In this substantial passage from The World Viewed (1971), Stanley Cavell reflects on the relationship between the world and the screen, describing the latter as a portentous phenomenological frame without boundaries, capable of expanding or contracting to accommodate the span of the world that ‘happens’ within it.2 Nothing really ends on the screen: compared to painting and photography, the medium of film is the gestational and emphatic site of an eternal new beginning of reality. The spatial metaphor underlying Cavell’s discourse aligns with the intrinsically philosophical dimension of his reflection on cinema, but it can also prompt some related questions.