Cavelle Automatism

Film-Philosophy 18 (2014): Special Section on Stanley Cavell
Being on the Outside: Cinematic Automatism in Stanley

Cavell’s The World Viewed
Lisa Trahair1
The presentation of an unseen world has historically been extolled as one of

the powers, indeed, the virtues of cinema. Jean Epstein, for one,
demonstrated a wide-eyed fascination with film’s unparalleled capacity to
convey the truth of life in its illogical, non-teleological, open-ended, and
infinitely mutating glory. In ‘Bonjour Cinema’, Epstein hails cinema as ‘[a]
new poetry and philosophy’ (1981, 9), an art whose truth is different from
the story’s because it despises convention, considers staging absurd and
eloquence dead (1981, 11). Instead of pursuing the drama of action, the
truth of cinema will be found in suspended tragedy:
True tragedy remains in abeyance. It threatens all the faces. It is in
the curtain at the window and the handle of the door. Each drop of
ink can make it bloom on the tip of the fountain-pen. In the glass of
water it dissolves. The whole room is saturated with every kind of
drama. The cigar smoke is poised menacingly over the ashtray’s
throat. The dust is treacherous. The carpet emits venomous
arabesques and the arms of the chair tremble. (Epstein, 1981, 11)
This suspension of tragedy was made possible by the non-interference of the
human-being in the capture of that reality. As Jacques Rancière puts it: film,
for Epstein, was ‘an art’ in which human intelligence ‘is subject to another
intelligence, the intelligence of the machine that wants nothing, that does
not construct any stories, but simply records the infinity of movements that
gives rise to a drama a hundred times more intense than all dramatic
reversals of fortune’ (Rancière, 2006, 2). The name given to this power is
cinematic or cinematographic automatism. Numerous other thinkers—
Walter Benjamin, André Bazin, Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze and
Jacques Rancière, to name the most prominent—have focussed their
investigations of cinema on understanding the power of this automatism.2
Cavell, however, is the one who most explicitly takes it on and makes it the
fulcrum on which his entire argument about the ontology of cinema pivots.
In his monograph, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film
(1979), Cavell addresses automatism at four distinct points. At each instance
1
University of New South Wales: l.trahair@unsw.edu.au
2
See Walter Benjamin (1972) ‘A Short History of Photography.’ Screen, 13, 5-26; André
Bazin (1967) ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ in What is Cinema? Volume I.
Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley University of California Press; Stanley Cavell (1979) The
World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press; Gilles Deleuze (1986) Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press and
(1989) Cinema 2: The Time-Image. London: Athlone.
www.film-philosophy.com 128
his objective is to fashion it in accordance with his broader views of cinema

so that it might come to embrace the complex history of the medium’s
relation to modernism and the conviction of ‘serious films’. This essay will
examine these four encounters with automatism. It follows on the back of
Kathleen Kelley’s recent study of Cavell’s understanding of automatism to
straddle the apparent divergence between Bazinian realism and Clement
Greenberg’s prioritisation of medium specificity and Robert Sinnerbrink’s
work aligning Cavell’s idea of cinema as ‘a moving image of scepticism’
with the project of thinking philosophically about film.3
The first mention of automatism in The World Viewed is made when Cavell
questions Bazin’s use of the term in association with realism only to
emphasise its real power to relieve subjectivity of the task of apprehending
nature (Cavell, 1979, 20). In the second instance, Cavell conceives
automatism as the mechanism responsible for giving us views of the world
(Cavell, 1979, 72). In the third, Cavell broadens the concept from something
specific to the medium of film to that which subtends the medium of art in
general in order to consider the different ways it is put to use in traditional
and modernist art (and by extension, traditional and modernist film) (Cavell,
1979, 101-108). Finally, in the chapter ‘More of the World Viewed’, added
to the 1979 edition, he relates automatism to philosophical scepticism
(Cavell, 188).
First meditation on automatism: Bazinian automatism and realism
While Cavell’s full discussion of automatism doesn’t take place until
Chapter 14 of his nineteen chapter book, Cavell makes reference to the
concept as early as page twenty to emphasise the fact that the photograph is
a manufactured, not hand-made, image of the world and to acknowledge
Bazin’s identification of this fact with film’s satisfaction of an ancient and
longstanding obsession with realism (Cavell, 1979, 20; Bazin, 1967, 12).
Cavell questions Bazin’s linkage of automatism to realism and his
imputation that photography both inherited this drive from painting and
relieved painting of the burden of it.
Cavell counters Bazin’s claims with four points. He insists that the wish that
photography fulfilled was not something sought only by painters but was
3
See Kathleen Kelley (2012) ‘Faithful Mechanisms: Bazin’s Modernism.’ Angelaki:
Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, vol. 17, no. 4, 23-37; Robert Sinnerbrink (2011)
New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images. See in particular Chapter 5, ‘Bande à part:
Deleuze and Cavell as Film-Philosophers’, London and New York: Continuum. My reading
of Bazin is also indebted to James Phillips (2012) ‘The Fates of Flesh: Cinematic Realism
Following Bazin and Mizoguchi.’ Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, vol. 17,
no. 4, 9-22. Other recent engagements with Cavell’s early work on cinema include
Temenuga Trifonova ‘Film and Skepticism: Stanley Cavell on the Ontology of Film’,
Rivista di estetica, vol. 51, no. 46 (2011) and William Rothman and Marian Keane,
Reading Cavell’s The World Viewed: A Philosophical Perspective on Film, Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 2000.
(and is) a more fundamentally human wish. He argues that painting did not
give up on realism but illusionism, writing that ‘[p]ainting, in Manet, was
forced to forgo likeness exactly because of its own obsession with reality,
because the illusions it had learned to create did not provide the conviction
in reality, the connection with reality, that it craved’ (Cavell’s emphasis,
1979, 21). He refutes the idea that in freeing itself from illusion, painting
was cutting its ties with all objective reference. Finally, he argues that even
when painting came, much later, to deny objective reference, this did not
mean it was giving up its connection with reality. It was more a case of
‘painting and reality no longer assur[ing] one another’ (Cavell’s emphasis,
1979, 21).
It is arguable, however, that in making these counter claims Cavell assumes
that Bazin identifies realism with likeness or illusion. An examination of
Bazin’s writing reveals that Cavell has reduced Bazin’s thinking, yet at the
same time produced a book that we would do well to understand as an
attempt to nuance, develop, and provide a stronger philosophical basis for
the difficult and often misunderstood position that Bazin occupies on film as
an art form.4 Let’s consider Bazin’s distinction between aesthetic realism
and illusory realism first.
In his discussion of realism, Bazin distinguishes between the true realism
that derives from the aesthetic dimension of art and the pseudo realism that
is driven purely by psychological need and eventually satisfied with illusory
appearances (1967, 11). Yet he also argues that the combination of these
two dimensions—an aesthetic realism that expresses a spiritual reality and a
psychological realism that endeavours to duplicate the outside world—
forms the basis of art from its primitive function right through to its
contemporary manifestations. He even shows that while psychological need
demands the presentation of likeness, likeness can be a matter of conviction
rather than illusionistic. The psychological need that realism will eventually
be called upon to satisfy is of human indestructibility by nature or
overcoming death. Initially, this need requires a manipulation of the relation
between the real and the unreal, that something not real is treated as real. In
its primitive guise, the need requires only a cursory or iconic resemblance to
the appearance of reality. Non-illusionistic likeness thus forms the basis of
prehistoric art: the representation of speared animals on cave walls assumes
an absolute (albeit non-sensory and non-perceptual) identity between image
and the model, and a belief that magic can intervene in the causality of fate
to guarantee a providential future (Bazin, 1967, 10). In ancient Egypt,
likeness as belief in an identity between model and image lies behind the
process of accompanying entombed mummies with statuettes to protect the
dead from pillaging by marauding outsiders (Bazin, 1967, 9-10).
4
For more on this see Kelley, 2012.
For Bazin, psychological realism satisfies an essentially human need to

