ABSTRACT
The world might very well be the only given of fi lm studies, something as common to indexical theories of the photographic image as it is to studies of transnational cinema. As Stanley Cavell has famously argued in The World Viewed, cinema has a special relation to the world. Recall, for instance, his discussion of the world of painting as it stands in opposition to the world of cinema:
The world of a painting is not continuous with the world of its frame; at its frame, a world fi nds its limits. We might say: a painting is a world; a photograph is of the world. What happens in a photograph is that it comes to an end. A photograph is cropped, not necessarily by a paper cutter or by masking but by the camera itself. The camera crops it by pre-determining the amount of the view that it will accept; cutting, masking, enlarging, predetermining the amount after the fact. . . . The camera, being fi nite, crops a portion from an indefi nitely larger fi eld; continuous portions of
heideggerandcinem a
that fi eld could be included in the photograph in fact taken; in principle, it could all be taken. Hence objects in photographs that run past the edge do not feel cut. . . . When a photograph is cropped, the rest of the world is cut out. The implied presence of the rest of the world, and its explicit rejection, are as essential in the experience of the photograph as what it represents.1
