsis
Stanley Cavell looks closely at America's most popular art and our perceptions of it. His explorations of Hollywood's stars, directors, and most famous films--as well as his fresh look at Goddard, Bergman, and other great European directors--will be of lasting interest to movie-viewers and intelligent people everywhere.
About the Author
Stanley Cavell is Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, Emeritus, at Harvard University.
Harvard University
Table of Contents
Foreword to the Enlarged Edition
Preface
1. An Autobiography of Companions
2. Sights and Sounds
3. Photograph and Screen
4. Audience, Actor, and Star
5. Types; Cycles as Genres
6. Ideas of Origin
7. Baudelaire and the Myths of Film
8. The Military Man and the Woman
9. The Dandy
10. End of the Myths
11. The Medium and Media of Film
12. The World as Mortal: Absolute Age and Youth
13. The World as a Whole: Color
14. Automatism
15. Excursus: Some Modernist Painting
16. Exhibition and Self-Reference
17. The Camera's Implication
18. Assertions in Techniques
19. The Acknowledgment of Silence
More of The World Viewed
Notes
Index