The Conception of Film for the Subject of Television: Moral Education of the Public and a Return to an Aesthetics of the Ordinary

Stanley Cavell was no doubt the first to account for the transformation of theory and criticism brought about by reflection on popular culture—such as so-called mainstream cinema. However, Cavell is less concerned with reversing artistic hierarchies or inverting the relation between theory and practice than with the self-transformation required by our encounters with new experiences. Robert Warshow, Cavell’s inspiration on these matters and the author of remarkable analyses of popular culture, put it thus:

We are all “self-made men” culturally, establishing ourselves in terms of the particular choices we make from among the confusing multitude of stimuli that present themselves to us. Something more than the pleasures of personal cultivation is at stake when one chooses to respond to Proust rather than to Mickey Spillane, to Laurence Olivier in Oedipus Rex rather than Sterling Hayden in The Asphalt Jungle. And when one has made the “right” choice, Mickey Spillane and Sterling Hayden do not disappear; perhaps no one gets quite out of sight of them. There is great need, I think, for a criticism of “popular culture” which can acknowledge its pervasive and disturbing power without ceasing to be aware of the superior claims of the higher arts, and yet without a bad conscience.

Cite this book chapter: Laugier, S. "The Conception of Film for the Subject of Television: Moral Education of the Public and a Return to an Aesthetics of the Ordinary", dans David LaRocca (dir.), The Thought of Stanley Cavell and Cinema. Turning Anew to the Ontology of Film a Half-Century after The World Viewed, New York, Bloomsbury, 2020, pp. 210-227. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501349195.0020