Ontology of filmic experience and the emergence of self-consciousness in Stanley Cavell's philosophy of cinema

The article is devoted to the analysis of the filmic experience in the philosophy of film of American philosopher Stanley Cavell and its impact on the development of human self-consciousness. Cavell argues that the cinema has philosophical and educational significance, since it is able to reveal the general conditions of our relation to reality. Cavell’s philosophy of film is a “phenomenology of spirit” in the realm of cinema, reveals both the development of viewer’s consciousness from immediate perception to reflective self-consciousness and development of the cinema itself from naive realism to philosophical comprehension of ontological and epistemological dimensions of filmic experience. Cavell gives to the problems of film an existential dimension, correlating filmic experience with the concepts of freedom, autonomy and reflection, and thinking that cinema can solve the most important philosophical task of genesis of subjectivity and understanding its place in reality.