believe in the species’ capacity to prevail over time, that is, over death
(1967, 9). It derives from a wish for immortality. But art’s evolution in
tandem with the progress of civilisation is nothing other than the
sublimation of the human terror of being eclipsed by time (Bazin, 1967, 9-
10). It is this sublimation that sees the development of illusionistic realism.
With the disappearance of a belief in magic, the relationship between copy
and model becomes illusionistic.
Between ancient Egyptian and modern times, the compass for the real is the
ideal and a purely spiritual realism prevails over the function of images
(Bazin, 1967, 10). In modernity, a reversal in the relation between the real
and the ideal occurs such that the contemporary vocation of the image is
‘the creation of an ideal world in the likeness of the real’ (Bazin, 1967, 10).
The invention of photography, Bazin also argues, reconfigured the
relationship between aesthetics and psychology. The primitive need that
images had been brought into service to satisfy (as means of relating models
and copies) survives in the photographic age as a psychological questing
after realism as resemblance. It is the intrusion of mechanical means into
the production of images, the first being the use of the camera obscura by da
Vinci to create the illusion of three-dimensional space in Renaissance
perspective ‘within which things appeared to exist as our eyes in reality see
them’, that renders this realism as a perceptual or sensory realism (1967,
11).5 From this moment in the history of art, painting’s ambitions become
divided between the aesthetic realism that expresses ‘a spiritual reality
wherein the symbol transcended its model’ and a psychological realism that
duplicates the outside world in an effort to sate the primordial appetite for
illusion (1967, 11). A taste for a particular kind of illusion, namely
immortality, has been replaced with a taste for illusion in general. The
question of what is at stake in this modification, why, that is, the production
of art ceases to be driven by the disavowal of mortal existence and instead
embraces a broader sense of make-believe—why belief in the afterworld is
replaced with the fantasy of other worlds—is not addressed by Bazin. He
does, however, tell us that the need for illusion is a non-aesthetic, mental
need, that threatens to unbalance the arts (1967, 11).
The complete satisfaction of the need for psychological realism by
photography and cinema has the surprising (and undoubtedly homeopathic)
consequence that the ‘categories of resemblance’ come to ‘determine the
character of its aesthetic’ (Bazin’s emphasis, 1967, 15). Resemblance is no
5
James Phillips thus contrived the term bi-fold realism to account for the complexity of
Bazin’s arguments on the subject (2012, 9), although Phillips’ distinction is between
technical or technological realism and artistic or aesthetic realism (2012, 9-11). In what
follows, I use the terms perceptual realism in reference to the claim of the photographic
image to an identity between model and copy and aesthetic realism or spiritual realism in
reference to images that imbue matter with spirit.
longer a relation between two things—the model and the copy—where the
latter will be judged according to the former, but the thing itself. Bazin
insists the photographic image ‘is the model’ (Bazin’s emphasis, 1967, 14).
Moreover, the aesthetic dimension of photography derives from its power to
lay bare realities and is still thought of by Bazin in terms of spiritual
expression. Aesthetics is the practice of imbuing matter with spirit. But with
the advent of photography, aesthetics ceases to be first and foremost a
matter of putting human spirit into matter and becomes a question of
ensuring that it stays out of it. The power of photography to lay bare
realities in turn alters the relation between subject and object and relocates
the source of the creative power of art so that it no longer resides in the
artist. Rather, nature now gives itself to be seen.
It is here, in relation to the aesthetics of the photographic image and where
originality is on the side of the object, that Bazin locates cinematographic
automatism:
For the first time, between the originating object and its reproduction
there intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent. For
the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without
the creative intervention of man … All the arts are based on the
presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his
absence. Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a
flower or a snowflake, whose vegetable or earthly origins are an
inseparable part of their beauty (1967, 13).
The world gives us an image of itself that is not even burdened with the
subjectivity of the viewer:
It is not for me to separate off, in the complex fabric of the objective
world, here a reflection on a damp sidewalk, there the gesture of a
child. Only the impassive lens, stripping its object of all those ways
of seeing it, those piled-up preconceptions, that spiritual dust and
grime with which my eyes have covered it, is able to present it in all
its virginal purity to my attention and consequently to my love. By
the power of photography, the natural image of a world that we
neither know nor can see, nature at last does more than imitate art:
she imitates the artist (1967, 15).
Bazin is clearly more subtle in his consideration of the relationship between
film, painting and realism than Cavell gives him credit for. Bazin’s idea of
realism is not limited to perceptual illusion. He doesn’t suggest that painting
alone is driven by a realist quest or make this realist quest something driven
by a desire for illusion that brackets out reality or aesthetics. Moreover, all
of the elements of Bazin’s arguments—the concepts of immortality, of
nature, of magic, of the source of creativity in the age of photographic
reproduction—are taken up by Cavell and subjected to deeper philosophical
consideration. Even Bazin’s emphasis on aesthetics as the domain of
spiritual expression is transposed in Cavell’s work into an on-going
consideration of what he calls humanity’s ‘condemnation to meaning’

