Thinking Film: Philosophy at the Movies

Hailed as one of America's original art forms, film has the distinctive character of crossing high and low art. But film has done more than this. According to American philosopher Stanley Cavell, film was also a place where America in the 1930s and 1940s did its thinking, a tradition that was taken up and enriched throughout world cinema. Can film indeed think? That is, can film do the work of philosophy?

Following Cavell's lead to think along the tear of the analytic—continental traditions,...