Abstract

American philosopher Hillary Putnam has said that Stanley Cavell is the only philosopher to have made writing about movies a part of his philosophical project. Since 1971, with the publication of The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film , Cavell has actively pursued questions concerning the physical medium of the movies - as well as its aesthetics, its history, and its criticism - as part of his reflections on our human experience of the world. This essay attempts to unearth some of the earliest of Cavell's insights into the movies through a study of certain short passages on Vertigo by framing Cavell's study with the examination of one of the most popular texts in Academic Film Studies, feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." The conclusions of this analysis are offset by a survey of the recent psychoanalytic studies of Vertigo by Lacanian cultural critic Slajov ZiZek. The conjunction of these two excursions away from Cavell sets the stage for a discussion of his interpretation of the film, pieced together from sections of The World Viewed and Pursuits of Happiness . Themes of the screen creation of women, of the transformative powers of the camera, and of the role of the movie director, together forecast the most admired contribution this American philosopher has offered to Academic Film Studies: the definition of the related genres of the Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage and the Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman.