Acknowledgment - No Knowledge Without It: An Introduction to William Rothman and his Work Alan Cholodenko 1

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1 Acknowledgment - No Knowledge Without It: An Introduction to William Rothman and his Work Alan Cholodenko 1 In preparing to deliver the formal Introduction of William Rothman at the symposium Stanley Cavell and the Question of Moral Perfectionism in American Cinema at the University of Sydney on 6 August 2010, I was reminded of Stanley Cavell s compelling axiom, No knowledge without acknowledgment. In recasting that Introduction for this Special Section of Film-Philosophy, I was reminded of it again. It is a thought that the person I was to introduce not only brought home to me but has lived by. I know that well. For I ve known William Rothman as not only a colleague but dear friend since 1968 that s 46 years! when we were both graduate students at Harvard, he in Philosophy, I in Fine Arts. In 1968 and 1969, a small number of us graduate students gave the first film courses in the regular academic year at Harvard: he on Hitchcock, I on Orson Welles. Bill, as he is known, went on to finish his thesis the first Harvard PhD on film under philosopher Stanley Cavell, the Walter M. Cabot Professor (now Emeritus) of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, and then to teaching jobs at Harvard, NYU, and the University of Miami, where he has taught for over two decades. As for me, I came to the University of Sydney in 1978 to create its Film Studies program in the Fine Arts Department. But, even while living on the opposite sides of the earth, Bill and I maintained our friendship. In 1995, he invited me to lecture to his students on Frederick Wiseman s documentaries, the subject of my Harvard PhD, in his course The Nonfiction Film. Later, he invited me to be on his panel on Jean Rouch and film at the 2005 Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in London. 2 And finally, he came to Australia. 3 It was a rare delight to be able to welcome him to Sydney, after so many years of 1 Dr Alan Cholodenko is an Honorary Associate of the Department of Art History and Film Studies at The University of Sydney, from which he retired in 2001 as Senior Lecturer in Film and Animation Studies. 2 This led to the publication Three Documentary Filmmakers: Errol Morris, Ross McElwee, Jean Rouch, edited by William Rothman, in which my essay Jean Rouch s Les maîtres fous: Documentary of Seduction, Seduction of Documentary, is happily included. 3 Brought there thanks to Associate Professor Rex Butler of the University of Queensland, to the University of Queensland which brought Bill to Australia to give its Daphne Mayo lecture to the United States Studies Centre, to then Acting Directors of the Power Institute Dr Catriona Moore and Professor Roger Benjamin, to the Power Institute, to Dr Richard Smith, to the Department of Art History and Film Studies, to the Department of Philosophy, and to the School of Letters, Arts and Media all of the University of Sydney which sponsored the symposium, and Andrew Yip and Jennifer Beckett, who assisted in the organising thanks to all these people and institutions. 1

2 waiting, and to introduce him at the symposium. 4 Indeed, it was a singular, and singularly personal, pleasure for me, the consequence of which was, and is here, an Introduction rather different from the standard model, one possessing, I hope, more than adequate compensations. Let me sketch for you key aspects of Professor Rothman s work therefore Stanley Cavell s work, too to help in some small way to contextualise key issues and coordinates of this Special Section. In his scholarly publications Rothman has focused his attention on three areas in particular. First, the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Rothman s 1982 book Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze is simply canonical. In my opinion, one cannot do work on Hitchcock without reference to Rothman and that book; a book which is, for me, one of the greatest works in the literature of the study of film. Indeed, I must here propose for that first book of Rothman s even as Rothman proposed in that book for that first film of Hitchcock, The Lodger that that book announced his [Rothman s] central concerns and declared a position at once a philosophical position on the conditions of human existence and a critical one on the powers and limits of the medium and the art of film to which he [Rothman] [has] remained faithful over the years (1982, 7). His second area of focus is documentary film theory. Rothman s The I of The Camera: Essays in Film Criticism, History, and Aesthetics (1988; 2 nd edition 2004) is a collection of articles, many already published elsewhere, not only supplementing his work on Hitchcock in The Murderous Gaze, especially with the essays Vertigo: The Unknown Woman in Hitchcock and North by Northwest: Hitchcock s Monument to the Hitchcock Film, and expanding his reconsideration of Hollywood with Reflections on the Classical American Cinema but extending his thinking, begun in The Murderous Gaze, on documentary film, in particular cinéma vérité, via a consideration of Alfred Guzzetti s Family Portrait Sittings, cinéma vérité itself an abiding interest for Rothman. Continuing that focus on documentary, his next book was Documentary Film Classics (1997), a text offering a very different view of documentary than that, for instance, of Bill Nichols Ideology and the Image and Representing Reality, works canonical in Film Studies. Typical of Rothman s approach, the book combines close analysis of major films with critical readings opening the texts to their significance as historical documents and, to quote Rothman, their aspirations and achievements as films [while] also sustain[ing] philosophical investigations of a number of 4 Dr Richard Smith, also of this Department, who organised the symposium, asked me to serve as its Moderator, hence to deliver the Introduction of Rothman as its keynoter, for which I thank him here. 2