(1979, 107) and its ‘condemnation to intention and consequence’ after The
Fall (1979, 188). 6 Cavell, however, gives Bazin’s thought a greater
existentialist emphasis: original sin is the point at which humanity enters
into history, becomes conscious of time, and therefore becomes reflective.
God aside, Christian religion and art are unified in their expression of this
changed relation to nature.
Cavellian Automatism, The Subtraction of Subjectivity and Scepticism
Most significantly, when Cavell writes that photography overcomes
subjectivity by ‘automatism, by removing the human agent from the task of
reproduction’ (1979, 23), he is completely on track with Bazin. Cavell
writes:
So far as photography satisfied a wish, it satisfied a wish not
confined to painters, but the human wish, intensifying in the West
since the Reformation, to escape subjectivity and metaphysical
isolation—a wish for the power to reach this world, having for so
long tried, at last hopelessly, to manifest fidelity to another (Cavell,
1979, 21).
Bazin, as we have seen, had already identified the human wish for the
elimination of subjectivity as a factor that intervenes in, and makes
problematic, human being-in-the-world. Cavell links cinematic automatism
with a peculiarly Western existential crisis that emerged in the wake of the
decline of religious idealism. Namely, the wish to nullify the condition of
subjecthood that inserts itself between ourselves and nature, that
denaturalises, as it were, our experience of nature, is an aspiration that
resulted from the diminishing power of religion in the West from the
Reformation onwards. The foreclosure of a religious sensibility meant that
the predominating ethos governing the connection between humanity and
the world became a striving for unmediated presence, an experience of
nature un-impinged by the limitations of subjectivity. Cavell suggests here
that the religious idea that the laity were entitled to a direct relation to God
without need of the church’s representation and intervention finds a purely
secular expression in the cultural realm in a human striving for a direct
relation to nature. The new relation to God brings with it a new relation to
nature. Expressionism and romanticism both respond to this, expressionism
by representing ‘our terror of ourselves in isolation’, and romanticism by
honing in on subjectivity and making it ‘the route back to our conviction in
reality’ (1979, 22). Photography becomes the medium that observes our
isolation from nature by removing subjectivity from the equation altogether.
Photography simultaneously and somewhat paradoxically promises a direct
6
‘The human condemnation to intention and consequence is the sequel, if the not meaning,
of original sin’ (1979,188).
relation to reality (1979, 23). By Cavell’s logic (if not his word), it expiates
original sin by returning us to an age of innocence.
Where Bazin sees photography and painting in competition to achieve
illusionistic realism, Cavell argues instead that the ‘quest for visual reality’
creates a split between the two mediums. While painting has no choice but
to accept the ‘recession of the world’, its disappearance from view, and
become modern, photography, by contrast, ‘maintains the presentness of the
world by accepting our absence from it’ (Cavell, 1979, 23). Cavell notes,
‘[t]he reality in a photograph is present to me while I am not present to it’
(Cavell, 1979, 23). It is not a matter then of photography prevailing over
painting in the drive toward a poorly conceived idea of realism, but of each
art form, delimited by its medium, using the different means available to it
to realise its aesthetic purpose to make spiritual reality communicable.
In this respect, Cavell takes the emphasis off the confusing idea of realism
that obscures Bazin’s thinking and replaces it with the notion of presence.
For Cavell, presence is the spiritual reality that all art in the modern age
endeavours to understand. The question of presence underpins his concern
with subjectivity in so far as it prevents nature and humanity being fully
present to each other.
[W]hat painting wanted, in wanting connection with reality, was a
sense of presentness—not exactly a conviction of the world’s
presence to us, but of our presence to it. At some point the unhinging
of our consciousness from the world interposed our subjectivity
between us and our presentness to the world. Then our subjectivity
became what is present to us, individuality became isolation. The
route to conviction in reality was through the acknowledgment of the
endless presence of the self (Cavell’s emphasis, 1979, 22).
As we will see, film is initially spared this requirement to acknowledge ‘the
endless presence of the self’ because it gives us a view of the world where
subjectivity does not interpose itself.
The removal of the subject made possible by cinematic automatism is also
peculiarly inflected by Cavell’s broader approbation of scepticism as the
fundamental behavioural disposition afforded by modernity. In Chapter 6,
Cavell writes that the magic of (traditional) cinema, its magical
reproduction of the ‘unseen’ world onto film, ‘explains our forms of
unknownness and of our inability to know’ (Cavell, 1979, 40-41). Cavell
doesn’t explicitly address the relationship between modern scepticism,
movie culture, and the philosophy of film until ‘More of The World
Viewed’, the afterword to the second edition of his book, but the problem of
scepticism nevertheless adds a consistency to many of his formulations. We
might distinguish here between how Cavell sees cinematic automatism
refuting philosophical scepticism and the more general phenomenon of

