Apologies to Stanley Cavell

Abstract

I read The World Viewed as soon as it was published in 1971. Although I was outraged (and even at times disgusted) by that first reading, I was touched by its eloquence. My hostility was undoubtedly the premature judgment of a champion of avantgarde cinema toward a critic whose taste differed so radically from mine. I could hardly attend to what Cavell actually wrote at that time. My rage began with the opening chapter’s claim that “in the case of films, it is generally true that you do not really like the highest instances unless you also like the typical ones.” Here, I thought, was a parodic example of a professorial movie buff, taking what the Brattle Cinema in Cambridge happened to screen as the art of film. He amply declares that only a fool would judge paintings or music on the same basis. I wondered would he would say to someone who took the full range of books in the “philosophy” section of a typical Boston bookstore as the parameters of his disciple, noting at that time that there would be nothing by Cavell himself on such a shelf. (His 1969 collection of essays, Must We Mean What We Say? had disappeared by then. I had to order the book—hardcover only—from the publisher a year later.)