William Rothman

William Rothman (born June 25, 1944) is an American film theorist and critic. Since receiving his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University in 1974, he has authored numerous books, including Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze (1982; expanded Second Edition, 2012), The “I” of the Camera: Essays in Film Criticism, History and Aesthetic (1988; expanded Second Edition, 2004), Documentary Film Classics (1997), Reading Cavell’s “The World Viewed”: A Philosophical Perspective on Film (with Marian Keane) (2000), Must We Kill the Thing We Love? Emersonian Perfectionism and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock (2014), Tuitions and Intuitions: Essays at the Intersection of Film Criticism and Philosophy (2019), and the forthcoming The Holiday in His Eye: Stanley Cavell’s Vision of Film and Philosophy. Rothman also edited Cavell on Film (2005), Jean Rouch: A Celebration of Life and Film (2007), Three Documentary Filmmakers: Errol Morris, Ross McElwee, Jean Rouch (2009), and co-edited Looking with Robert Gardner (2016) and the forthcoming Writ on Water: The Sources and Reach of Film Imagination.

Rothman has published philosophical readings of a diversity of films ranging from the works of Alfred Hitchcock and other “classical” directors (e.g., George Cukor, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Yasujiro Ozu, Jean Renoir, Billy Wilder) to more contemporary filmmakers (e.g., Chantal Akerman, the Dardenne brothers, Abbas Kiarostami, Terrence Malick) and to historically significant documentaries (from Nanook of the North and Land without Bread to Night and Fog, “direct cinema” films of Richard Leacock and D. A. Pennebaker, ethnographic films of Jean Rouch andRobert Gardner, and personal documentaries by Alfred Guzzetti, Ross McElwee and Edward Pincus. Rothman has also written extensively on aspects of film theory and on the writings of Stanley Cavell, an American philosopher who made film a major focus of his work.

Rothman has since the 1970s been a voice championing the marriage of film studies and philosophy. His work helped pave the way for the emergence, and the present flourishing, of the intellectual discipline or sub-discipline that has come to be known as “film-philosophy.”

Life

William Rothman received his Ph.D. from Harvard’s Philosophy Department, where Stanley Cavell was his dissertation advisor. Cavell encouraged him to think of film as a subject for philosophy, to think of great films as philosophically serious, and to recognize that when he was thinking about films in his own way he was doing philosophy. After submitting his dissertation in 1973, he accepted a position as Assistant Professor in Cinema Studies at New York University. In 1976, a National Endowment for the Humanities grant brought him back to Harvard, "to develop a set of eight courses to the present curriculum in film and to develop new teaching and research tools...to help secure the humanistic incorporation of film into universities."

In 1986, Rothman became Director of the International Honors Program on Film, Television and Social Change in Europe and Asia. In 1989, he and his wife, filmmaker Kitty Morgan, wrote and co-produced (with the National Film Development Corporation of India) Unni, a 35mm feature film shot in South India and directed by the Indian filmmaker G. Aravindan. In 1990, Rothman relocated to Florida to be a Professor in the Motion Picture Program (now the Department of Cinematic Arts) at the University of Miami, where he has taught ever since.

Writings

In Rothman's first book, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze (1982), his stated goals were to achieve a philosophical perspective on Hitchcock's authorship and to investigate, philosophically, the conditions of authorship in film. In pursuit of these goals, Rothman performed extended readings, incorporating over 600 frame enlargements, of five Hitchcock films, articulating the ways the films express their ideas. His commitment was to allow the film to help teach him how to view it, how to think about it, how to find what he had at heart to say about it. The book established the critical procedures that Rothman has followed in writing about a wide range of films, filmmakers, genres, national cinemas and movements. Rothman has also written extensively on aspects of film theory and on the writings of Cavell.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Rothman’s work contested the assumption, then prevalent within academic film studies, that the field should prioritize theory over criticism and aspire to the condition of a science. In Rothman’s view, embracing theory as an authority higher than experience was tantamount to an avoidance of philosophy as Cavell understood and practiced it. By the 1990s, a sense that Cavell’s writings were potentially useful had become widespread, if hardly universal, not only within academic philosophy but also such fields as literary studies, American studies and religious studies. Within film studies, however, they were largely ignored. With Marian Keane, Rothman wrote Reading Cavell’s “The World Viewed” (2000) to reintroduce the field to the philosophical alternative Cavell’s book articulates, and he followed it up by editing a collection of his writings, Cavell on Film (2005).

