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This book engages in a critical encounter with the work of Stanley Cavell on cinema, focusing skeptical attention on the claims made for the contribution of cinema to the ethical character of democratic life. In much of Cavell's writing on film he seeks to show us that the protagonists of the films he terms "remarriage comedies" live a form of perfectionism that he upholds as desirable for contemporary democratic society: moral perfectionism. Films are often viewed on television, and television shows can have "filmlike" qualities. The book addresses the nature of viewing cinematic film as a mode of experience, arguing against Cavell that it is akin to dreaming rather than lived consciousness and, crucially, cannot be shared. It mirrors the celebrated dialogue between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jean D'Alembert on theatre. The book articulates the implications of philosophical pessimism for addressing contemporary culture in its relationship to political life. It clarifies how The Americans resembles the remarriage films and can illuminate the issues they raise. The tragedy of remarriage, would be a better instructor of a democratic community, if such a community were prepared to listen. The book suggests that dreaming, both with and without films, is not merely a pleasurable distraction but a valuable pastime for democratic citizens. Finally, it concludes with a robust response from Dienstag to his critics.
suggest that one thread of Marienbad 's interwoven layers could be considered as advancing concerns very similar to those of Malle's Les Amants . Finally, most provocatively, I want to suggest that, in some respects, Marienbad might be considered in the light of Preston Sturges's The Lady Eve (1937), a film that has come up in earlier chapters and which is one of the examples of a remarriage comedy that Cavell theorises. My suggestion emerges by virtue of a small moment in Sturges's film, shortly after the Lady Eve Sidwich (Barbara Stanwyck) has introduced herself
Cavell suggesting that he is somehow naive or ignorant or disingenuous is simply a non-starter. (It is remarkable as well to me that you are arguing so extensively on a turf of Cavell’s own making: after all, both the terms “remarriage comedy” and “moral perfectionism” are inventions – exclusively, in the case of his identifying the genre of remarriage, and largely in the
. Two models of exemplarity In much of Cavell’s writing on film he seeks to show us that the protagonists of the films he terms “remarriage comedies” live a form of perfectionism that he upholds as desirable for contemporary democratic society: moral perfectionism. However, there appear to be two ways in which we can interpret exemplarity in Cavell
connection between Emersonian perfectionism and the “remarriage comedies” of the 1930s and 1940s . Rather than demonstrating moral improvement, the film reveals the dangers and pleasures involved in the representation of the instability of erotic relations. It warns, I argue, against thinking that we can learn to democratize by watching a representation of democracy, however artful
Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), went on to claim a disappointment at the fact that his arguments relating to remarriage comedies in Pursuits of Happiness could not be expanded, for want of space, so as to consider European films. He points to Renoir's The Rules of the Game (1939) as one such European film ‘obviously invoking the project of remarriage’ (Cavell 1981 , 166). Raymond Durgnat, in his book on Renoir, remarks in his discussion of The Rules of the Game that ‘Beyond all question, it is by the destruction of Jurieu's and Christine
wishes to call Smiles of a Summer Night a remarriage comedy, that the stakes of remarriage are explicitly played out between Desirée and Fredrik. This couple achieves (or begins to achieve) what Cavell calls acknowledgment. Most simply this means that a self and another person can agree upon the things that make up a world. The achievement of acknowledgment, happening for Cavell so often as it does in literature or film between the members of a romantic couple (traditionally a man and a woman) can often only be an achievement built on an original failure – hence for
on the other hand by the critique of romantic love provided by Leo Bersani. My aim in this chapter is to delve further into these arguments, especially insofar as they pertain to cinema. I examine Cavell's conception of ‘comedies of remarriage’ first of all, and engage closely with Leo McCarey's 1937 film The Awful Truth , a key example of a remarriage comedy for Cavell. I then also engage in some detailed assessment of the approach Bersani, writing with Dutoit, takes to Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 film, Contempt . By taking a close look at each of these films, we
made in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s, a cycle which Stanley Cavell called ‘remarriage comedies’. What was most characteristic of ‘new’ marriage was that it was based on the mutual understanding of the members of the married couple: a free and equal agreement to experience life and the world together, as two people rather than one. This agreement or acknowledgment was something agreed upon by the couple alone. It was not an agreement brought to them by external factors such as parents or money or power or history or even a legal decree defined as ‘marriage
the medium of film. The first of Cavell’s two books on Hollywood genres is on what he calls the ‘comedies of remarriage’. The film of that genre which most clearly plays out many of the themes I have been tracing throughout this chapter is Frank Capra’s seminal It Happened One Night (1934), the film that gives birth to the genre of remarriage comedies. Cavell’s reading of the film centres on the role of the famous blanket that divides the film’s yet-to-be-married couple, Peter (Clark Gable) and Ellie (Claudette Colbert), as they spend a night together in a motel