scepticism to which film, although late to the party, responds.7
Cavell opens the way to understanding film in relation to the philosophical
expression of the idea of scepticism by linking our quotidian striving for
unity with nature to both Cartesian doubt and the effort to overcome
Kantian a priorism. The world that reveals itself to the camera, and whose
candour rests on the fact that nothing it reveals to the presence of the camera
is lost, repudiates the teaching of modern philosophers, from Descartes to
Hegel, preoccupied with nature’s ability to reveal the truth and to deceive
us. Just when modern philosophy lost faith in nature’s capacity to disclose
itself to us, and, by exposing nature’s capacity to lie, usurped nature’s
authority for itself by making reason the arbiter of truth, along comes film
and, by virtue of its automatism, flourishes, undiminished by the problems
of scepticism that beset philosophy. As Cavell tells it, the mechanical
reproduction of the world independent of subjective interference gives us
the ‘unseen’ view of the world that Kant, Locke, and Hume had thought was
beyond our empirical reach and that Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, and
Nietzsche thought beyond our metaphysical reach (Cavell, 1979, 102). The
story of film’s relation to scepticism does not, however, end here. In the
chapter ‘End of Myths’, Cavell discloses how an historically contingent
scepticism issuing from the aftermath of World War II, which saw an end to
the belief in working toward a common good, manifests as an inability to
believe the old forms and genres and cycles of cinema’s mythological age.8
Second Meditation on Automatism: Automatism and the Medium of Film.
For Cavell, automatism comprises the photographic basis of film and is
therefore an essential component of the medium of film, but it is also the
7
For an example of the former, see the ‘Preface’ where Cavell attributes the technical
description offered by film viewers to the feeling that we cannot satisfactorily account for
what is before our eyes. Scepticism also forms a backdrop to his opening remarks
identifying his orientation toward film with Tolstoy’s dismissal of most of the great art of
the past. Cavell understands Tolstoy’s stance not as repudiation of art, not a matter of not
caring about art, but rather as an admission that it is not possible not to care about the
importance of art, and, as a consequence of this, about the nature of art. Cavell applies the
same doubt to the movies in order to consider their importance as art (Cavell, 1979, 4).
8
Cavell goes on: ‘These beliefs flowered last in our films about the imminence and the
experience of the Second World War, then began withering in its aftermath—in the
knowledge, and refusal of knowledge, that while we had rescued our European allies, we
could not preserve them; that our enemies have prospered; that we are obsessed with the
ally who prospered and prepared to enter any pact so long as it is against him; that the stain
of atomic blood will not wash and that its fallout is nauseating us beyond medicine, aging
us very rapidly. It is the knowledge, and refusal to know, that we are ceding to Stalin and
Hitler the permanent victories of the war (if one of them lost the old world battle, he shares
the spoils of the present war of the worlds), letting them dictate what shall be meant by
communism and socialism and totalitarianism, in particular that they are to be equated. We
lash ourselves to these ideas with burning coils of containment, massive retaliation, moon
races, yellow perils, red conspiracies, in order that in the spasms of our fixed fury we do
ourselves no injury, in order not to see the injury we have done, and do’ (Cavell, 1979, 62-
63).
means by which the medium extends beyond its photographic basis to the
world as such, to human reality and nature. In effect, and while Cavell
doesn’t quite put it this way, this means that automatism affords film with
the potentialities of at least two ‘mediums’. One is the celluloid emulsion,
which, by virtue of the automaticity of the photographic mechanism,
captures views of the world; the other is human reality and nature. While
Cavell’s first encounter with automatism focuses on the removal of
subjective participation in representation, on his second approach, he places
the world that gives itself to be viewed in sharper relief. In Chapter 11 ‘The
Medium and the Media of Film’, for example, Cavell replaces what he had
been calling the photographic basis of film with the phrase ‘succession of
automatic world projections’ (Cavell’s emphasis, 1979, 72). ‘Automatic’,
Cavell now maintains, refers to the mechanical nature of photography, with
a particular emphasis on the absence of both the human hand in producing
images, and the world and its creatures when they are screened. ‘World’
refers to ‘the ontological facts of photography and its subjects’, and
‘projection’ to the ‘phenomenological facts of viewing and to the continuity
of the camera’s motion as it ingests the world’ (Cavell, 1979, 73). The
world projects itself onto film so that what film promises, its candour, is the
exhibition of the world itself (Cavell 1979, 120). Film reveals the entirety of
what the world reveals to it. Film doesn’t suffer the same interferences that
the other arts encounter. Its medium, Cavell thinks, does not limit what is
revealed to it.
And yet, the medium of film also has media, and these media have different
pertinences to the automatism of the photographic mechanism on the one
hand and to the ontology of the world on the other. In the first instance,
there are the media produced by the effects of the camera such as cycles,
genres, and the types of individualities bound up with stars; in the second,
there are the particularities of the human species, including its gestures, its
objects and the places it inhabits (Cavell, 1979, 69).
The idea that the cinematic medium has for its media both conventional
(genres and types) and natural components (particular human beings,
gestures, objects and places) testifies to a tension between the kinds of
automatism at play in cinema and even to how automatism, despite its
immediate relation to nature, does not unconditionally give us a world that
exists independently, but one where the conventions film shares with other
arts and the technological facts of cinema have entered into it.
From Natural Consciousness to Self-Consciousness.
Cavell’s book takes the form of a phenomenology, both in the account it
gives of Cavell’s personal relationship to cinema as a transformation from
natural consciousness to self-consciousness, from an ‘ordinary’ appreciation
of the form to a philosophical one, and in his contention that film is an art
that develops from having a natural relation to the world to having a self-
conscious philosophical relation to it. The development of film’s self-
consciousness entails the supersession of a traditional medium by a
modernist one. Cavell distinguishes between the artistic age of cinema,
where the new medium innocently pursued forms of happiness, and the
absolute age, where cinema, at the very least, becomes aware that these
halcyon days properly belong to the past. In its artistic age, film fulfills a
mythic function. In the age that supersedes it, film will be caught between
operating in bad faith (‘new wrinkles to old formats’ (Cavell, 1979, 69)) or
taking up the modernist mantel, acceding to self-consciousness and entering
into the condition of philosophy. Automatism is the concept that allows
Cavell to straddle the natural and philosophical relation to cinema.
Cavell opens his book with the question of what it was that compelled him
to change his relation to cinema from a form of entertainment that he was
naturally in awe of to something to be regarded both critically and
philosophically (Cavell, 1979, xix). The two immediate causes he
identifies—the emergence in Europe of various new wave movements, and
their invitation to reflect on Hollywood while maintaining continuity with it,
just as Hollywood was itself beginning to unravel, and the end of film’s
ecumenical power to operate as a public form of entertainment—are, by his
own admission, unsatisfactory (Cavell, 1979, xix-xx). As the argument
develops it becomes clear that it is the influence of modernism and the art
historical thinking about modernism (particularly the work of Michael
Fried, but arguably also Clement Greenberg) that draws him to try to
account for cinema with the terms they had established to talk about modern
painting (Cavell, 1979, xxv).9
The immediate point of perplexity that any inclination toward a comparative
analysis between cinema and modern art raises, and which the book takes it
upon itself to address, is why a form that only came into existence with
modernity, and indeed with modern technology, does not necessarily, or
even predominantly, constitute itself as a thoroughgoing expression of a
9
These terms comprise not only the concepts of presence and theatricality that Fried had
used in his doctoral thesis, subsequently published as Absorption and Theatricality:
Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980) and in Three American Painters:
Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella: Fogg Art Museum 21 April-30 May 1965 and
‘Art and Objecthood’ Artforum, June, 1967, but also place considerable emphasis on the
importance of the medium that is associated with Greenberg’s work.
modernist sensibility.10 Cavell, in a fashion consistent with this conception