With these books, Cavell’s philosophical procedures merged as a central subject of Rothman’s writings, which increasingly addressed the implications for his own critical writings of Cavell’s discovery, in the late 1980s, of the profound affinity between his way of thinking philosophically and that of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Cavell gave the name “Emersonian perfectionism” to the way of thinking he had come to recognize as his own, no less than Emerson’s, and in Cities of Words (2004), Cavell placed it within a philosophical and literary tradition of perfectionism he traced back to Plato and Aristotle and forward from there to thinkers such as John Locke, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and John Rawls, to artists such as William Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, Henry James and George Bernard Shaw, and to the Hollywood romantic comedies and melodramas of the 1930s and 1940 he had earlier studied.

In Must We Kill the Thing We Love? Emersonian Perfectionism and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock (2014), Rothman argued that Hitchcock’s ambivalence toward Emersonian perfectionism, compounded by ambivalence toward overcoming or transcending that ambivalence, was the driving force of the director’s work. The book traces a progression from the early British thrillers to the masterpieces of the 1950s and ultimately to Marnie, in which, as Rothman had argued in the chapter on that film he wrote for the Second Edition of The Murderous Gaze, Hitchcock overcame or transcended his ambivalence and embraced the Emersonian perfectionism he had always also resisted. And in writing this book, Rothman declared that he was himself an Emersonian perfectionist. That he now found himself with a name for his way of thinking, as well as a philosophical and historical context in which to place his own aspirations as a writer, did not lead him to alter his critical procedures; it enabled him, as he put it in the Introduction to Tuitions and Intuitions: Essays at the Intersection of Film Criticism and Philosophy, to express his thoughts more freely and in ways that are more overtly philosophical.

Books

• Hitchcock—The Murderous Gaze, Harvard University Press, 1982
• The “I” of the Camera: Essays in Film History, Criticism and Aesthetics, Cambridge University Press, 1988; Expanded edition, 2004
• Documentary Film Classics, Cambridge University Press, 1997
• Reading Cavell’s “The World Viewed”: A Philosophical Perspective on Film (with Marian Keane), Wayne State University Press, 2000
• Cavell on Film (editor), State University of New York Press, 2005
• Jean Rouch: A Celebration of Life and Film, Schena Editore and Presses de l'Université de Paris-Sorbonne (editor), 2007
• Three Documentary Filmmakers: Errol Morris, Ross McElwee, Jean Rouch (editor), State University of New York Press, 2009
• Hitchcock—The Murderous Gaze (expanded edition), State University of New York Press, 2012
• Must We Kill the Thing We Love? Emersonian Perfectionism and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock, Columbia University Press, 2014
• Looking with Robert Gardner, State University of New York Press (co-editor), 2016
• Tuitions and Intuitions: Essays at the Intersection of Film Criticism and Philosophy, State University of New York Press, 2019
• The Holiday in His Eye: Stanley Cavell’s Vision of Film and Philosophy, State University of New York Press (scheduled publication, November 2021)

