Film Üzerine Felsefi Bir Soruşturma: Stanley Cavell’ın Film Ontolojisi
A Philosophical Investigation On Film: Stanley Cavell’s Film Ontology

Summary/Abstract: The relationship between film and philosophy commonly appears as the reflection of philosophical problems on the silver screen or as a discussion of the aesthetic problems of cinema with the concepts of philosophy. Stanley Cavell’s film ontology is significantly different with respect to the relationship between film and philosophy. He approaches film from an ontological point of view. In doing so, he refers to the theoretical framework that Wittgenstein presents in his late period. Cavell, with reference to Wittgenstein’s theory of meaning, denies the distinction between appearence and reality, image is not an image of reality; on the contrary, it is the reality itself. For him, the attitude of modern philosophy that separates appearance from the reality is an illusion. Cavell bases this Wittgensteinian attitude on the ontology of the photographic image. According to this ontological position, photograph is not an image of a reality but an autonomous reality. Cavell then tries to understand cinema with this ontological structure that he attributes to the photographic image. The reality of the film world and the contactlessness of the audience’s actual world with the film world create a dual ontological structure. Cavell makes an analogy between the effect of this ontological duality on the audience and philosophical skepticism. Hence, he calls the film the moving image of skepticism. For Cavell, the world of the film is a magical world in which the audience is in doubt between existence and non-existence. In this study, I aim to clarify the ontological status that Cavell attributes to the photographic image and the relationship between film and philosophical skepticism In addition, I will claim that the relationship Cavell established between film and philosophy, has an unusual quality because he uses the film as a philosophical scene.

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