Roger Scruton - On Islam and the West

Anti-Oedipus

But which is the revolutionary path? Is there one? – To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World Countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist "economic solution"? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go further still, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to "accelerate the process," as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven't seen anything yet

(Deleuze in Anti-Oedipus)

La société du spectacle

This is a must see, although the book is of course a lot better...

Language: French/ English subtitles
IMDB Rating: 7./ 10

Plot: The 90 minute film took a year to make and incorporates footage from The Battleship Potemkin, October, New Babylon, Shanghai Gesture, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Rio Grande, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Johnny Guitar, and Confidential Report, as well as Soviet and Polish films, industrial films, American Westerns, news footage, advertisements, and many still photographs. Events such as the muerder of Lee Harvey Oswald (who assassinated U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1963), the revolutions in Spain in 1936, Hungary in 1956 and in Paris in 1968, and people such as Mao Zedong, Richard Nixon, and the Spanish Anarchist Durruti are represented. Throughout the movie, there is both a voiceover (of Debord) and inter-titles from "Society of the Spectacle" but also texts from the Committee of Occupation of the Sorbonne, Machiavelli, Marx, Tocqueville, Emile Pouget, and Soloviev. Without citations, these quotes are hard to decipher, especially with the subtitles (which exist even in the French version) but that is part of Debord’s goal “to problematize reception” (Greil and Sanborn) and force the viewer to be active (wiki).

In addition to the above film material, I think it is also perhaps worth checking this more contemporary version of the spectacle.

Mindwalk

Language: English
IMDB Rating: 7.4/ 10

Plot: A US politician (Sam Waterston) visits his poet friend (John Heard) in Mont. St. Michael, France. While walking through the medeival island discussing their philosophies of life they happen upon Sonja (Liv Ullman), a scientist in recluse, who joins in their conversation. The two men listen to the ideas of this brilliant woman and discuss how her ideas can work in their own politician and poet lives (IMDB).

Chronopolis

It took animator/filmmaker Piotr Kamler nearly half a decade to make this fantastic animated 3-D sci-fi film that is set in a futuristic city inhabited by powerful immortals who are utterly bored with the idea of eternity and so begin playing with time.

Language: mostly unspoken and a little bit of French in the beginning
IMDB Rating: 7.6

Plot: The story is fascinating, and the style in which it is told remarkable. There is no dialog to explain what happens, just some brief opening narration to set the scene. There is an obsessed mountain climber. And elsewhere, a city with enigmatic inhabitants who control matter. The apparently omniscient Chronopolitans are able to see this mountain climber in his world, deciding to contact him to reveal their hidden existence. To do so, they manipulate basic matter though a sort of alchemy, culminating in an intelligent sphere which departs to meet the man. The interactions between the sphere and the man are mostly jovial, but trying to meet the inhabitants of Chronopolis themselves is not so simple.

The story is indeed told entirely through pictures and music. This is much a process of sharing the discoveries of the characters with them, and so does require some patience. The film might appear to move slowly to a person hoping for dialog or a more conventional film narrative, but I expect that those who can appreciate the attention to detail here will relish it. Most movies which use 3D animation use it in a more cartoonish, "claymation" effect, whereas the sculpture here tends towards a less exaggerated appearance. In many ways, the city of Chronopolis is the main character itself. How the place is depicted is a fine balance between organic fluidity and grown technology, with the larger than life grandeur of an abandoned city from a lost Earth civilization, such as those from Egypt and Central America. The Chronopolitans may appear to be a refined culture, with vast knowledge and abilities, but is their contact ultimately nothing more than a time capsule from a ddeat (or closed) culture? Or is this perhaps a land of mythology, with different characteristics and rules than ordinary life, where they are in a unique position to comment on our world? (IMDB)

Human, all too human : Nietzsche

Language: English/ German - English subtitles
Producer: BBC

Plot: The prescient seeds of thought disseminated by Friedrich Nietzsche in the 19th century prefigured the pivotal 20th-century concepts of existentialism and psychoanalysis. In this program, interviews with Nietzsche biographers Ronald Hayman and Leslie Chamberlain, archivist Dr. Andrea Bollinger, translator Reg Hollingdale, writer Will Self, and philosopher Keith Ansell Pearson probe Nietzsche’s life and elucidate his writings. In addition, his sister’s role in editing his works for use as Nazi propaganda is highlighted. Extracts of Nietzsche’s aphoristic prose, drawn from works such as The Parable of a Madman and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, aptly convey the essence of a supreme stylist and prophetic thinker (source).