Selected Keynote Addresses, Special Lectures, and Other Professional Activities

• “Cavell’s Two Takes on The Philadelphia Story,” La pensée du cinema: International Conference in Honor of Stanley Cavell, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, 2019
• “Pursuits of Happiness: Cavell in Transition,” “The Thought of Movies” Conference, University of California at Santa Barbara, 2019
• “Cavell Reading Cavell,” “The Thought of Movies” Conference, Boston University, 2019
• “Alfred Hitchcock’s Signature Motifs,” video essay for Criterion Collection DVD of Hitchcock’s The Lodger, 2017
• “Silent Cinema in China,” Columbia Global Center, Paris, 2017
• “Pursuing Pursuits of Happiness,” Colloquium “À la recherche du bonheur. Stanley Cavell, le cinéma et la vie ordinaire,” Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, 2017
• “Film, Philosophy, Education,” the Gregynog Conference on the Philosophy of Education, Wales, 2016
• “Dardenne, Levinas, Cavell,” Film-Philosophy conference, Edinburgh, 2016
• “Levinas and Cavell,” the annual Wittgenstein Lecture, Centre de philosophie contemporaine de la Sorbonne, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2016
• “Emerson, Film, Hitchcock,” Colloquium on Philosophy and Film, Åbo Akademi University, Finland, 2015
• “Seeing the Light in The Tree of Life,” International Colloquium on Film and Philosophy, Lima, Peru, 2014
• “Television Drama Then and Now,” the Annual George Brandt Lecture, University of Bristol, UK, 2014
• “Marnie: Hitchcock’s Last Masterpiece,” closing evening address at the New York International Film Festival, 2012
• “Suspense and Temporality in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock,” Conference on Suspenseful Times and the Moving Image, Tel Aviv University, 2010
• “Moral Perfectionism and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock,” Conference on Philosophy and Criticism,” The University of Sydney, August 2010
• “The Universal Hitchcock,” the Annual Daphne Mayo Lecture, University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, Australia, 2010

Further Reading

• Butler, Rex, “William Rothman’s Vertigo,” Film-Philosophy, Vol. 18, 2014
• Butler, Rex, “William Rothman,” in Rex Butler, Stanley Cavell and The Arts: Philosophy and Popular Culture, Bloomsbury, 2020,  107-27
• Cameron, Evan, “Documentary Film Classics by William Rothman,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 59, No. 2 (Spring, 2001), 215-217
• Carr, Jay, “A Wistful, Sensitive Unni," Boston Globe, September 14, 1989
• Cavell, Stanley, “Words for a Conversation,” in Charles Warren, ed., Beyond Document: Essays in Nonfiction Film, Wesleyan University Press, 1998, xi-xxviii
• Cholodenko, Alan, “Acknowledgment—No Knowledge Without it: An Introduction to William Rothman and His Work,” Film-Philosophy, Vol. 18, 2014
• Clayton, Alex, and Andrew Klevan, The Language and Style of Film Criticism, Routledge, 2012
• Crouse, Jeffrey, “Why Not Realize Your World? Philosopher/Film Scholar William Rothman Interviewed by Jeffrey Crouse,” Film International, Vol. 9, Issue 6, 2011
• LaRocca, David, editor, The Thought of Stanley Cavell and Cinema, Bloomsbury, 2019, passim
• MacLennan, Gary, “Rothman and the Challenge of Critical Realism,” Film-Philosophy, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1997
• Pye, Douglas, “Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze by William Rothman,” Journal of American Studies, Vol. 17, No. 1, 1983, pp. 107-109
• Rothman, William, “Against the System of the Suture,” Film Quarterly, 1975
• Sullivan, David, “‘I’ing Cinema: Rothman's Readings of Cinematographic Visions and Visionaries, Aesthetics,” Film-Philosophy, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1998
• Thomas, Paul, “Hitchcock—The Murderous Gaze,” American Film, April 1982
• Toles, George, “Writing About Performance: the Film Critic as Actor,” in Alex Clayton and Andrew Klevan, eds.,The Language and Style of Film Criticism, Routledge, 2012, 87-105
• Warren, Charles, “Documentary Film Classics,” Journal of Film and Video, 2000

External Links

University of Miami Faculty Profile

William Rothman Bibliography

Tribute to Stanley Cavell

Book Talk: William Rothman on Tuitions and Intuitions, November 13, 2019

William Rothman on Hitchcock's Signature Motifs on THE LODGER

Books & Books: Dr. William Rothman on Must We Kill the Thing We Love?, September 3, 2014

Tribute to G. Aravindan

References

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