3 interrelated issues and themes (p. ix). Key among these serious themes is that, again to quote Rothman: The medium [of film] transforms or transfigures reality when the world is revealed, reveals itself, on film. And reality itself, in our experience, is already stamped by our fantasies (p. xiii). The leading contemporary continental philosopher Slavoj Žižek wrote for the back cover of Documentary Film Classics that the book is not about a specific marginal genre of cinema but about something more far-reaching. This book is simply a must for anyone who wishes to understand cinema. And Rothman s most recent book is the anthology Three Documentary Filmmakers: Errol Morris, Ross McElwee, Jean Rouch, published in 2009, a book in which Rothman not only writes of McElwee but continues his engagement with the work of French cinéma vérité pioneer Rouch, and in which I join Rothman in that meditation with an article of my own on Rouch. Moreover, I join him in his understanding that Morris, McElwee, and Rouch make philosophical films, as well as the understanding that, as Rothman states, quoting Rouch: Cinema is the creation of a new reality (2009, 10). Rothman's third area of focus is Stanley Cavell s writings on film, which is the subject of this section. Cavell was not only Rothman s doctoral advisor but, over the years since, his leading interlocutor. And Rothman is the foremost exponent of Cavell s philosophy of film, as well as its foremost interpreter and explicator, having authored the key book, Reading Cavell s The World Viewed: A Philosophical Perspective on Film, with Marian Keane in 2000, which Rothman followed up in 2005 with Cavell on Film. This is an anthology of previously uncollected writings of Cavell on the subject, edited by Rothman, and with an evocative and illuminating overview by him of Cavell s writings on film in the Introduction. Here, as with his work on Hitchcock and documentary, Rothman s work is not only indispensable but also pivotal, mounting the case that film is a form of philosophising, that films are to be taken seriously as philosophy, that they offer knowledge in ways declarative of the nature of the medium, and that they therefore call for acknowledgment, including of the knowledge they offer, as well as of those who author that knowledge. And that acknowledgment, as Cavell declares and performs, as does Rothman, is to be made by appealing to ordinary language, to what we ordinarily say and mean, appropriate to the ordinary nature of films in our lives, as well as the ordinary nature of philosophy in our lives, marking for Cavell and Rothman an affinity of film and philosophy in the ordinary. This affinity is at the same time, in terms of the self-reflection that is for them the natural condition, as it were, of both film and philosophy, an extraordinary affinity, an affinity in the extraordinary, the wondrous, for them. 3

4 That necessity of acknowledgment, serving as a precondition to knowledge, includes for Rothman the acknowledgment of Cavell himself and of his work, which has for far too long been called for but not tendered, rather, repressed, by the Anglo-American institution of Film Studies. All the more shocking, as Rothman writes in his Introduction to Cavell on Film that Cavell is the only major American philosopher who has made the subject of film a central part of his work (2005, xiii). As Rothman puts it in that Introduction: Writing about movies has been strand over strand with Stanley Cavell s philosophical life from his earliest to his latest writings. As he observes in the Preface to Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman, Cavell s thinking about film has for four decades been bound up with his thinking about most of whatever else I have been thinking about in what may be called philosophy or literature. (2005, xi) I gather this to mean that, for Rothman, the philosophical ideas and concerns animating Cavell s writings on the philosophy of film are so interwoven with the philosophical ideas and concerns animating Cavell s other writings that the former cannot be disentangled from the latter. Nonetheless, let me list those writings on the philosophy of film: The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (1971; enlarged edition 1979), an account of Cavell s remembered experience of film and of the conditions that constitute the medium and art of film; Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981), where Cavell first elaborates the Emersonian moral perfectionism at play in the genre of the comedy of remarriage he discovers in the Hollywood cinema of the 1930s and 40s; Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (1996), its eponymous genre for Cavell derived from the comedy of remarriage; Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (2004), which intersperses readings of movies and of classic texts of moral philosophy (Rothman, 2005, xi) in terms of the comedy of remarriage; as well as his essays articulating the subject in his 1984 book Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes and numerous articles, including those anthologised in Rothman s Cavell on Film. Rothman s insight, for me, implies more. As he suggests in the Introduction to Cavell on Film, not only did Cavell discover that Hollywood films inherited the philosophical concerns of American transcendentalism (2005, xxii), Cavell himself inherited those concerns central to his philosophy from those films, in and through his experience of the films he loved to go to the movies to see every week and came to think and write about. Rothman states there: 4

