Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. They were the intellectual power couple of the 20th century. Some have called Sartre the father of Existentialism. But perhaps it’s more accurate to call him the chief popularizer of the philosophical movement. And Simone de Beauvoir, she wrote The Second Sex, the sprawling 1949 tome that laid the intellectual foundation for second-wave feminism that exploded during the 1960s.
The two philosophers first became an item in October 1929, but it was never a traditional relationship. They neither married nor shared the same living quarters, and they famously had an open relationship. But, as de Beauvoir said, “The comradeship that welded our lives together made a superfluous mockery of any other bond we might have forged for ourselves.”
They were a powerful couple, writes Louis Menand in The New Yorker, “with independent lives, who met in cafés, where they wrote their books and saw their friends at separate tables… but who maintained a kind of soul marriage.” Whatever your personal views, you need to consider this: The relationship worked for Sartre and de Beauvoir for 50 years.
Despite their celebrity, we’ve rarely come across footage of the two philosophers together. So we’re bringing you this — a rare clip from a 1967 documentary filmed at Sartre’s Montparnasse high-rise apartment, overlooking the cemetery where the two philosophers were eventually buried. Somewhat fittingly, we see the two intellectuals, but never in the same frame. You can purchase the complete film for educational use here.
Here’s one for Ripley’s Believe It Or Not: Bertrand Russell, the eminent mathematician and philosopher, once made a cameo appearance in a Bollywood movie.
The year was 1967. Russell was by then a very frail 95-year-old man. Besides finishing work on his three-volume autobiography, Russell was devoting much of his remaining time to the struggle for peace and nuclear disarmament. To that end, he sometimes made himself available to people he thought could help the cause. (See our March 2012 post, “How Bertrand Russell Turned the Beatles Against the Vietnam War.”)
So when he was asked to appear in a movie called Aman, about a young Indian man who has just received his medical degree in London and wants to go to Japan to help victims of the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Russell said yes.
It’s a weird scene. The eager young graduate, played by Rajendra Kumar, is granted an audience with the famous philosopher, who gives him his blessing and offers a few words of wisdom. Sadly, much of what Russell has to say is drowned out by the Hindi-language narration. But the clip above offers an intriguing glimpse of Russell at his home in London only three years before his death. Its appearance on the Internet has caused considerable amusement. One observer noted that, as an actor, Russell has only three degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon. Truth really is stranger than fiction.
Paul Holdengräber is the kind of cultural gadabout that makes New York one of the greatest cities to live in, since New Yorkers like him are forever tracking down the world’s best writers, thinkers, and artists and roping them into intimate, unscripted public interviews, discussions, and performances. He belongs in the company of such luminary interviewers as James Lipton or Charlie Rose, but Holdengräber does something so many curators of culture don’t—he pulls things from his subjects that you’ve never heard them say before, and he does it because he’s seemingly fearless and a consummate amateur in the best sense of the word: he’s a lover—of literature, the arts, music, philosophy, and most of all, conversation. A recent Wall Street Journal profile described Holdengraber as the “only one man in New York who possesses the complement of skills—charm, erudition, curiosity and perhaps most of all chutzpah” to pull off what appear to be casual chats–but which Holdengräber carefully prepares–with people like Pete Townshend, Colum McCann, Umberto Eco, and just about anyone else you could think of.
Holdengräber works as curator of LIVE from the NYPL, a regular event described as “Cognitive Theater” that has featured previous guests like Harold Bloom, Patti Smith, Jay‑Z, and Colm Toibin. It’s something of a variety show. Some events put two complementary figures in conversation with each other, such as this past November’s conversation between the pardoned West Memphis Three suspect Damien Echols and former Black Flag singer Henry Rollins; some feature surprising, out-of-character performances, such as a reading of the modern classic kid’s book for adults, Go the F*ck to Sleep, as deadpanned by the voice of existential despair, Werner Herzog; and sometimes LIVE takes place in traditional interview format, with Holdengräber doing what he does best, getting fascinating people to tell stories about themselves. For example, Holdengräber sat down in June, 2010 for a lengthy talk with Christopher Hitchens, who had just published his memoir, Hitch 22. Little did either of them know that Hitchens would be gone in less than two years. In the short clip above, Hitchens and Holdengräber talk about mortality, both onstage and during an intimate backstage smoke break. Watch the full video of their talk below, and find the schedule for upcoming talks here.
