Cavell on Film

A collection of the philosopher Stanley Cavell's most important writings on cinema.

Stanley Cavell was the first philosopher in the Anglo-American tradition to make film a central concern of his work, and this volume offer a substantially complete retrospective of his writings on cinema, which continues to offer inspiration and new directions to the field of film and media studies. The essays and other writings collected here include major theoretical statements and extended critical studies of individual films and filmmakers, as well as occasional pieces, all of which illustrate Cavell's practice of film-philosophy as it developed in the decades following the publication of his landmark work, The World Viewed. This revised edition includes six additional essays, five of them previously unpublished, that illuminate his inspiring vision of a humanistic study rooted in a marriage of film and philosophy. In his introduction and in the preface to this new edition, William Rothman provides an overview of Cavell's work on film and his aims as a philosopher more generally.

William Rothman is Professor of Cinematic Arts at the University of Miami. His many books include The Holiday in His Eye: Stanley Cavell's Vision of Film and Philosophy and Tuitions and Intuitions: Essays at the Intersection of Film Criticism and Philosophy, both published by SUNY Press.