5 It is in the very movies that were for so many years a normal part of Cavell s week that Emerson s ways of thinking remained alive within American culture, available as an inheritance. Apart from the role Hollywood movies played in Cavell s education, it would not have been possible for a philosopher who received his professional training within an Anglo-American analytical tradition that has never acknowledged Emerson as a philosopher to have inherited Emerson s ways of thinking at all. (2005, xxii) And this leads to the astonishing further intuition for Rothman that Cavell s own philosophical procedures are underwritten by the ways American movies think about society, human relationships, and their own condition as films (2005, xxii). But it suggests too, for me, that film has been more than a central part of Cavell s education, work, and practice of philosophy. Cavell s has been a life transformed, transfigured animated, reanimated, I would propose by film: a philosophical life in film, in film as philosophy. In other words, his life his philosophical life went to the movies! The movies as a form of animation, of reanimation! And here, by philosophy, I mean not only ontology and epistemology but aesthetics and ethics, indeed, where arguably the aesthetic and ethical are for Cavell privileged modes of the ontological and epistemological, the aesthetic foregrounded by Cavell in his repeated characterisations of film as the latest of the great arts. Here, film is itself reanimated as a mode of philosophising and, at the same time, philosophising is itself reanimated as a mode of, if you ll allow, filming, filming itself a form of thinking and thinking about thinking, a form of not only self-reflection but self-transformation, a form of reanimation! And cultural- and world-transformation reanimation. But I must here add that and it would be derelict for me not to do so as cognate to his writings on Cavell and call for acknowledgment of Cavell, Rothman has published numerous challenges to and critiques of film theory, in particular the Anglo-American version of late 1960s French Marxist film theory, the version that ruled the field of Film Studies into the early 1980s, and arguably does in certain regards still, even if only as a ghost that won t go away. One cannot but think first of Rothman s 1975 article, Against the System of the Suture, published in Film Quarterly, and reprinted in Movies and Methods, edited by Bill Nichols, in But there are many more such articles, as well as conference papers, where Rothman is articulating a critique of such theory, and the ways in which those wedded to it wield it, while at the same time defending and advocating a philosophy of film, a philosophy he has, in fact, been at the forefront of creating and promoting. Here, one thinks of Rothman s 1991 Society for Cinema Studies paper, Multi-Culturalism and the Philosophy of Stanley Cavell: Must Cinema 5

6 Studies Speak in One Voice?, where he argued that Film Studies embrace of theory, historically, was also a repression of philosophy, and in particular of Cavell s way of thinking philosophically. As Rothman framed it in the challenging statement he read to the Plenary Session of that conference: From an Emersonian perspective, Cavell s writing urges us to speak about film in our own human voices, in words accountable to our own experience but unsanctioned by any higher authority. His writing threatens the comforting illusion that film study s legitimacy has been definitively established by the higher authority our field calls theory. From a Cavellian perspective, the reign of theoretical systematizing over film study, like its reign over philosophy, bears a repressive aspect. While Bill and I have had our disagreements over that late 1960s film theory, to say nothing of theory as such, which we addressed through correspondence even before the existence of , not only have we been supportive and encouraging of each other s work, I have myself found late 1960s film theory problematic in key regards, in response to which my own work has constituted likewise a critique and a challenge, my response including drawing there, but not only there, upon Bill s work, including drawing sustenance from it. And we both have common ground in the need to bring film and philosophy together; he in terms of the work of Cavell, I in terms of the French poststructuralist and postmodernist approaches in particular those of Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard which for 30 years now I have been bringing to the theorising of film, the last 23 of which to the theorising, in my papers and publications, of film as a form of animation. Of course, such poststructuralist and postmodernist approaches to film can be and have been claimed to be not philosophy, a position I understand Bill to have himself espoused but has modified, at least insofar as he believes that, unlike late 1960s Anglo-American film theory, such poststructuralist and postmodernist approaches such theories have not misrepresented, even falsified and betrayed, the ideas of the French thinkers they have brought and bring to the enterprise. But this contesting of theory by philosophy, the elegy for theory (to use D.N. Rodowick s term) philosophy would ostensibly wish to pronounce, is itself for me a contentious, to say nothing of complex, matter in need of substantial elaboration and clarification, whether that happen here or not. Assuredly, we have common ground, insofar as we have witnessed the blackballing of the approaches we have brought to film by those institutions wedded to and propounding late 1960s Anglo-American film theory. It seems only lately that our approaches have found places of welcome in Film Studies, as well as in conferences, symposia, and journals of other organisations, where they are now in fact being given an airing. For 6

