Jeroen Gerrits – författare

Drawing on the film-philosophies of Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze, argues that skepticism is an ethical problem that pervades contemporary film.Because of its automatic way of recording reality, film has a privileged relation to the problem of skepticism. If early film theorists celebrate cinema for overcoming skeptical doubt about the power of human vision, recent film-philosophers argue that our postphotographic, digital cinema is heading toward a general acceptance of skepticism, as though nothing on screen has anything to do with reality any longer. Emerging from the interaction of Stanley Cavell's and Gilles Deleuze's film-philosophies, Cinematic Skepticism challenges both these views. Jeroen Gerrits takes the issue of skepticism beyond concern with knowledge, turning skepticism into an ethical problem that pervades film history and theory. At the same time, he rethinks a Cavello-Deleuzian approach across the digital and global turns in cinema. Combining clear explanations of complex philosophical arguments with in-depth analyses of the contemporary films Grizzly Man, Amélie, Three Monkeys, and The Headless Woman, Gerrits traces how cinema invents ways of dis/connecting to the world.

Drawing on the film-philosophies of Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze, argues that skepticism is an ethical problem that pervades contemporary film.Because of its automatic way of recording reality, film has a privileged relation to the problem of skepticism. If early film theorists celebrate cinema for overcoming skeptical doubt about the power of human vision, recent film-philosophers argue that our postphotographic, digital cinema is heading toward a general acceptance of skepticism, as though nothing on screen has anything to do with reality any longer. Emerging from the interaction of Stanley Cavell's and Gilles Deleuze's film-philosophies, Cinematic Skepticism challenges both these views. Jeroen Gerrits takes the issue of skepticism beyond concern with knowledge, turning skepticism into an ethical problem that pervades film history and theory. At the same time, he rethinks a Cavello-Deleuzian approach across the digital and global turns in cinema. Combining clear explanations of complex philosophical arguments with in-depth analyses of the contemporary films Grizzly Man, Amélie, Three Monkeys, and The Headless Woman, Gerrits traces how cinema invents ways of dis/connecting to the world.

Cavell’s Ontology of Film presents ten essays by some of the most prominent international scholars of Stanley Cavell’s work with a double purpose: to look back, half a century after its original publication, at Cavell’s now seminal film-philosophical book The World Viewed (1971, enlarged 1979), and to draw on its concepts to assess the world in the current age of digital media and climate change.The volume opens with a series of essays that revisit Cavell’s discussion of film—crucially including classical Hollywood movies—in the context of modernism. Several authors consider whether this preoccupation with modernism in Cavell’s early work ultimately (and anachronistically) gave way to an embrace of romanticism or whether Cavell conceives these frameworks as offering different responses to the persistent problem of skepticism. Others consider how popular filmmakers or film genres outside Hollywood might contribute to, or alter, Cavell’s thoughts on the movies. Moreover, taking to heart that some of Cavell’s main lines of thought are premised on the idea of film as an analog medium that projects and screens the world inside a theater, several contributions to this volume nevertheless project The World Viewed’s concepts onto the future of our televisual and digital culture. The volume finally loops back to Cavell’s discussion of modernism in The World Viewed so as to find the seeds of a Cavellian politics for the age of climate disaster.Thus, beyond celebrating the past through a collection of reviews and reflections on The World Viewed—a book of “ontological reflection” that themselves conceive the world on screen as “a world past”—the present volume is best understood as a series of Cavellian meditations on media and mediated relations to the world, sustained, in the wake of Cavell’s own passing (2018), by an ongoing current of thought on the idea of temporality itself.