As if his curatorial work for the NYPL were not enough, Holdengräber also hosts The Paul Holdengräber Show, which premiered last year on YouTube’s Intelligent Channel. Here he gets the chance to flex his interview muscles away from the audiences in a small studio setting. Now nine episodes in, the show has featured an unpredictable lineup of guests such as master chef David Chang, Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert, Robin Hood Foundation managing director Eric Weingartner, and this past July, New Yorker writer Philip Gourevitch. In their conversation below, Holdengräber and Gourevitch have a conversation that swings effortlessly from reporting on international tragedy and war to writing a piece on James Brown to Gourevitch’s love for the Biblical story of Jonah and the whale. Gourevitch retells the story with the intensity and vividness of an eyewitness and the incisive commentary of a Talmudic scholar. It’s a moment only Paul Holdengräber could set up.
Josh Jones is a writer and musician. He recently completed a dissertation on land, literature, and labor.
Both psychoanalysis and psychotherapy act only through words. Yet they are in conflict. How so? There we have the question posed to psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and world-famous public intellectual Jacques Lacan in the video above, a clip from a scripted quasi-interview called Television whose answers play like his famous lectures. Watch it, or watch our previously featured video of Lacan giving a talk, and you’ll experience one quality that made him world-famous. Few others could combine such high-flown subject matter with such theatrically emphatic oratorical ability — an ability you can sense even if you don’t understand French. Fortunately, subtitles have been provided, offering Anglophones a chance to understand what connections the man saw between the unconscious, language, Freud, sexual relations, and comedy.
“There are, insofar as the unconscious is implicated, two sides presented by the structure, the structure which is language,” Lacan begins. “The side of meaning, the first side, the side we would identify as that of analysis, which pours out a flood of meaning to float the sexual boat.” These remarks come pre-written in the script of Television, something between a conversation and a play that grew out of Jacques-Alain Miller’s failed attempt to film a traditional interview of the psychoanalytic luminary. “After every cut, when it was time to start up again, Lacan shifted a bit in his discourse,” Miller wrote in Microscopia: An Introduction to the Reading of Television. “Each time he gave an additional twist to his reflections which were unfolding there, under the spotlights, thwarting any chance of bridge-building. We stopped after two hours; I gave him in writing a list of questions; and he wrote [Television]in about two weeks’ time. I saw him every evening and he gave me the day’s manuscript pages; then he read or acted out — with a few improvised variations — the written text. He made a spring-board of this false start.”
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Cultureand writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Back in late November, Psy’s “Gangnam Style” had clocked 792 million times on YouTube, and the Chinese dissident artist Ai Wei Wei filmed his own Gangnam Style parody video. Now, just five weeks later, the video has logged over 1.1 billion views. That’s one view for every seven people on the planet. What has made this pop song a global phenomenon? Various critics have chalked it up to a fluke, or to the randomness that belongs to many internet memes. Such non-answers probably wouldn’t fly with Slavoj Žižek, the nose-rubbing, shirt-tugging, Slovenian philosopher who offered his own take on the Gangnam Style Phenomenon. Speaking at the University of Vermont on October 16th, 2012, Žižek attributed Gangnam’s wild popularity to modern forms of spirituality. But I’m sure that that summary is oversimplifying things. If you have 90 minutes to kill (and I do mean kill), you can watch Žižek’s complete UVM talk below. His Gangnam musings come around the 35:10 mark.
To fully experience the clip above, you’ll need to be awake and pressing play at precisely 12:04 am. What you’ll be seeing is a very small segment of The Clock, a 24-hour video assemblage that keeps time with clips culled from a century’s worth of film history. Some of these markers are in the dialogue, but most are shots of clocks and watches in which a specific time is clearly visible.
