The claim of film

This article explores Stanley Cavell’s reflections on cinema and the cinematic as a medium that estranges and, in this way, educates our experience, compelling us to rediscover our ordinary life. As a popular practice, cinema requires no authorization from critics or theory but educates experience to be worthy of trust. It can do so only if we are willing to confront what it reveals – our fantasies, our vulnerabilities, and fears. The task is to reclaim film as a common resource of intelligence, capable of resisting conformity and sustaining the democratic work of acknowledgment. At stake is its political role in countering the rising authoritarianism by fostering imagination and responsiveness.