Sportive Thoughts

If film is an art of realism, then our desire to see a good film is “wishing for the condition of viewing as such” (Cavell, The World Viewed 102). I do not wish to explore, as Cavell aptly and adequately does, the ontology of aesthetic experience as it pertains to cinema; what I want to do with this short essay is approach a definition of “good” as a qualifier for art in general, and film specifically.

For starters, the qualifier “good” in this case is attached to its referent by an act of judgment, and this act is supported by the aesthetic mode of action called interpretation. Unlike, say, a moral judgment that (in my view) describes an action as “good” when it is undertaken in a way that either aims to or adheres to a form of self-presentation, an aesthetic judgment is most compelling when it acts on—rather than merely describes—its referent. This means that judging a work of art necessarily alters, enforces, or discredits the value one had placed on it before the interpretive act; and this further means that, in aesthetic judgment, the author's task is, for starters, placed aside to allow for the critic's task. (As opposed to moral judgment, where I take it that one's interest is placed in one's own actions, such that one asks not “what do I like about this?” but “how should I go about doing this?”) And so it would seem that Cavell's concept of autonomism is in the first instance a critical concept, designed for the extraction of meaning from a work rather than the creation of meaning in a new work. This should strike us as strange and against our instincts as we read on in the chapter.

Taking this critical route, we notice that our hypothesis drawn from Cavell's text, that our desire to see a “good” film is “wishing for the condition of viewing as such,” forces us to distinguish our “good” film from the fantasy-desiring movie experience, where one seeks a comfort from the “real world” (Adorno's complaint) or seeks entertainment as a supplement to or replacement of her worldly life (many plaintiff's here; not the least of which is Plato and his now-crowded cave). It is a major feature of our hypothesis that film be considered, along with everything else, a part of what is “real.” The cinema is; it exists. We can talk about it and we can talk about the effects it has on our lives. To dismiss the cinema's reality, to call it part of the modern manufacture of cultural delusion, is to refuse to be a critic at all. By either viewing films as an escape or suggesting that films force us out of reality, we do not even discredit films as valuable artworks; we effectively refuse to study films as art and therefore cannot begin to judge. It is also a major feature of our study that the very necessity to judge, when confronted by art, suggests quite explicitly an inseparableness from the aesthetic experience. We must judge an artwork when we encounter it, or else in some sense we are not quite tuned-in to the world we inhabit.

Art, I take it, is not merely supplemental or decorative, but integral to one's seeking and thinking of (“acknowledgment of”) the world. Hence, Cavell writes, “It is our fantasies, now all but completely thwarted and out of hand, which are unseen and must be kept unseen” (102). To see one's fantasies is to no longer see the world; in one's fantasies one sees only the impalpable content of one's desires, the conditions and actualities that one would have if she could, but cannot. She cannot have her fantasy fulfilled both because it is the nature of fantasy to be impossible and because, if it were to be fulfilled, it would no longer be desired—instead the now-palpable content of desire becomes loved, appreciated, disappointing or regrettable. Art, and cinema included, is not fantasy; art is real. As a reality, it is loved, appreciated, disappointing or loathed—and the point is precisely that we always respond with an emotion somewhere on that gradient of loving/loathing, therefore making art very present and addressable by our ordinary thoughts and feelings.

Now is where things should start feeling strange: can we not say that a film that I might not call a film “good” that you really love? Can you love something that I judge unlovable, because it is not “good”? Or is it that beauty really is in the eye of the beholder, thus making my judgments sometimes unintelligible to you when they conflict your natural responses? The effect of this objection is to suggest that the viewer's response to a work of art is our primary factor in attributing it a qualitative value. If the attribution is proper—that is, if it is describable as an aesthetic judgment—then we could venture to say that our love for a film is to encounter within that film a “condition of viewing” to which we can adhere to as our own. We love a film because it is developed from a “condition of viewing” closely similar to the “conditions of being” from which we have developed as humans. We recognize something in the loved film, and this recognition evokes a need to confirm its validity—the aesthetic consummation of an empirical desire, or, in other words, the bringing together in art the things of our world that had previously been unacknowledged. (Think of the Divine Comedy; Dante starts with an absence of what he does not know, or is not certain of. At the end, he has seen, by Virgil's guidance, the guidance of a poet, an artist, the disparate things of everyday life, organized in horror around the great maw that refuses to acknowledge unity of being, and so chews everything that gets close to its own callousness. Dante then ascends to see the tapestry of the stars and proceeds in the next book to bring together yet more familiar, worldly things and actions; his guide then becomes the erotic image of Beatrice, who leads him up to the final consummation—the pure light of God which fills all. These are not simply religious tropes, they are aesthetic devices that create values from things that are already familiar to us.)

Thus, I do not think I'm tripped up by the fact that some people love Shawshank Redemption but dislike or at least lack the desire to see The Trial. Those persons have not encountered within their realm of experience or developed for themselves a "condition of viewing" that is exhibited by The Trial, and therefore cannot, ontologically, call The Trial a better film than Shawshank Redemption. To make such a claim requires the development of condition of viewing "as such," the appropriate exposure to the two films, and a recognition of said conditions such that one may perform the proper evaluative act. This is why we say that critics must be properly trained, must review a variety of works, and must make their most important statements a declaration of praise--otherwise we would not be able to tell what makes a work of art "good" and thereby become cynical in our responses towards critics and artists alike.

What, then, does the filmmaker as artist strive for? As an example of the modern art, film can be explained by how Cavell characterizes Modernism on page 103 of The World Viewed: "Modernism signifies not that the powers of the arts are exhausted, but on the contrary that it has become the immediate task of the artist to achieve in his art the muse of the art itself." That is to say, the tradition (Modernism) from which film springs as a medium becomes self-supporting, automatic--and my favored example is of the scene in The Trial where Orson Welles and Anthony Perkins are juxtaposed to one another against the light of a projector and of a screen. Welles stands beside the projector and Perkins is framed within the screen, thus calling on our own predicament within the cinema and our own relationship, not to a literary device transcribed to film, but to the instance of artistry with which we are engaged at that very moment. Welles, as both director and an antagonist in all his films including The Trial, is not just showcasing himself. He is actively finding his muse by entering into his art, like Dante in the Divine Comedies or Velasquez in Las Meninas.

Just how this works is still something of a mystery. We do know that it does work, that art is possible, and that it is integral to our lives as humans, a kind of life that is difficult to grasp and describe in its entirety: "Only an art can define its media...for separate creatures of sense and soul, for earthlings, meaning is a matter of expression; and that expressionlessness [of Modernism] is not a reprieve from meaning, but a particular mode of it; and that the arrival of an understanding is a question of acknowledgement" (107).

What is the "good" in and of art? It is precisely what we are looking for when we seek an aesthetic experience in the first place; it is what works to fulfill our need for meaning and acknowledge us as seers of the world.