If viewing the complete piece sounds like a marathon, consider that artist Christian Marclay and a phalanx of assistants spent three years locating and placing the clips and smoothing out the resulting soundtrack. Some of these moments came preloaded with the import of a High Noon. Others were of a more incidental, background-type nature prior to being cast in Marclay’s project.
Those unable to spend quality time with The Clock at the Museum of Modern Art this January can get a feel for it via philosopher and writer Alain de Botton’s brief chat with Marclay below.
- Ayun Halliday resolves to use it better in 2012. Perhaps you shouldn’t follow her on Twitter @AyunHalliday.
Back in 2009, Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel made his course, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?, available on the web for free (YouTube — iTunes — Web). Suddenly lifelong learners around the world had access to a popular course enjoyed by more than 14,000 Harvard students over 30 years. Starting on March 12, 2013, Sandel plans to offer Justice as a free course through edX, the provider of MOOCs (or Massive Open Online Courses) created by Harvard and MIT. And here’s one thing you can guarantee: In a single offering, Sandel will bring his course to more students worldwide than he did through his decades teaching at Harvard.
FYI: edX announced other new spring courses. All will be added to our collection of Free Online Certificate Courses & MOOCs from Great Universities. They include:
In 1958, legendary director John Huston decided to make a film about the life of Sigmund Freud. Having met Jean-Paul Sarte in 1952 during the filming of Moulin Rouge, Huston felt the philosopher would be the ideal person to script the Freud film, since Sartre knew Freud’s work so well and since Huston surmised that he would have “an objective and logical approach.” Despite Sartre’s obvious talents, this still seems like an odd choice on its face, given the specific demands of screenwriting versus philosophical or literary work. But Sartre had some experience writing for the screen by that time—like most literary screenwriters, he’d mostly done it for the money and disavowed most of this work in hindsight–and he loved the movies and respected Huston. The director and the existentialist philosopher also had very similar views of their biographical subject:
Ironically both Sartre and Huston considered themselves anti-Freud for largely the same reason: Sartre because as a Communist he believed the role of the psychoanalyst was limited and of little social importance. For his part Huston felt that psychoanalysis was an indulgence for bored house wives and the problem children of the rich while the “movers and shakers”’ were too busy for it and those that most needed it couldn’t afford it.
Huston and Sartre’s treatment of Freud promised to be critical, but the partnership soon soured due to Sartre’s inability to keep his script at feature length. First, he delivered a modest 95-page treatment. This, however, became a 300-page draft in 1959 that Huston calculated would produce an unacceptable five-hour-long film (see an image from Sartre’s draft screenplay below, and click it to read it in a larger format).
When Huston and Sartre met in person in Galway to find a way to cut the screenplay down to a reasonable length, their working relationship was less than cordial. In Huston’s recollection, Sartre never stopped talking long enough for anyone else to get a word in. The director also remembered that Sartre was “as ugly as a human being can be.” Sartre’s remembrance is hardly more flattering of Huston, if somewhat more comic; he described the director in a letter to his wife Simone de Beauvoir as a pretentious, thoughtless character.…
…in moments of childish vanity, when he puts on a red dinner jacket or rides a horse (not very well) or counts his paintings or tells workmen what to do. Impossible to hold his attention five minutes: he can no longer work, he runs away from thinking.
After their Galway meeting, during which Huston tried and failed to hypnotize Sartre, the philosopher attempted another revision, but this time, he sent Huston an even longer draft, for an eight-hour film. At this point, Huston gave up on Sartre and salvaged what he could, eventually enlisting the help of German screenwriter Wolfgang Reinhardt to finish the script. Huston finally made his Freud film, released in 1962 as Freud: The Secret Passion, with Montgomery Clift as the doctor (see the trailer for the film above).
Unsurprisingly, Sartre had his name removed from the final film. For a fuller account of the meeting of Huston and Sartre, see the second chapter of Elizabeth Roudinesco’s Philosophy in Turbulent Times, where you’ll find other fascinating details like Sartre’s desire to cast Marilyn Monroe as Anna O and Huston’s bemusement at Sartre’s dental hygiene.
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
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