… In response to the skeptical attitude, which sets the perceiving subject at a distance from nature, in film humanity and nature are of one substance and held in a common duration — they are expressed as having common Being. They partake of the same ontological substance, and in addition have the same epistemological nature. For “reality” here is not what is, or the accuracy or not of what is pictured, but our condition of being in the world.
This is from The Virtual Life of Film by D.N. Rodowick (2007):
… The deeper lesson of photography for philosophy is understanding not only how the skeptical attitude is expressed in photographic looking, but also how photography returns the world to us while nonetheless holding perception at a distance.
That we wish to see everything in this way means that film responds to a moral condition, a way of being-in-the-world that film manages to express for us as a generalized, cultural perception. For [Stanley] Cavell, the “reality” of film is the actuality of this metaphysical dilemma; there is no other relation of photography or film to reality. The succession of automated world projections is our condition of perceiving as such to the extent that we are modern subjects, or, as Cavell puts it, film is a moving image of skepticism. The skeptical attitude of which photography is one manifestation, expresses a realization “of human distance from the world, or some withdrawal of the world, which philosophy interprets as a limitation in our capacity for knowing the world … It is perhaps the principal theme of [Cavell's book] The World Viewed that the advent of photography expresses this distance as the modern fate to relate to the world by viewing it, taking views of it, as from behind the self.” As spiritual automata, what film produces is an ontological condition for the human subject,
[not] by literally presenting us with the world, but by permitting us to view it unseen. This is not a wish for power over creation (as Pygmalion’s was), but a wish not to need power, not to have to bear its burdens … In viewing films, the sense of invisibility is an expression of modern privacy or anonymity. It is as though the world’s projection explains our forms of unknownness and of our inability to know. The explanation is not so much that the world is passing us by, as that we are displaced from our natural habitation within it, placed at a distance from it. The screen overcomes our fixed distance; it makes displacement appear as our natural condition. (The World Viewed)
[ ... ]
Our condition has become one in which our natural mode of perception is to view, feeling unseen. We do not so much look at the world as look out at it, from behind the self … Viewing a movie makes this condition automatic, takes the responsibility for it out of our hands. Hence movies seem more natural than reality. Not because they are escapes into fantasy, but because they are reliefs from private fantasy and its responsibilities; from the fact that the world is already drawn by fantasy. And not because they are dreams, but because they permit the self to be wakened, so that we may stop withdrawing our longings further inside ourselves. Movies convince us of the world’s reality in the only way we have to be convinced … by taking views of it. (The World Viewed)
The last phrase is important for understanding how the phenomenology of film projection expresses for Cavell both the metaphysical isolation of the modern subject and its possible overcoming.
… If the reality that film holds before us is that of our own perceptual condition, then it opens the possibility of once again being present to self or acknowledging how we may again become present to ourselves. This is why Cavell emphasizes that “reproducing the world is the only thing film does automatically.” For these reasons, film may already be the emblem of skepticism in decline. The irony of this recognition now is that modernity may no longer characterize our modes of being or of looking. The possibility of recognizing photography’s deep connectedness with a way of being in the world is becoming more and more evident as that mode of existence is passing into something else, and as [analog] photography itself is on the wane.
… The modern ethical dilemma, then, is how to regain contact with this world, to overcome our distance from it and restore its knownness to us. We wish for the condition of viewing as such because this is our way of establishing and maintaining our connection to the world — by having views of it. And in having views in just this way, one that requests conviction in the prior existence of this world even if it is present to use only in images, brings us out of our private reflections and encourages us to consider again the world as such.
… One reason that “we do not know what our conviction in reality turns upon” [Cavell] is that we continue to demand (and often distrust) visual evidence when what maintains our conviction is in fact a temporal perception. But this unknownness of the grounds of our conviction in these ephemeral images — a world suspended in variable patterns of light — is itself a hopeful quality. For while cinema’s automatism relieves us from the burdens of perception, it also holds open before us our own agency in acts of perception, and sustains our epistemological inquisitiveness regarding those acts and their consequences. And so Cavell concludes:
The moral of film’s image of skepticism is not that reality is a dream and not that reality confines our dreams. In screening reality, film screens its givenness from us; it holds reality from us, it holds reality before us, i.e., withholds reality before us. We are tantalized at once by our subjection to it and by its subjection to our views of it. But while reality is the bearer of our intentions it is possible … to refuse to allow it to dictate what shall be said about it … Flanked by its claims to speak for us, it is still open to us in moments to withhold it before ourselves and may gladly grant that we are somewhat spoken for. To know how far reality is open to our dreams would be to know how far reality is confined by our dreams of it. (The World Viewed)
Perhaps the long dream or fantasy from which the self begins to be awakened through filmic perception is that of the division of humanity from nature, or of Being speaking with a different voice from that of nature.
… In their automatic manufacture of an image of the world, film and photography displace us from yet reconnect us to this world, not by disfavoring or alienating humanity, but by casting humanity and nature in a common frame and reintegrating them in a common duration. In our views of the world, we are presented a situation wherein humanity is returned to (visible) nature in sharing the same duration with it. And, according to Cavell, there are moral consequences in failing to grasp this fact: “Then if in relation to objects capable of such self-manifestation human beings are reduced in significance, or crushed by the fact of beauty left vacant, perhaps this is because in trying to take dominion over the world, or in aestheticizing it (temptations inherent in the making of film, or of any art), they are refusing their participation with it.” In response to the skeptical attitude, which sets the perceiving subject at a distance from nature, in film humanity and nature are of one substance and held in a common duration — they are expressed as having common Being. They partake of the same ontological substance, and in addition have the same epistemological nature. For “reality” here is not what is, or the accuracy or not of what is pictured, but our condition of being in the world.
-Julie
