Astra Taylor is quickly establishing herself as one of today's premiere documentary filmmakers. A lecturer and author, her first film, (as producer) Persons of Interest, won a number of awards and dealt incisively with the program of 'extraordinary rendition' implemented in the wake of september 11th. Her directorial debut, Zizek! saw her patiently following the mad philosopher around his lecture circuit (and into his bedroom), helping him perform the "suicide of his public image" that he jokingly refers to near the end of the film. Her most current work is on a documentary based on none other than Mike Davis' Planet of Slums, a landmark book that follows the historically unprecedented explosion of slums around the world.
Her most recently released film, which is currently being celebrated by reviewers as it travels the festival circuit (most recently, earlier this month it was featured in the Kingston Canadian Film Festival) is called the Examined Life, and effectively takes Zizek! to another level by featuring not only Zizek (this time in a New York garbage heap explaining how, to develop a real political ecology, we must learn to embrace our trash), but also his friend (and third wave feminist hero) Judy Butler, Martha Nussbaum (who, to give balance where it is due, once took Butler and her colleagues to pieces in her much-publicized paper 'The Professor of Parody'), Jacques Derrida's spacey pupil Avital Ronell (who Zizek routinely jokes about in his lectures), ethicist Peter Singer, among others. Other than Zizek's trip to the dump, we find Cornell West flying through downtown New York traffic in a taxi cab, Michael Hardt calming paddling a lake in a rowboat, and all (as in Zizek!) philosophizing in places as far outside of their stuffy university habitat as Taylor could get them.
The titular theme is, of course, Socrates' famed 'the unexamined life is not worth living,' but beyond this both Taylor's selection of philosophers and her shooting style focus on a more specific type of intervention in public space. These philosophers, while academic celebrities in a sense (leaders of the 'radical left' - or whatever's left of it), are not simply stuffy intellectuals speculating about unresolvable questions which we will never face in daily life - their topics touch on the key issues that define today's social landscape (the ethical dimension of consumerism, the political stakes in ecology, etc.). In a sense, Taylor is simply rethinking what the public-ness of the public intellectual is supposed to entail - documenting their work is, of course, a matter of publicizing them, and the logical next step is to actually put them in public spaces and, at least at an aesthetic level, give the effect that they are thereby being made more readily accessible to us.
The massive influence of each philosopher's particular theoretical work - always intelligibly given, alters, with each segment, what we imagine a public life to consist in (they have each, in turn, radically altered various spheres of public life in their own academic work from which they draw for their skits - eg, Nussbaum's work in the field of law, Hardt's work with grassroots activists, West's with black community rights groups, etc.). This to say that, while concerned with 'big ideas,' Taylor's strategy is not finally just a gimmick used to entertain those who might have already been exposed to the work of these intellectuals. The question of public dialogue is always more or less active in the various public intellectual performances.
And of course, in a more literal sense, this is simply a kind of nostalgic guerrilla philosophizing, taking their philosophizing to the streets (lakes, dumps, etc.) these thinkers reclaim otherwise boring places and, with their theorizing, make these otherwise potentially stale settings not only more relevant and interesting to our civic lives but also more crucial staging grounds for the types of choices and behaviour we think liable to change social relations. The overall effect of the film is quite far removed from some obscure, naive 'you can make a difference' rhetoric; the message is a more practical and progressive one meant to encourage the kind of public dialogue that will be necessary if our communities are going to avert the kind of catastrophes that the news (and often other styles of documentary) throw in our faces as foregone conclusions we play no part in (there is no condescending, Michael Moore-style us vs. them hysteria going on here).
So what is likely most fitting about Taylor's admittedly very simple filmmaking strategy here, is that it leaves the movie-going public with a sense that the film, and its ideological content, is not finally set in a place that is far-removed from the theater, somewhere else entirely, but is instead more closely aligned with the kind of common spaces audiences navigate in their everyday routines, out in the world at large.
Playing at Cinema du Parc, starting April 3rd, 2k9
