Romantic Affinities?

Cavell on Opera, Film, and the Claim of Expression

Abstract

In “Opera and the Lease of Voice,” a chapter of A Pitch of Philosophy (1994), as in a relatively recent essay entitled “Opera in (and as) Film” (2005), Cavell develops a compelling argument about the link between these two art forms. According to him, opera and film represent two historically distant attempts to come to terms with the same “cultural trauma,” one he characterizes as “having to do with a crisis of expression, a sense that language as such, reason as such, can no longer be assured of its relation to a world apart from me or to the reality of the passions within me.” Such a crisis has a name: it is called skepticism.