Philosophy on Screen

  • Samuel Beckett & Alan Schneider – Film (1965)

    USA1961-1970Alan SchneiderPhilosophyPhilosophy on ScreenSamuel BeckettShort Film

    F I L M I N F O
    1. Samuel Beckett made a single work for projected cinema. It’s in essence a chase film; the craziest ever committed to celluloid. It’s a chase between camera and pursued image that finds existential dread embedded in the very apparatus of the movies itself. The link to cinema’s essence is evident in the casting, as the chased object is none other than an aged Buster Keaton, who was understandably befuddled at Beckett and director Alan Schneider’s imperative that he keep his face hidden from the camera’s gaze. The archetypal levels resonate further in the exquisite cinematography of Academy Award-winner Boris Kaufman, whose brothers Dziga Vertov and Mikhail Kaufman created the legendary self-reflexive masterpiece Man With a Movie Camera. Commissioned and produced by Grove Press’s Barney Rosset, FILM is at once the product of a stunningly all-star assembly of talent, and a cinematic conundrum that asks more questions than it answers.Read More »

  • Roberto Rossellini – Socrate (1971)

    1971-1980DramaItalyPhilosophy on ScreenRoberto Rossellini

    ‘Socrates’ Mirrors the Platonic Touch of Rossellini
    Something more than wordplay is involved when one describes Roberto Rossellini’s “Socrates,” which opened yesterday at the New Yorker Theater, as the great Italian director’s most Socratic film, in his most Platonic style.

    Although the movie was shot entirely in Spain with lots of correctly costumed extras, who walk around what look to be the freshly painted, spruced-up remains of the sets of Anthony Mann’s unfortunate “Fall of the Roman Empire,” it concedes no more than it absolutely must to the demands of a popular cinema that seeks access to the intellect through visual grandeur and primal emotions.Read More »

  • Vladimir Kobrin – Son Plyashuschih Chelovechkov AKA The Dream of the Little Dancing Men (1997)

    1991-2000ArthouseExperimentalPhilosophy on ScreenRussiaVladimir Kobrin

    Film is about communication. Kobrin pays homage to Vasili Nalimov, to his work and life. Nalimov was a mathematician and philosopher, but was also an eccentric anarchist with mystic tendencies who spent eighteen years in a concentration camp.
    Nalimov’s philosophy relies on probabilistic methods in the natural and social sciences and applies them to the study of language and consciousness.
    The film’s name Kobrin took from Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Dancing Men”.Read More »

  • Ermanno Olmi – Il segreto del bosco vecchio AKA The Secret of the Old Woods (1993)

    1991-2000Ermanno OlmiFantasyItalyPhilosophyPhilosophy on Screen

    This Ecological Fairy Tale, with live actors and talking animals tells the story of a colonel (Paolo Villaggio) who is entrusted with a large estate of woodlands until his schoolboy nephew comes of age. Disregarding local tradition and the practice of his esteemed deceased brother, the military man decides to selectively cut the old growth timber. He is confronted with the protestations of the tree spirits (Giulio Brogi) and the local townsfolk, to no avail. Over their objection he releases the unpredictable wind from the cave to which it has been confined, and even wishes for the early demise of his nephew so he can own the woods outright. But he comes to value human contact more, starts to come to terms with most of the spirits, and reverses some plots to get rid of his nephew. A bit like a live action Hayan Miyazaki tale such as Princess Mononoke, but not so violent.Read More »

  • King Vidor – The Fountainhead (1949)

    1941-1950ArchitectureClassicsDramaKing VidorPhilosophy on ScreenUSA

    Quote:
    The hero of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead is Howard Roark (Gary Cooper), a fiercely independent architect obviously patterned after Frank Lloyd Wright. Rather than compromise his ideals, Roark takes menial work as a quarryman to finance his projects. He falls in love with heiress Dominique (Patricia Neal), but ends the relationship when he has the opportunity to construct buildings according to his own wishes. Dominique marries a newspaper tycoon (Raymond Massey) who at first conducts a vitriolic campaign against the “radical” Roark, but eventually becomes his strongest supporter. Upon being given a public-housing contract on the proviso that his plans not be changed in any way, Roark is aghast to learn that his designs will be radically altered. Roark sneaks into the unfinished structure at night, makes certain no one else is around, and dynamites the project into oblivion.Read More »