A Guide to Happiness: "Nietzsche on Hardship"

Scooting on a motorbike around the native lands of Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Alain de Botton talks to the people of all ages he encounters. He engages them in conversations about the central concepts each of these philosophers grappled with. Surprisingly, these were the same things that trouble many of us today: lack of money, the pain of love, inadequacy, anxiety, the fear of failure and the pressure to conform. Each of the half-hours is devoted to one of these philosophers:

106 - "Nietzsche on Hardship"

Plot: Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness: 106 is “Nietzsche on Hardship.” Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) advocated suffering and the overcoming of hardship as good aspects of life. Why and how did Nietzsche advocate difficulty as necessary for worthwhile life achievements?

A Guide to Happiness: "Schopenhauer on Love"

Scooting on a motorbike around the native lands of Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Alain de Botton talks to the people of all ages he encounters. He engages them in conversations about the central concepts each of these philosophers grappled with. Surprisingly, these were the same things that trouble many of us today: lack of money, the pain of love, inadequacy, anxiety, the fear of failure and the pressure to conform. Each of the half-hours is devoted to one of these philosophers:

105 - "Schopenhauer on Love"

Plot: Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness: 105 is "Schopenhauer on Love." 19th Century Arthur Schopenhauer believed that love is the most important human striving because of its powerful impulse toward "the will to life." What light does Alain de Botton shed on the irony of an unhappy philosopher probing the subject of love?

A Guide to Happiness: "Montaigne on Self-Esteem"

Scooting on a motorbike around the native lands of Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Alain de Botton talks to the people of all ages he encounters. He engages them in conversations about the central concepts each of these philosophers grappled with. Surprisingly, these were the same things that trouble many of us today: lack of money, the pain of love, inadequacy, anxiety, the fear of failure and the pressure to conform. Each of the half-hours is devoted to one of these philosophers:

104 - "Montaigne on Self-Esteem"

Plot: Episode 4: "Montaigne on Self-Esteem" looks at the problem of self-esteem from the perspective of Michel de Montaigne (16th Century), the French philosopher who singled out three main reasons for feeling bad about oneself - sexual inadequecy, failure to live up to social norms, and intellectual inferiority - and then offered practical solutions for overcoming them.

Michel de Montaigne lived in 16th Century France, long before modern psychology developed and the expression "self-esteem" was coined. In what ways was this contemporary psychological concept central to his worldview?

A Guide to Happiness: "Seneca on Anger"

Scooting on a motorbike around the native lands of Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Alain de Botton talks to the people of all ages he encounters. He engages them in conversations about the central concepts each of these philosophers grappled with. Surprisingly, these were the same things that trouble many of us today: lack of money, the pain of love, inadequacy, anxiety, the fear of failure and the pressure to conform. Each of the half-hours is devoted to one of these philosophers:

103 - Epicurus on Happiness

Plot: Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness: 103 is "Seneca on Anger." What practical guide can we adopt from the principles developed by Roman philosopher Lucious Annaeus Seneca (4 BC-65 AD) to accommodate the stresses and dangers of his era?

Seneca took the subject of anger seriously enough to dedicate a whole book to the subject. Seneca refused to see anger as an irrational outburst over which we have no control. Instead he saw it as a philosophical problem and amenable to treatment by philosophical argument. He thought anger arose from certain rationally held ideas about the world, and the problem with these ideas is that they are far too optimistic. Certain things are a predictable feature of life, and to get angry about them is to have unrealistic expectations.

