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.
Gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello have drawn an increasingly large following as the decade as worn on, but this year their cinematic profile has raised dramatically. In Berlin this year Madonna unveiled her Filth and Wisdom, staring frontman Eugene Hutz, and now comes a full blown tour documentary filmmaker Margarita Jimeno, Gogol Bordello Non-Stop. The film made its North American bow at AFI over the weekend and screens again this Wednesday at the Arclight. The Bogota, Columbia born, Williamsburg based Jimeno, who has made shorts and worked in the art and editorial departments of NYC indies for a decade, caught up with us to discuss her fascination with There Will Be Blood, her desire to adapt Que Viva La Musica! and where to catch Sid Vicious on You Tube. …Read more
In the Telluride catalog, Slavoj Zizek calls The Great Sacrifice, “the supreme achievement of the Nazi melodrama.” Before the film’s screening at the festival Sunday morning, in Zizek’s inimitable way, he put the work of director Veit Harlan into context. “[Harlan was] one of the Big 3 of Nazi cinema. Number 1 was Leni Reifenstahl, number 2 was Douglas Sirk. These two, I think, they can be redeemed. [With] Leni, the impotence of the analysis starts with, you think she’s a bad girl…but it doesn’t work. Douglas Sirk, I have greater suspicions there. But Harlan, he is the ultimate, he can not be redeemed. But he is a breathtaking visual talent.” For perspective: later Zizek noted that when he “despises” someone or something, he uses words like “brilliant” or “breathtaking”; when he actually respects them, he says “they are not completely an idiot.”
Its maker and its message may have been despicable (and Zizek’s post film lecture, summarized below, left no doubt that Harlan made the film with Nazi ideals in mind), but there’s no question that The Great Sacrifice is a breathtakingly visual film.
Over the weekend, The Guardianpublished a Q & A with Slavoj Zizek, the cultural theorist and film philosopher who will be guest directing the Telluride Film Festival later this month. From the sound of things, the Slovenian academic is in a pretty dark emotional state at the moment. His answers to Rosanna Greenstreet’s relatively innocuous, form-letter style questions are universally, comically negative, especially when the topic is love or sex. Examples:
It’s a good thing I work alone in an airtight concrete room, because I literally, audibly yelped when this press release landed in my inbox. Slavoj Zizek––the superstar Lacanian theorist who Sophie Fiennes bluescreened into Psycho, who analyzed 9/11 through terms set by The Matrix, who is probably the only former Princeton professor to star in a documentary with an exclamation point in the title––will Guest Direct the 2008 Telluride Film Festival. Telluride’s Guest Directors are charged with putting together a sidebar of films, and introducing the screenings at the Labor Day weekend fest. In keeping with Telluride tradition, Zizek’s picks, like the rest of the line up, will be kept secret until the week of the fest, but if anybody want to start putting money down on what Zizek might program, I’m game.
Yesterday would have been Alfred Hitchcock’s 108th birthday, a fact that seemingly went virtually unreported in the U.S. entertainment media (I only stumbled upon the news this morning, via this post by Kim Morgan). As late celebration, I spent the morning watching Hitchcock-centric YouTube clips from Slovenian theorist Slavoj Zizek’s filmed lecture, The Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema. Above, watch Zizek explain why the killer in Psycho is an “unfatobable monster.” After the jump, Zizek moves into the fruit cellar. …Read more
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
filmcouch-114
Over the weekend, The Guardian 