of modernism, looks to the medium itself, and specifically to the nature of
film’s automatism, to explain its capacity to hold its viewers in thrall. The
mythic age of the movies was its magical age. Cinema suspended its
audiences in a sense of wonder: ‘The hours … were hours and days of awe;
momentous, but only for the moment; unrecapturable fully except in
memory and evocation; gone’ (Cavell, 1979, 10). Cavell thus understands
the wish ‘for the world re-created in its own image’ (Cavell, 1979, 39) that
is satisfied by the magic of the medium not as a wish to have power over
creation, but a wish not to have to bear the burden of creation (Cavell, 1979,
40).
Third Meditation on Automatism: Automatism in the Arts in General
The mythic age of cinema comes to an end and with it modern film makes
an appearance. Cavell explains how this happens by theorising the different
function of automatism in traditional and modern art. In Cavell’s third
encounter with the concept, automatism loses its specific application to
cinema and becomes something that subtends all the arts. Automatism
becomes the same thing as the medium. The medium of film is photography
and photography is film’s automatism by virtue of it constituting its
medium, just as the medium of poetry is words and the medium of painting
is paint. In Aristotelian terms, we would say that the medium is the material
cause. But the automatic qualities of a work of art are not limited to its
material or physical base, as Cavell well knows. There are other factors in a
work that operate as both expressive and limiting conditions of what a work
can do. Cavell explains: ‘The use of the word [automatism] seems to me
right for both the broad genres or forms in which an art organizes itself
(e.g., the fugue, the dance forms, blues) and those local events or topoi
around which a genre precipitates itself (e.g., modulations, inversions,
cadences)’ (Cavell, 1979, 104). Automatism now embraces not only the
material cause of the work but the formal cause as well.
Traditional and Modern Automatism
Automatism, not just cinematic (or photographic) automatism but
automatism in general, can now be called upon to illuminate the difference
between traditional and modern art. In traditional (non-modernist) arts,
automatisms are both the material conditions and the technical or
10
There are clearly reasons within modernism that would preclude cinema from following
this track. Not least of them is the incompatibility between the disenfranchisement of
modernist art and the capital intensive nature of cinema that compels it toward a democratic
constituency, but equally significant is the fact that the particular brand of modernism that
Greenberg, Fried and Cavell all hail—which is built upon the idea that the medium
acknowledges itself in order to recover the loss of conviction it can manifest about the
nature of reality—doesn’t emerge as something identifiable until the post World War II
period. Although it is also the case that all three of them will endeavour to find its germ
cells in the beginning period of philosophical modernism.
disciplinary constraints and limitations that an artist seeks to master in order

