Movies with Stanley Cavell in Mind

DAVID LAROCCA is the author, editor, or coeditor of a dozen books. He edited The Thought of Stanley Cavell and Cinema, a commemorative issue of Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies, Inheriting Stanley Cavell, and Stanley Cavell’s Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes. He has taught philosophy and cinema and held visiting research and teaching positions at Binghamton, Cornell, Cortland, Harvard, Ithaca College, the School of Visual Arts, and Vanderbilt. www.DavidLaRocca.org

Foreword
The Importance of Stanley Cavell for the Study of Film
Sandra Laugier

Introduction
The Seriousness of Film Sustained
David LaRocca

I. The Companionship of Film and Philosophy

1. Love and Class in Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows
Robert B. Pippin

2. Lévinas, Cavell, and the Films of the Dardenne Brothers
William Rothman

3. The Specter of the Electronic Screen: Bruno Varela’s Reception of Cavell
Byron Davies

II. Recollecting and Remembering

4. The Pertinence of the Stars: Achieving Mortality in Little Did I Know and Only Angels Have Wings
Steven G. Affeldt

5. In Praise of Cinema: Cavell, Arnaud Desplechin, and Telling What Counts in Trois souvenirs de ma jeunesse
Joseph Mai

III. Rethinking Remarriage

6. Morality and Recognition: A Cavellian Reading of Elaine May’s A New Leaf
Paul Schofield

7. Remarriage Comedy, the Next Generation: The Bold Pursuit of Happiness
K. L. Evans

IV. The Female Voice Heard Anew

8. Passionate Utterances: Cavell, Film, and the Female Voice
Catherine Wheatley

9. Cavell, Altman, Cassavetes: The Melodrama of the Unknown Woman in A Woman Under the Influence and Nashville
Charles Warren

V. Contending with Conditions, Human and Otherwise

10. Stanley Kubrick and Stanley Cavell: Cinematic Syntax, Avoidance, and Acknowledgment
David Mikics

11. The Use and Abuse of Documentary Confessionals: Cavell, Žižek, and the Possibility of Justice in The Unknown Known and The Act of Killing
Amir Khan

12. Pursuits of Happiness in the Time of War: On Borhane Alaouié’s Beirut: The Encounter
Daniele Rugo

VI. Visibility, Audibility, and Intelligibility

13. Chantal Akerman and Stanley Cavell: Viewing in La Captive and Reviewing in Moral Perfectionism
Kate Rennebohm

14. Contemplating the Sounds of Contemplative Cinema: Stanley Cavell and Kelly Reichardt
David LaRocca

Acknowledgments
Contributors
Index