A Guide to Happiness: "Epicurus on Happiness"

Scooting on a motorbike around the native lands of Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Alain de Botton talks to the people of all ages he encounters. He engages them in conversations about the central concepts each of these philosophers grappled with. Surprisingly, these were the same things that trouble many of us today: lack of money, the pain of love, inadequacy, anxiety, the fear of failure and the pressure to conform. Each of the half-hours is devoted to one of these philosophers:

102 - Epicurus on Happiness

Plot: Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness: 102 is “Epicurus on Happiness.” Epicurus, an ancient Greek philosopher who lived from 341-270 BC, believed that “friends,” “freedom,” and “thought” are the path to happiness. What kind of happiness was Epicurus seeking – and is this still relevant today?

A Guide to Happiness: “Socrates on Self-Confidence”

Scooting on a motorbike around the native lands of Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Montaigne, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Alain de Botton talks to the people of all ages he encounters. He engages them in conversations about the central concepts each of these philosophers grappled with. Surprisingly, these were the same things that trouble many of us today: lack of money, the pain of love, inadequacy, anxiety, the fear of failure and the pressure to conform. Each of the half-hours is devoted to one of these philosophers:

01 - Socrates on Self-Confidence

Plot: Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness: 101 is “Socrates on Self-Confidence.” What did Socrates (470-399 BC) mean by “searching for the truth,” “self-knowledge,” and his dialectic method, and how does Alain de Botton extrapolate these concepts into our lives in the 21st Century?

Derrida on Religion and more

Perhaps you want more on Derrida, in that case I also found an interesting seminar given by Derrida on religion. Please click to listen: Part I and Part II (right click to save).

Summary: This extended interview with Jacques Derrida was conducted by John D. Caputo, Kevin Hart, and Yvonne Sherwood as the plenary session of the 2002 joint annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). The interview gives Derrida the opportunity to speak on a range of subjects from his secret life of prayer, to the Judeo-Christian heritage of deconstruction, to sacrifice, belief, faith, secularization, atheism, finitude, and beyond. But what pervades throughout is a certain feeling of anxiety, reserve, and humility, which to those already familiar with Derrida's work, should be of no surprise. However-given the audience at the annual meeting of the AAR/SBL, many of whom had long heard of Derrida but had never read him or seen him in person, given the reality of how Derrida's reception in the field of religious studies had come full circle from the original reading and employing of Derrida as the post-Enlightenment successor to the hermeneutics of suspicion to the more recent sentiment that positions Derrida as a quasi-Enlightenment pietist driven by an affirmative religious passion, and given the fact that it was only a short time afterward that Derrida would be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which meant that this would be one of his last major public appearances before his dteah in 2004-it is interesting to note Derrida's continued hesitation combined, as always, with a sense of urgency.

To download the ebook: "Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida by John D. Caputo" please click here (torrent) or buy it here.

Summary: Responding to questions put to him at a Roundtable held at Villanova University in 1994, Jacques Derrida leads the reader through an illuminating discussion of the central themes of deconstruction. Speaking in English and extemporaneously, Derrida takes up with clarity and eloquence such topics as the task of philosophy, the Greeks, justice, responsibility, the gift, community, the distinction between the messianic and the concrete messianisms, and his interpretation of James Joyce. Derrida convincingly refutes the charges of relativism and nihilism that are often leveled at deconstruction by its critics, and sets forth the profoundly affirmative ethico-political thrust of this work. The Roundtable is annotated by John D. Caputo, the David R. Cook Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University, who has supplied cross-references to Derrida’s writings, where the reader may find further discussion on these topics. Professor Caputo has also supplied a commentary which elaborates the principal issues raised in the Roundtable.

Derrida - The Movie

Language: French with English subtitles
IMDB rating: 6.6/ 10

Plot: An odd portrait of Jacques Derrida, one of the most polemical and influential theorists of the end of the 20th century. The filmmakers 'deconstruct' the French thinker's private and professional life, in an attempt to capture the processes of an inquisitive and iconoclastic mind which has greatly influenced our way of understanding the limits of language (official site).