to be accomplished in that art. To secure one’s place in an artistic tradition,
one must master it, and mastering a tradition means mastering the range of
automatisms on which the tradition is built (Cavell, 1979, 104). An artist is
deemed to be masterful because of his/her facility with automatisms.
In traditional cinema, film’s relation to its automatism—that is the
photographic reproduction of the world—is natural. Being natural here
amounts to being believed in. The automatism of cinema makes it an art
devoted to satisfying our wish to view the world and the basis for this art is
our belief in its capacity to do this. This question of belief, though not
explicitly stated by Cavell, nevertheless comes to the fore when he
distinguishes between traditional cinema and modern cinema by grounding
modernist film’s difference in a lapse of conviction in (which we might also
call a scepticism about) the traditional uses of its automatism.
Film’s automatism is different from that of other arts (except photography)
because of this ‘naturalness’. Unlike other artists, filmmakers are not
required to master their medium’s primary automatism. Rather, it is entirely
given to them by virtue of the visible world giving itself to be seen and the
camera’s capacity to transfer what the world gives to its mechanical
apparatus into views for others. When Cavell considers the relationship
between cinema’s powers and those he ascribes to art more generally, he
therefore wonders whether film’s powers overstep the limits of those that
would make it an art. Movies, he conjectures in regard to automatism,
achieve their power too readily, with the result that filmmakers are able to
tap the power of the medium (automatism) innocently. Perhaps, queries
Cavell, its automatism makes it too powerful, leaving no room for the work
of the artist? Or perhaps it is a case of us not properly understanding either
the object or its art (Cavell, 1979, 104)?
Cavell’s definition of automatism in the arts in general goes some way
toward producing a negative answer to these questions, making it incumbent
on us to extend his definition of automatism even in traditional film—that
is, film in its mythic, magical function as it operated in the artistic age of
cinema—to include not just the mechanical nature of the photographic
apparatus and the world viewed but, in addition, the forms, cycles, and
genres it either developed for itself or inherited from other arts and made its
own, the ‘types of individualities’ that particular films deployed, the stars,
and the use of monochrome and colour (in other words, Cavell’s subject
matter between his first mention of cinematic automatism in Chapter Two
and his full explication of the concept in Chapter Fourteen).11 Logically,
11
One could doubtless go further than Cavell himself does and mention the use of sound,
framing, editing, and so forth, in other words, everything that a director must master in
order to be considered accomplished in his art.
these should be considered secondary or tertiary automatisms. Surely, too,

there is nothing simple in their mastery.
The new medium and its gamut of aesthetic possibilities become, on a
second reading of Cavell’s book, further instances of cinema’s automatisms,
automatisms that are explored and mastered in the artistic age as one would
expect of any traditional artistic medium. The mythic age of cinema was, in
this respect, also its artistic age. Traditional film both accommodated the
automatisms of other arts—the persistence of established forms—and found
new ways to master them, thus offering new ways of thinking about them
(Chapter Five). It incorporated the new forms of modernity, showing itself
to be quintessentially adept at reproducing the rhythms and types of the
modern world that had captured Charles Baudelaire’s imagination. Film
reproduced the forms of ‘contemporary happiness’ (Cavell, 1979, 42),
representing the beauty of the present, and modern experiences of the
ephemeral, the fugitive, and the contingent. It indulged a fascination with
the inner life of the object, developed a hyper-attentiveness to the body, and
promoted character types (the dandy, the military man and the woman) who
would best speak to the morality and need for justice of democratic
communities (Cavell, 1979, 41-60). This was a medium that, unlike other
arts, had the freedom to choose between calling attention to the objects in
the frame or allowing them to call attention to themselves (Cavell, 1979,
25). It contrived a new ontology of performer and performance distinct from
theatrical acting and created a new compact between performer and
audience by exploiting a new mode of audience absorption into performance
(Chapter Four).
Modernist art as it is understood by Cavell was born of a changed
understanding of the place of humanity in metaphysics and an awareness
that old forms and traditional means have become obsolete or inadequate to
the reality that it is art’s responsibility to reflect on. Painting ceased to
produce likenesses of the world because the mimetic purpose of art ceased
to express any conviction about art’s relation to reality, and because visual
illusion could neither represent unmediated presence as the necessary
condition of our connection to reality or speak the truth of our inability to
represent the unmediated presence of the self and the world to each other
(Cavell, 1979, 21). In the face of the evaporation of a natural relation to the
world, the modern artist is forced to turn inward, to reflect upon art itself
and the history of its medium, to ascertain the limits and capacities of its
medium, and to experiment with the conditions that will secure its
pertinence. The artist who is devoted to art is driven ‘to making an object
that will bear the same weight of experience that such objects have always
borne which constitute the history of his art, is compelled to find unheard-of
structures that define themselves and their history against one another’
(Cavell, 1979, 72). Automatism nevertheless continues to play a vital role in
modernist art because modernism is not an exhaustion of the ‘natural’

