Haunting the World

Essays on Film After Perkins and Cavell

Argues that the experience of the ordinary film viewer and the investigations of the film scholar or film philosopher are not necessarily so far apart.

In Haunting the World, Dominic Lash tries to show that taking films seriously in no way interferes with the pleasure we get from watching them. The book draws its title from the philosopher Stanley Cavell, who saw "haunting the world" as something we are all prone to and who claimed that cinema's relationship with this tendency is both an "importance" and a "danger" of film. Specifically, Lash proposes that the work of Cavell and of the critic and scholar V. F. Perkins have valuable lessons to offer contemporary film studies, some of which are in danger of being neglected. Written in a lively and approachable style that makes philosophical ideas accessible without simplifying them, the book argues that film theory risks going awry when it dismisses or underestimates the experience of the ordinary film viewer. Haunting the World offers fresh accounts of fundamental topics, including description, experience, and agency, and examines in detail important films by Ildikó Enyedi, Paul Thomas Anderson, Ridley Scott, Werner Herzog, Andrei Tarkovsky, Kelly Reichardt, and more.

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