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Argues that the experience of the ordinary film viewer and the investigations of the film scholar or film philosopher are not necessarily so far apart.
In Haunting the World, Dominic Lash tries to show that taking films seriously in no way interferes with the pleasure we get from watching them. The book draws its title from the philosopher Stanley Cavell, who saw "haunting the world" as something we are all prone to and who claimed that cinema's relationship with this tendency is both an "importance" and a "danger" of film. Specifically, Lash proposes that the work of Cavell and of the critic and scholar V. F. Perkins have valuable lessons to offer contemporary film studies, some of which are in danger of being neglected. Written in a lively and approachable style that makes philosophical ideas accessible without simplifying them, the book argues that film theory risks going awry when it dismisses or underestimates the experience of the ordinary film viewer. Haunting the World offers fresh accounts of fundamental topics, including description, experience, and agency, and examines in detail important films by Ildikó Enyedi, Paul Thomas Anderson, Ridley Scott, Werner Herzog, Andrei Tarkovsky, Kelly Reichardt, and more.
"A vital, generous, and illuminating contribution not only to writing about Perkins and Cavell but to the further flourishing of accessible writing about film and its achievements. Dominic Lash has written a series of essays that offer each in its own marvelous way a fresh path for thinking about and experiencing cinema and the work of two of its most accomplished and important scholars." — Jason Jacobs, University of Queensland
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Naive Film Criticism
Part One. V. F. Perkins
1. Film as Film in the Twenty-First Century
2. V. F. Perkins and the Redescription of Films
Part Two. Stanley Cavell
3. "Not Yet the Last": On a Paragraph by Stanley Cavell
4. Cavellian Reflections on Privacy, Consent, and Expression in Ildiko Enyedi's On Body and Soul (Teströl és lélekröl)
5. (Re)producing Marriage: Stanley Cavell and Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread
6. Experience, Skepticism, and Idolatry in Stanley Kubrick, Nicholas Lash, and Stanley Cavell
Part Three. Figurations
7. The Shape of It All: Priorities and Completeness in Nicole Brenez's Work on Abel Ferrara
8. Rupture, Suture, Nietzsche: Impossible Intersubjectivity in Ridley Scott's Alien
9. Hypnosis-Images: Indiscernibility and Hypnotic Agency in Gilles Deleuze's Heart of Glass
Part Four. Tarkovsky and Reichardt
10. "You Can't Imagine How Terrible It Is to Make the Wrong Choice": Faith, Agency, and Self-pity in Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker
11. Kelly and Andrei in the Zone
12. "A Fair Curve from a Noble Plan": Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women
Notes
Works Cited
Filmography
Index