powers of a medium so much as art reaching the point that it needs to reflect
on these powers. Indeed, Cavell thinks that modernist art constitutes itself as
investigation of this very confusing application of automatism.
He explains: whereas the traditional artist activates automatisms and uses
them to his best advantage, the modernist artist has to explore the
automatism itself, ‘as if investigating what it is at any time that has provided
a given work of art with the power of its art as such’ (Cavell, 1979, 107).
Modern art necessarily takes it upon itself to test the limits of its
confinement of the medium to its physical basis. In reflecting on its muse,
art produces not simply another instance of art, but a whole new medium
within itself, a new automatism. The primary automatism of modernist art is
therefore an exploration of the dialectic of freedom and constraint, while the
investigation of automatism makes art self-conscious, autopoietic, and
autonomous (Cavell, 1979, 108-118). In becoming self-conscious, art,
according to Cavell, comes to exist in the condition of philosophy (Cavell,
1979, 14).
Modernist Film
For Cavell, the natural power of photography that constituted the
automatism of traditional film captures or ‘fixes’ its media—those ‘utterly
specific rhythms of voice and gesture and posture, … those particular streets
and carriages and chambers against and within which those specific beings
had their being’— and, freezing them in time, made them vulnerable to
losing their relevance, such that they no longer convince us of their
convictions (Cavell, 1979, 69). To put it another way, the genres and types
that cinema gave us ‘automatically’ stopped providing a satisfying
analogousness to the changing face of reality, and by their inadequacy
started calling into question the very ‘nature’ of the art of cinema.
Having lost its ‘natural relation’ to its world, film becomes encumbered by
the ‘modernist predicament’ already faced by the other arts. A lapse of one’s
conviction in the traditional automatism to operate naturally or to embrace
nature defines modernism in general. In modernist film, this means that the
photographic reproduction of the world is something that can no longer be
taken for granted. Cavell expresses this crisis in terms of the world
withdrawing itself from us. Cinema no longer has the power to present us
with views of the world that we can believe as truthful. For Cavell, the
stories, and genres and types we are left with exist without making any
claim on reality. Film’s assuredness as an art forces it to turn inwards and
question the basis of its certainty. Automatism, however, cannot be
dispensed with because movies cannot be made without it, but the nature of
its power changes. Cavell writes: ‘its awareness and responsibility for the
physical basis of its art compel it at once to assert and deny the control of its
art by that basis’ (Cavell, 1979, 105).
Fourth Meditation on Automatism: Scepticism
In ‘More of The World Viewed’, Cavell calls cinema ‘a moving image of
scepticism’ because it satisfies our senses of reality even while that reality
does not exist (Cavell, 1979, 188, my emphasis). Indeed, he goes so far as to
say that our senses are satisfied in this way because the reality made present
to us does not exist. Cavell, however, also distinguishes this scepticism from
the ‘farce of skepticism’ (Cavell, 1979, 189), which denies as a consequence
that there is ever any reality to what is projected on screen. The latter view
is farcical because it takes scepticism only as a loss of conviction in the
external world and not as a means to reclaim that conviction (Cavell, 1979,
189). Scepticism, for Cavell, is not an end but a means; it is thus not
nihilistic but redemptive.
Cavell insists that sceptical doubt comes from a genuine anguish about the
world and about the communicability of experience. But the function of
sceptical doubt should not be limited to doubting reality because it slips
through the net of philosophy, doubting art because there are too many
instances where it lacks conviction, doubting communication because words
are inadequate to feelings or they do not mean the same thing to you as they
do to me, or doubting film because it uses an objective device to give me
views of a world from which I am excluded—thereby naturalising a world
in which I am alien and denaturing the world in which I exist. For Cavell,
scepticism is neither a final cause nor something that must be overcome; nor
is it something to forget about or to be avoided.
Acknowledgment
Acknowledgment is key to understanding the redemptive function of
scepticism. However, when it comes to understanding the ontology of film,
a simple acknowledgment of doubt is not enough because it does nothing to
restore our conviction in the world. In this respect, the second half of The
World Viewed can be read as an attempt to distinguish between instances of
empty acknowledgment that don’t take the other into account and the
acknowledgment that seeks to connect being together in/with the world by
recognition of difference or separateness. So in the chapter ‘Exhibition and
Self-Reference’, Cavell argues that self-reference is not the same as
acknowledgment because it doesn’t necessarily entail a relation to others.
Films, Cavell observes, have been self-referential from the outset and
there’s nothing to say that referencing the self carries any conviction about
anything. It may even entail disguising an absence of conviction (Cavell,
1979, 126). In the chapter ‘The Camera’s Implication’, Cavell considers
how cinema can respond to ‘the metaphysical dishonesty’ instantiated by
the camera’s position outside the picture. Arguing in a similar vein to his
point about self-reference, he observes that the camera including itself in the
image is an empty gesture—a documentary filmmaker undertaking such an
act, for example, might rightly be accused of not allowing the subject of his
film to reveal itself. What is also required, Cavell insists, is an
acknowledgment of the kind of work the camera does.
The rules for the acknowledgment of automatisms in art take their brief
from interpersonal relations. Acknowledgment between persons is not a
disclosure of something that was unknown to either party but a means of
repairing a relation that is damaged and that has broken or threatens to break
the connection between people. It must also recognise the difficulty that ‘the
other’ presents, and the desire to avoid having to recognise the other’s
position, that is, particularly in so far as it is a sceptical position.12 This is
the difficulty in other words that acknowledgment entails. Acknowledgment
is the restoration of a connection that nevertheless recognises the
separateness of the two parties. It is an attempt to become more fully
conscious of a relation or a situation in which one is already participating
(Cavell, 1979, 126-130).
Cavell finishes the 1971 edition of his book by suggesting that the
importance, and the danger, of film is its presentation of a world that is
complete without me, that holds me, as it were, on the outside of the picture.
Cavell says this is a world of immortality and of illusion (Cavell, 1979,
160). But Cavell also perceives a possible space for me in the picture by
invoking the possibility of a thorough-going reconciliation of the condition
of viewing a film with being thrown into the world as Heidegger understood
it. This power of film lies in its capacity to reduplicate the stakes of our own
traumatic entry into the world so that we might awaken from the slumber of
natural existence to arrive at a self-conscious relation to it. To achieve this,
however, is no simple matter. Film, Cavell insists, won’t satisfy our desire
for the world’s exhibition if we don’t let it appear, and the condition in
which this will happen is anxiety. Allowing the world to manifest itself
means being willing to let go of our actions and to allow the self to exhibit
the self without the self’s intervention. This road to self-knowledge, Cavell
imagines, even in 1971, is an ugly one. The terror that attaches to the
submission to this course necessarily entails a revelation of the self through
‘a betrayal of the self’, just as love for Cavell is always a betrayal of love
(Cavell, 1979, 160).
For Cavell, the modernist filmmaker, like the modernist artist, has the
opportunity to acknowledge the world’s separateness and to let it exhibit
itself. This is also a chance to pry oneself free of the deadlock that ensnared
12
As Kelley says, acknowledgment without recognition of avoidance is just ‘a bobble-head
doll on the dash of our lives, nodding “yes” to all that it encounters’ (2012, 29).
the romantics. Although pursuant of a return to nature that entailed an

