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.
In this darkly poetic animation, the Polish filmmaker Piotr Dumala offers a highly personal interpretation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s classic novel, Crime and Punishment. “My film is like a dream,” Dumala said in 2007. “It is as if someone has read Crime and Punishment and then had a dream about it.”
Dumala’s version takes place only at night. The story is told expressionistically, without dialogue and with an altered flow of time. The complex and multi-layered novel is pared down to a few central characters and events: In the Russian city of Saint Petersburg, a young man named Raskolnikov lies in his dark room brooding over a bloody crime.
He murders an old woman with whom he had pawned his watch. When her younger sister comes home unexpectedly, he murders her too. He confesses to a saintly young woman named Sonya. The sinister eavesdropper Svidrigailov knows of Raskolnikov’s love for Sonya, and of his sins. In the end Svidrigailov takes a pistol and “goes to America” by killing himself.
Dumala completed his half-hour film of Crime and Punishment (Zbrodnia i Kara) in 2000, after three years of work. He has a unique method: He takes a white plaster panel and coats the surface with glue. He then paints over it with a dark color and lets it dry. He uses a knife and sandpaper to engrave his image, creating a hatching effect that gives it a feeling of texture. To add darkness to a light area, he adds more paint with a brush.
It’s a form of “destructive animation.” Each image exists only long enough to be photographed and then painted over to create a sense of movement. It’s a process that sometimes makes Dumala sad. “I think sometimes when I do a drawing in my film, I want to keep it,” he told Melissa Chimovitz of Animation World Networkin 1997, “but I must destroy it because this is the technique I use. I must destroy every frame to put in its place another one, the next one, to have movement. This way, sometimes I think it is too much suffering, to destroy all the time what I am doing.”
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Offscreen, Rainn Wilson—Dwight from The Office—has become a kind of pop-guru for the Web 2.0 set. In 2009, Wilson and friends Joshua Homnick and Devon Gundry created SoulPancake, a media company designed to provide an interactive experience for people to “Chew on Life’s Big Questions” (says the tagline): religion, philosophy, art, culture, science, humor, life, death, you name it. And the refreshing thing about it is, while Wilson is of the Bahai faith himself, his organization is unaffiliated with any particular religion. So it’s a safely ecumenical space for atheists, agnostics, and the growing number of “Nones” to interact without any danger of proselytizing or religious inside baseball.
SoulPancake has produced a best-selling book and scored a content deal with Oprah’s OWN network, but it all grew out of a rather simple idea—a video series called Metaphysical Milkshake. Billed as a “travelling talk show,” Metaphysical Milkshake is as low-concept, high-appeal as Jerry Seinfeld’s web series “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee”: Basically, Wilson drives around in a beat-up seventies stoner van and picks up celebrities like Joseph Gordon-Levitt or lesser-known internet stars like blogger and “twitter funny girl” Kelly Oxford, (who calls his ride “a sweaty rape van”). Then he dishes with them about some deep and some not-so-deep stuff. And thanks to some cheap special effects, the van magically transports them wherever the guest wants to go.
A couple days ago, Wilson picked up conceptual prop-comic Demetri Martin (or the other way around). They gabbed about comedy archaeology, getting mugged for beliefs, and drawing the state of their souls. Watch the short episode above and subscribe to the SoulPancake YouTube channel to see them all and more.
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.
Ah, 20th-century philosophy: even a great many philosophers of the 20th century wouldn’t touch it. When you want to approach a thorny, complex, contradictory field like this, you especially value a teacher like Rick Roderick (1949–2002). Called “the Bill Hicks of Philosophy” by his fan sites, Roderick recorded a series of lectures for The Teaching Company, in the early nineties. (Though the Great Courses have grown far more slickly produced since then, the intellectual content of their older efforts, like this one, remains solid.) Above, you’ll find “The Masters of Suspicion,” the introductory lecture to “The Self Under Seige,” his video course on 20th-century philosophers. In eight segments (available in a playlist below), Roderick covers the likes of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jürgen Habermas. Perhaps he can make sense of them for you; if not, he’ll make them into hours of entertainment.
Not having come up steeped in 20th-century philosophy during his own education, Roderick has his own opinions about how these luminaries throw into question all forms of human knowledge and identity. But he does take their ideas seriously, connecting them as he considers them to real issues and then-current events.
This reveals that he also has his own opinions, more than willingly given, about — bear in mind, the year was 1993 — Bill Clinton, Jesse Helms, political correctness, Pat Buchanan, Billy Graham, network television, Jerry Falwell, and The Big Chill. “When we do philosophy my way,” Roderick announces in his distinctive West Texas accent, “we just talk about what’s goin’ on and try to find our way about.” If that’s how you like philosophy done, visit rickroderick.org to hear much more of it.
You can find more recent philosophy courses produced by The Great Courses here.
Now for a story which “raises questions about the theory and nature of knowledge.” An elephant “hears a faint noise coming from a small speck of dust; it seems to him like a tiny person is calling out for help.” He “finds it peculiar that a dust speck could speak so he reasons that there must be a very small creature on it. Without being able to see the creature, he seems to know it is there and that it is his duty to save it from harm. The other animals in the jungle see him speak to the dust speck and find it impossible that there could be a creature living on it.” Met with only disbelief, “he holds tight to what he knows is true and learns from the voice that there exists an entire universe.” At last, the speck’s resident tiny townspeople “come together and make enough noise for the animals to hear; they have proven their existence and the jungle animals are able to know what Horton has known all along.” Most of us have read this classic children’s book, Horton Hears a Who! by Dr. Seuss. But how many of us have probed its “questions about the nature of human knowledge”?
The last paragraph’s quoted text all comes from Teaching Children Philosophy’s Horton Hears a Who module. The project, an outgrowth of Mount Holyoke College professor Tom Wartenberg’s course “Philosophy for Children,” comes premised on the notion not onlythat youngsters can learn philosophy, but that they possess minds particularly well-suited to its study. Teaching Children Philosophy draws out the relevant philosophical issues and questions from the books they’ve been reading already, from the epistemology of Horton Hears a Who! to the metaphysics of Sylvester and the Magic Pebble to philosophy of mind in Harold and the Purple Crayon. Targeted toward parents, educators, and kids themselves, the site promises great solace to any philosophically minded reader (or reader-aloud) of children’s stories who feel they have long since exhausted the depths of these beloved slim volumes. “How does Horton know that this voice means there is a person on the speck?” “Is the moon that Harold draws the same as the moon we can see in the sky at night?” “If Sylvester is still a donkey because he thinks, what happens when Sylvester is not thinking?” You supply the children’s books, and Wartenberg and company supply the philosophy.
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