CONVERSATIONS 7 1. Apologies to Stanley Cavell P. ADAMS SITNEY I read The World Viewed as soon as it was published in 1971. Although I was outra- ged (and even at times disgusted) by that first reading, I was touched by its eloquen- ce. My hostility was undoubtedly the premature judgment of a champion of avant- garde cinema toward a critic whose taste differed so radically from mine. I could har- dly attend to what Cavell actually wrote at that time. My rage began with the opening chapter’s claim that “in the case of films, it is generally true that you do not really like the highest instances unless you also like the typical ones.” Here, I thought, was a pa- rodic example of a professorial movie buff, taking what the Brattle Cinema in Cam- bridge happened to screen as the art of film. He amply declares that only a fool would judge paintings or music on the same basis. I wondered would he would say to some- one who took the full range of books in the “philosophy” section of a typical Boston bookstore as the parameters of his disciple, noting at that time that there would be nothing by Cavell himself on such a shelf. (His 1969 collection of essays, Must We Mean What We Say? had disappeared by then. I had to order the book—hardcover only—from the publisher a year later.) The fifteenth of The World Viewed’s nineteen chapters, called “Excursus: Some Modernist Painting,” drove home to me what a loss Cavell’s mind and pen were to what I then considered serious film study. In that chapter he brilliantly enacted the characteristic moves of his best writing, above all, by investing aesthetic distinctions with moral values. It didn’t take the copious footnotes to that chapter to show how indebted his choice of privileged paintings was to Michael Fried’s controversial (and dubious) taste. Yet his way of writing about them was astounding, and very moving: Acceptance of such objects achieves the absolute acceptance of the moment, by defeating the sway of the momentous. It is an ambition worthy of the highest