Sartre - The Road to Freedom

Some time ago I published a post on Martin Heidegger. This time I want to introduce another figure of contemporary European philosophy, Jean Paul Sartre.

In this excellent BBC documentary, Sartre's life is discussed by one of the grounding members of the "Nouvelle Philosophie" (for those interested in this stream of thought, click here for a great introductory essay) Bernard-Henry Levy. Jean-Paul Sartre's abstract ideas, grounded in everyday life, crystallized the mood of the times and became both a rallying point for youth and a touchstone for reaction to world events. This documentary covers accounts by Olivier Todd, Jean Pouillon, and Michelle Vian and includes interviews with Jonathan Ree, Baroness Mary Warnock, Patrick Vaudey, Bernard Levy, and others to analyze Sartre's life and existential outlook from the vantage point of World War II and its aftermath. Dramatized excerpts of "Nausea" and "No Exit" underscore Sartre's themes of alienation and commitment and offer a glimpse of his vision of hell.

Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger was probably one of the most controversial thinkers of the twentieth century. His intense affiliation with Hitler's regime has largely been debated in a range of both academic and public debates. In fact, Heidegger was one of the first to be in line to assist in Hitler's urge for power and his dreams for a 'pure' Aryn society or as he himself told his students:

"The Führer himself and he alone is German reality and its law, today and for the future" (source)

After the war, Heidegger told a de-Nazification committee that his entrance into the party "was only a matter of form" and that, in any case, after only ten months in office he angrily resigned from the rectorate in protest over a "conspiracy" that the Nazi minister of education was organizing against him (source). Unfortunately, he was never known to be the most trustful of persons. His lifetime love, Hannah Arendt (Jewish herself), described him to be "notorious for lying about everything" (Arendt in Young-Bruehl). Despite all these controversies, his international reputation had already been earlier assured with the publication of 'Being and Time', a book that was characterised by the young Jurgen Habermas as “the most significant philosophical event since Hegel's Phänomenologie ...”(source).

Some time ago, I watched the below documentary and thought about the question if we should dismiss and delegitimise the person Heidegger and reduce the contributions that he made in the works of more contemporary thinkers or whether we should set our ethics and emotions aside and rely on the pure theoretical/ academic heritage that he left for us with. The mind versus the person. Naturally, these processes are interwoven and further problematise the question...

Herbert Marcuse

You might want to check out the following documentary about Herbert Marcuse. Personally, I am a great admirer of him and what he has accomplished as a provocative thinker and lifetime activist (along with other thinkers of the Frankfurt School).

BIO: Herbert Marcuse was born in Berlin on July 19,1898. After completing his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Freiburg in 1922, he moved to Berlin, where he worked in the book trade. He returned to Freiburg in 1929 to write a habilitation (professor's dissertation) with Martin Heidegger. In 1933, since he would not be allowed to complete that project under the Nazis, Herbert began work at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, a Marxist-oriented think-tank (as we might say today).

He emigrated from Germany that same year, going first to Switzerland, then the United States, where he became a citizen in 1940. During World War II he worked for the US Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA), analyzing intelligence reports about Germany (1942-45-51). In 1952 Herbert began a university teaching career as a political theorist, first at Columbia and Harvard, then at Brandeis from 1954 to 1965, and finally (already retirement-age), at the University of California, San Diego.

Work: His critiques of capitalist society (especially his 1955 synthesis of Marx and Freud, Eros and Civilization, and his 1964 book One-Dimensional Man) resonated with the concerns of the leftist student movement in the 1960s. Because of his willingness to engage seriously with (and support) student protesters, Herbert soon became known as "the father of the new left" (a term he disliked and rejected). He had many speaking engagements in the US and Europe in the late 1960s and in the 1970s. He died on July 29, 1979, after suffering a stroke during a visit to Germany. (http://www.marcuse.org)

Further links:

• Official Homepage
• Wikipedia
• Herbert Marcuse Archive

The below documentary is well worth a watch, though the narrator's voice can be annoying at times.