  • Kirby Dick & Amy Ziering Kofman – Derrida [+Extras] (2003)

    2001-2010DocumentaryKirby Dick and Amy Ziering KofmanPhilosophyPhilosophy on ScreenUSA

    Quote:
    One of the most influential and iconoclastic figures of the 20th century, French philosopher and father of “deconstruction” Jacques Derrida has single-handedly altered the way we look at history, language, art, and film. In the spirit of Derrida’s work, acclaimed filmmakers Kirby Dick (SICK: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF BOB FLANAGAN, SUPERMASOCHIST [torrent available here]) and Amy Ziering Kofman have created an innovative and entertaining portrait by questioning the very concept of biography itself. Featuring a mesmerizing score by Oscar-winning composer Ryuichi Sakamoto (THE LAST EMPEROR), DERRIDA is a playful and provocative glimpse at a visionary thinker as he ruminates on everything from SEINFELD to the sex lives of ancient philosophers.Read More »

  • Neten Chokling – Milarepa (2006)

    2001-2010ArthouseBhutanNeten ChoklingPhilosophyPhilosophy on Screen

    Quote:
    The Tibetan film Milarepa, produced in 2006 is set in the magnificent Spiti Valley high in the Himalayas in the Zanskar region close to the border between India and Tibet. Directed by Neten Choklin, a Lama from Western Bhutan who has previously worked with Khyentse Norbu on the films such as The Cup and Travellers and Magicians, the film is the first part about the adventurous formative years of the legendary buddhist mystic, Milarepa (1052-1135) who is one of the most widely known Tibetan Saints, but whom set out for vengeance and retribution.
    Read More »

  • Claire Denis – L’intrus AKA The Intruder [+Extras] (2004)

    2001-2010Claire DenisDramaFrancePhilosophyPhilosophy on Screen

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    Quote:
    L’Intrus opens to a shot of the Franco-Swiss border as a border guard performs a customs check and inspection of a random vehicle with the aid of a contraband-sniffing dog. The seemingly mundane image of frontier, wilderness, and deception provides a curiously appropriate introduction into the Claire Denis’ impenetrably fractured, enigmatically allusive, otherworldy, and indelible metaphysical exposition into the mind of an emotionally severe, morally bankrupt, and profoundly isolated heart transplant patient named Louis (Michel Subor). Idiosyncratically unfolding in elliptical, often reverse chronology (with respect to the heart surgery) through the lugubriously fluid intertwining of Louis’ alienated existence and deeply tormented subconscious, the film is a fragmented and maddeningly opaque daydream (or perhaps more appropriately, a haunted nightmare) of the price exacted by his disreputable past, estranged relationships, hedonism, and instinctual quest for survival: his inability to reconcile with his only son and his family; his sexually motivated, yet emotionally distant relationship with a materialistic pharmacist; his dubious, transcontinental past (a suppressed history that may have included murder). Perpetually followed by a beautiful, enigmatic sentinel (Katia Golubeva) – or conscience – who seems to have been instrumental in obtaining his new heart, what emerges is an indelible, elegiac, and poetically abstract dreamscape through the wondrous, alien terrain of unreconciled (and irreconcilable) personal history, unrequited longing, and haunted memory.Read More »

  • Gert de Graaff – De zee die denkt AKA The Sea That Thinks [+Extra] (2000)

    1991-2000ArthouseGert de GraaffNetherlandsPhilosophyPhilosophy on Screen

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    The Sea That Thinks is a 2000 Dutch experimental film directed by Gert de Graaff. The film makes heavily use of optical illusions to tell a “story within a story” revolving around a screenwriter writing a script called The Sea That Thinks. The script details what is happening around him and eventually begins to affect what happens around him.Read More »

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