Books like The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film

I have to emphatically disagree with the Amazon reviewer who called this an "easy read." Sure, Cavell doesn't use the standard theory-speak; he uses plain English, but he uses it in strange ways. He also presumes that the reader possesses not only a thorough familiarity with classic Hollywood cinema, New Hollywood cinema, and the European "New Waves" of the 1960s, but also a solid grounding in the history of philosophy, Romantic poetry, early photographic history, and the history of modern art from Manet through color field painting. I thought I had a fairly firm grasp on most of those things, and still I found the book something to wrestle with. But wrestling with it is a rewarding experience. Cavell's way of looking at cinema seems wholly unique in the history of film theory or film philosophy - there's little I can even compare it to. My reading of the book is that he views philosophy and art as two sides of the same coin, two variations of historically conditioned responses to our epistemological and ontological condition. The changes we see throughout the history of art (and throughout the history of cinema, which is but a subset of that history and whose arrival itself signals a change) correspond with roughly contemporaneous developments in the history of philosophy - both are reflections of our faith in the world, or our isolation from it. The central concepts he circles around continuously all possess a dual meaning, both artistic and philosophical - "presence," "presentness," "acknowledgement," "conviction," "automatism" - I won't attempt to define them because I can't. I don't think that I've understood more than 10% of this book. I give it 4 stars because what I have understood is compelling, and because what I haven't yet understood I feel like is worthy of trying to understand.