ABSTRACT
A central goal of Stanley Cavell’s work is to understand the emergence of modern skepticism and with it an image of ourselves as detached spectators looking at objects devoid of intrinsic meaning, giving way to a characteristic feeling of isolation and loss of contact with external reality. Now film, according to him, is the art that best encapsulates that condition, serving as a “moving image of skepticism.” This chapter attempts to elucidate that claim, arguing that Cavell’s exploration of our experience of photographs and movies provides an object of comparison capable of reminding us of aspects of our ordinary relation(s) to the world that have been largely repressed in our epistemological investigations since modernity, ultimately showing that the picture of a detached spectator that we tend to assume in those investigations falls apart once it is thought through.