Eisenstein

Today one of the greatest directors in movie history (I think). A great modernist (one of the last and of Kafkian greatness), who's work shared a similar dialectic as that in the works of Marx. Forget about Orson Welles, cause this is Eisenstein! Poetic, political, philosophical and provocative.

Quote: "In painting the form arises from abstract elements of line and color, while in cinema the material concreteness of the image within the frame presents - as an element - the greatest difficulty in manipulation."

Bezhin lug (or "Bezhin Meadow")

Plot: A Soviet farmer son, who is working at a Kolchos is killed by his father, who wants to burn the fields of the Kolchos to damage the Soviet Society. (IMDB).



Aleksandr Nevskiy

Plot: It is the 13th century, and Russia is overrun by foreign invaders. A Russian knyaz', or prince, Alexander Nevsky, rallies the people to form a ragtag army to drive back an invasion by the Teutonic knights. This is a true story based on the actual battle at a lake near Novgorod. (IMDB)



Oktyabr

Plot: In documentary style, events in Petrograd are re-enacted from the end of the monarchy in February of 1917 to the end of the provisional government and the decrees of peace and of land in November of that year. Lenin returns in April. In July, counter-revolutionaries put down a spontaneous revolt, and Lenin's arrest is ordered. By late October, the Bolsheviks are ready to strike: ten days will shake the world. While the Mensheviks vacillate, an advance guard infiltrates the palace. Anatov-Oveyenko leads the attack and signs the proclamation dissolving the provisional government (IMDB)

Stalker, the making of

Stalker was made under very harsh conditions. The movie was actually shot twice, as the first tape got, "mysteriously enough", lots... Moreover, the crew was shooting near Tallinn in the area around the small river Pirita with a half-functioning hydroelectric station. Up the river was a chemical plant, which poured out poisonous liquids downstream. There is even this shot in Stalker: snow falling in the summer and white foam floating down the river. In fact the last surviving member of the crew said it was some horrible poison. Many women in our crew got allergic reactions on their faces. Tarkovsky (the Russian director) died from cancer of the right bronchial tube.

It is suspected that the 1957 accident in the Mayak nuclear fuel reprocessing plant, which resulted in a several thousand square kilometer deserted "zone" outside the reactor, may have influenced this film. Seven years after the making of the film, the Chernobyl accident completed the circle. In fact, those employed to take care of the abandoned nuclear power plant refer to themselves as "stalkers", and to the area around the damaged reactor as the "Zone.

Some photos taken during the shootings

The crew and actors
Tarkovsky and one of Kaidanovsky (one of the leading actors)
Tarkovsky giving instructions

Stalker

Staying in tune with post modernist/ structuralist thoughts earlier, I found a movie that quite fits the occasion. I have seen a lot of movies, some meaningless, some interesting, boring, shocking, etc., but this one is very special and definitely in my top 5 list. I am talking about Tarkovsky's Stalker.

Plot in a couple of words (though there is much more...): Near a gray and unnamed Russian city is the Zone, an alien place guarded by barbed wire and soldiers. Over his wife's numerous objections, a man rises in the Tead of night: he's a stalker, one of a handful who have the mental gifts (and who risk imprisonment) to lead people into the Zone to the Room, a place where one's secret hopes come true. That night, he takes two people into the Zone: a popular writer who is burned out, cynical, and questioning his genius; and a quiet scientist more concerned about his knapsack than the journey.

The Room is a place that means different things to the people who journey there, and the stark, ravished landscape they must journey through consists of the phobias and anxieties that they can hardly bear to face. The expedition the men experience is a long and often maddening one, and there are many scenes where the camera lingers on a beautifully composed shot so that the viewer can take time to understand how the characters fit into the settings and how those settings form both natural and supernatural obstacles.

Dont mind the long opening scene, as a true gem is about to be seen