How Movies Think

Abstract This chapter explains and defends Cavell’s accounts of both the nature of film realism and the value of (some) films as art, focusing on photographic production and continuity editing. What is central to Cavell’s account of the powers and artistic achievements of film is neither plot alone nor photography alone, but rather how plots of human importance are presented in photographically produced and aptly edited moving images. The artistic interest of the Cavell-defined genres of the comedy of remarriage and the melodrama of the unknown woman are traced to how they respond to social circumstances and the possibilities of meaningful life they enable and inhibit, and the fate of these genres under contemporary social conditions is considered.