In her second feature length documentary Examined Life, which opens today at IFC Center, Canadian born, Georgia bred documentarian Astra Taylor whips around the Tri-State area and beyond with eight of the planet’s most renown contemporary philosophers and probes their ever active brains for answers to questions large and small, elemental and abstract. Engaging a diverse and eclectic group of lauded philosophers and/or public intellectuals to step away from the Ivory Tower and into airports and lakesides, Tompkins Square Park and quaint row boats, Taylor’s subjects include Martha Nussbaum, Avital Rennel, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Judith Butler, Michael Hardt and Mr. Prophesy Deliverance! himself, Cornel West, who at one point happily summarizes himself as a “blues man in the life of the mind, I’m a jazz man in the world of ideas”.
Heady but built for maximum glide, Examined Life expands upon the director’s previous outing, a 2005 portrait of Slovenian cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek (who appears here, discussing the fascism of ecology next to a trash dump) which was also distributed, to wide acclaim, by Zeitgeist Films. This time she incorporates a broad spectrum of contemporary philosophical viewpoints within a series of lengthy, wide ranging chats that are often held while in motion through spaces that illustrate the topics at hand. The film ultimately creates a dynamic new template for a primarily verbal cinema that remains both visually satisfying and endearingly self-reflexive.
It seems somewhat appropriate then that I caught up with Astra via cell phone, while she strolled around Austin, TX.
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I’m way too tired (three film festivals in as many weeks will do that to you) and far too far removed from academia to make a coherent argument on this right now, but in trying to make a dent in my backed-up feed reader I came across some fascinating, British Marxist rumination on Joy Division. I think some of this writing might help me reconcile the two portraits of the band/singer Ian Curtis that I saw in Toronto: Grant Gee’s documentary Joy Division (which I have not yet had time to write about) and Anton Corbijn’s nominal Curtis biopic, Control (which I reviewed rather rapturously here).
Of specific concern: Gee’s provocative but not exactly fully realised thesis, that the story of Joy Division is synonymous with the story of the band’s home town of Manchester; and the philosophical concept of hauntology. You can find workable definitions of hauntology here and here, but both skew towards Derrida on one end, and music theory on the other. In relation to these two films, I think it’s more useful to simply think of hauntology as a tool with which to posit Ian Curtis as spectral presence in Control, and Joy Division as the ghost haunting Manchester in Joy Division.
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