A Succession of Automatic World Projections?

Having so far puzzled things out, one is confronted with the following remark from Cavell's book on film:

The reality in a photograph is present to me while I am not present to it; and a world I know, and see, but to which I am nevertheless not present (through no fault of my subjectivity), is a world past.

This can't be right: it cannot follow from this kind of asymmetrical presence that one is presented with the past, since the events in a play are meant to be happening now. If photographs present the past, that is further fact about them.

Even if we grant this further fact, Cavell's account of film is almost impossible to square with what I took to be his conception of theatre. He argues, in effect, that since film is screened photography, it too presents what it presents as past. Thus we can explain, without need for the theatrical convention of make-belief, why no-one attempts to intervene:

In viewing a movie my helplessness is mechanically assured: I am present not at something happening, which I must confirm, but at something that has happened, which I absorb (like a memory).

But, again, this can't be right. I suppose one could treat the screened images in a movie theatre as photographs: watching a film as, in effect, a documentary about its previous enactment. But that is not what we typically do.

As Cavell points out, a photograph – unlike a painting – is always implicitly of a whole world:

You can always ask, pointing to an object in a photograph – a building, say – what lies behind it, totally obscured by it. [...] You can always ask, of an area photographed, what lies adjacent to that area, beyond the frame.

Imagine asking these questions as you watch a film. If you are properly immersed, you won't say: "Behind the building is the studio parking lot; adjacent to the actors are lights and a trailer."

To watch a film is to make-believe that these are not photographs, in Cavell's sense: and so there is, so far, no reason why what is presented must be presented as past. (Mulhall is therefore wrong to find a "conflict between the genre of science fiction, with its projections of future social and technological arrangements, and the grain of the film medium." We can travel in time.)

In effect, Cavell's account of film conflicts with the premise on which his conception of theatre rests: that, when immersed, our practical reasoning is in the direction of what we make-believe, not what we believe. We know that these are screened photographs, just as we know that they are actors on stage. But this is quite irrelevant. What matters, and what Cavell leaves quite opaque, is the content of the make-belief (or of the many kinds of make-belief) through which we engage with film.