7 example, Bill presented a paper in June 2010 at the Hommage à Stanley Cavell: l écran de nos pensées: philosophie et cinéma two day symposium at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France, where Cavell was at the same time awarded an honorary doctorate. And in July 2010, I presented a paper at the Film-Philosophy conference at the University of Warwick in the UK, where there were two panels on the work of Cavell, one of which was chaired by the Editor of and one of the authors in this Special Section, Dr Robert Sinnerbrink. But here I am compelled to request: even as this Special Section is obviously another such moment where Cavell s work is being foregrounded, to be given considered address and thereby in that sense acknowledged, let us not forget to give such considered address and acknowledgment to Rothman s own contributions to the wedding of film and philosophy; a marriage or should I not say remarriage? a remarriage where each film and philosophy reanimates the other a remarriage for Cavell and Rothman not only possible but necessary, but the general recognition of which possibility and necessity is still in largest part a non-event in the disciplines of both Philosophy and Film Studies, and, I hasten to add, Animation Studies. I call for this of Rothman s contributions not least because, as he wrote in his Acknowledgments to The I of the Camera: one thing one learns by being a student of Stanley Cavell is that a student is not a disciple. We have separate visions; we see eye-to-eye, but from different slants (1988, xvi). And, parenthetically, we don t really want to be on the receiving end of Rothman s murderous gaze, do we?! Which is, in a way, to say that the largest reach of this publication (in) Film- Philosophy, what is most at stake in it, is, for me, that wonder that constitutes that wedding itself of film and philosophy, a wondrous remarriage that is, I must confess, highly suggestive in terms of my own work on animation but which I shall properly refrain from alluding to further in this Introduction, leaving it to the authors of the papers that follow to, in their own ways, animate Rothman and Cavell, even as they are animated by them, even as I and my work have been animated by Bill and his work. And, I hope, he and his work by me and mine. Leaving me with but this last bit of acknowledgment to tender. As we say Down Under, Lord luv ya, Bill. 7

8 Bibliography Cavell, S. (1971; enlarged edition 1979). The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Cavell, S. (1981). Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Cavell, S. (1984). Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cavell, S. (1996). Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cavell, S. (2004). Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Cholodenko, A. (2009). Jean Rouch s Les maîtres fous: Documentary of Seduction, Seduction of Documentary. In Rothman, W. (Ed.). Three Documentary Filmmakers: Errol Morris, Ross McElwee, Jean Rouch ( ). Albany: State University of New York Press. Rodowick, D.N. (2007). An Elegy for Theory. October, 122, Rothman, W. (1975). Against the System of the Suture. Film Quarterly, 29 (1), Reprinted in Nichols, B. (Ed.). (1982). Movies and Methods: An Anthology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rothman, W. (1982). Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Rothman, W. (1988; 2d Edition 2004). The I of The Camera: Essays in Film Criticism, History, and Aesthetics. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rothman, W. (1991). Multi-Culturalism and the Philosophy of Stanley Cavell: Must Cinema Studies Speak in One Voice?. Paper presented at the 1991 Society for Cinema Studies conference (unpublished). Rothman, W. (1997). Documentary Film Classics. New York: Cambridge University Press. Rothman, W., with Keane, M. (2000). Reading Cavell s The World Viewed: A Philosophical Perspective on Film. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Rothman, W. (2005). Cavell on Film. Albany: State University of New York Press. Rothman, W. (Ed.). (2009). Three Documentary Filmmakers: Errol Morris, Ross McElwee, Jean Rouch. Albany: State University of New York Press. 8