interest both in its look and its conditions, the romantic interest in nature
never went beyond the role it played in the constitution of subjectivity.
Modernism, by contrast, focuses exclusively on the conditions of nature,
and not as they affect me, but in their indifference to me, as autonomous,
self-sufficient laws unto themselves (Cavell, 1979, 113). The modernist’s
concern is not with how the world is, but the fact that it is, its haecceity
(Cavell, 1979, 113, 117). She seeks not a return to nature, but to bear
witness to the return of nature indifferent to me as a return of the repressed,
where I am the superfluous one.
In cinema, the self-realisation of being someone who is not seen and a
consequent securing of a place for myself in the picture happens when the
camera demonstrates a certain candour about the world’s closedness to me
by denying the coherence of the world around me, the coherence, that is,
that cinema imagined for me in its mythological age. Cavell says that if I
can acknowledge this closedness, I will arrive at a real rather than illusory
sense or immortality, which is the immortality of the nature that survives me
and judges me afresh at every turn.
Reading The World Viewed more than 40 years after its first publication,
and after multiple readings of Deleuze’s cinema books and the coming (and
going) of psychoanalytic film theory, it is striking how much of what Cavell
has to say resonates at one extreme with a particular conception of the
Lacanian gaze and at the other with Deleuze’s schematisation of the history
of film. The extent to which Cavell’s attempt to bring an ethical dimension
to being on the outside of the picture is consistent with Lacan’s formulation
of gaze as objet petit a is work for the future. It seems unlikely that a
Cavellian schema operates in Deleuze’s cinema books as another of those
nets that Deleuze weaves from the work of other thinkers to cast over
cinema in order to make it speak philosophically. Yet it is hard not to notice
that Deleuze’s division between the movement-image and time-image has
some equivalence to Cavell’s division between mythic and modernist
cinema, and that both writers place Hitchcock on the cusp of their division,
commenting on the rise of clichés as the element that undoes cinema’s first
form while associating its second form with an emergent self-consciousness.
Both writers place considerable emphasis on cinematic automatism as a key
aspect of cinema’s ontology and both finish their inquiries into cinema with
a consideration of the operations of words and images. It is also arguable
that each project follows a phenomenological form. While this is no more
the place to begin a systematic comparison between these first two
comprehensive attempts to grapple with the complexity of cinema as both
an art and a form of entertainment than it is to inquire into the formulation
of the gaze in Cavell’s ontology of film, it can be said that Cavell’s thinking
on automatism is by no means reducible to a totalising celebration of pure
cinema. Cavell brings into play the paradoxical nature of a medium that
simultaneously disinvests its art of subjective mediation, makes provision
for the world in-itself, sees the world withdrawing itself, and turns
disinvestment into the subject of serious reflection. Automatism, for Cavell,
starts out as tied to the particularity of the photographic apparatus only to be
ultimately understood according to the same universals (of liberty and
constraint) that govern each of the arts. Far from remaining something over
which the human spirit has no power, it becomes the means of its ethical
expression. Automatism, in other words, is the key to the aesthetics of
cinema and to gauging filmmakers thinking seriously about the propensities
and the limitations of the medium in which they are working.
Bibliography
Bazin, André (1967) ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ in What is
Cinema? Volume I. Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley University of California
Press.
Benjamin, Walter (1972) ‘A Short History of Photography.’ Screen, 13, 5-
26.
Cavell, Stanley (1979) The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of
Film. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1986) Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1989) Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Robert Galeta, London: Athlone.
Epstein, Jean (1981) ‘Bonjour Cinema and Other Writings’, Trans. Tom
Milne, Afterimage, 10, 9-38.
Fried, Michael (1965) Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules
Olitski, Frank Stella: Fogg Art Museum 21 April-30 May 1965.
Cambridge, Mass: Garland Publishing Company.
Fried, Michael (1967) ‘Art and Objecthood.’ Artforum, June, 1967.
Reprinted in Gregory Battcock, ed. (1968) Minimal Art: A Critical
Anthology. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968, 116-47.
Fried, Michael (1980) Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder
in the Age of Diderot. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kelley, Kathleen (2012) ‘Faithful Mechanisms: Bazin’s Modernism.’
Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, vol. 17, no. 4, 23-37.
Phillips, James (2012) ‘The Fates of Flesh: Cinematic Realism Following
Bazin and Mizoguchi.’ Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities,
vol. 17, no. 4, 9-22.
Rancière, Jacques (2006) Film Fables. Trans. Emiliano Battista. Oxford:
Berg.
Rothman, William and Marian Keane (2000) Reading Cavell’s The World
Viewed: A Philosophical Perspective on Film, Detroit: Wayne State
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Sinnerbrink, Robert (2011) New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images.
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Trifonova, Temenuga (2011) ‘Film and Skepticism: Stanley Cavell on the
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Cavelle Automatism

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Film-Philosophy 18 (2014): Special Section on Stanley Cavell

Being on the Outside: Cinematic Automatism in Stanley

The presentation of an unseen world has historically been extolled as one of

his objective is to fashion it in accordance with his broader views of cinema

For Bazin, psychological realism satisfies an essentially human need to

consideration of what he calls humanity’s ‘condemnation to meaning’

refuting philosophical scepticism and the more general phenomenon of

modernist sensibility.10 Cavell, in a fashion consistent with this conception

disciplinary constraints and limitations that an artist seeks to master in order

these should be considered secondary or tertiary automatisms. Surely, too,

modernist art because modernism is not an exhaustion of the ‘natural’

the romantics. Although pursuant of a return to nature that entailed an

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