What Becomes of the Camera in the World on Film?

In The World Viewed, Stanley Cavell's first book about the movies, he addressed the perplexing question, what becomes of reality when it is transformed or transfigured by the medium of film? Forty years later, we are still coming to terms with his seminal reflections about the ontology of motion pictures, including his brilliant and provocative observations about screen acting. In thinking about the relationship between film actors and the camera—a relationship in which a screen performer “is the subject of a study, and a study not his own”—I have long pondered an equally perplexing question that Cavell left unspoken: namely, what becomes of the camera in the world on film? ¹ As I will argue in what follows, the answer to this question is that, however paradoxical it may seem, the camera that is absent from the character's world is no less real within her or his world—and, to be sure, no less unreal—than it is within the actor's world, a world in which the camera is present. This answer returns us to Cavell's question about the nature of the world on film, and those “human somethings” within it, and allows us to consider it afresh. ²