• Elizabeth Lazebnik
    1
    Hello. I would like to share with you a short film that I made. I love discussing philosophy and wanted to create a film that explores how we relate to the world that is being created - or that we create around ourselves - and our place in it. I would love to hear your thoughts on the subject!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pakUxgni7l4

    Thank you!
    Elizabeth
  • BC
    13.2k
    Welcome to The Philosophy Forum. How did you find us, and decide that we would be a good sounding board?

    There are certainly plenty of people around who will argue that 'the world' is unreal, and is a projection of the mind. Or, that they are the only person that exists, and every thing and person are figments of their imagination. How close we come to contact with 'the real world' is debatable. I don't find these lines of thinking productive.

    The world is real, it persists after we die, and (I suppose) closely resembles the world our senses tell me exists.

    The film effectively presents the view of the solipsistic view through the monologue of the dying man; the other characters are anchored in the physical world of things -- prepping vegetables, cooking stoves, balsa wood planes, and the objects of ordinary life. Can't say I liked the screechy soundtrack.

    In the end, you came down on a world independent of our senses, our words, our depictions, our projections. The father is dead, the coffin has arrived. As central to the universe as we think we are, we are not around to observe that without us the world keeps spinning just as it did before. (Dammit -- I wasn't the center of the universe after all.)
  • Pierre-Normand
    2.3k
    The OP was posted in the other forum a few days ago. I'll just reproduce my comment here since my outlook contrasts with with Bitter Crank's, and it didn't elicit any further response over there.

    I quite enjoyed the movie though I probably missed some of the sub-text. I wasn't previously acquainted with Olesha, and know Bergson very little. StreetlightX, who posts regularly on this forum, had recently started a thread discussing Bergson's pioneering work regarding the now popular theme of embodied cognition.

    The dying man's meditations about loss of control and his feeling of distantiation from the world through language raises interesting issues regarding the conceptuality of thought. Some proponents of the essentially embodied nature of cognition take themselves to follow Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty in stressing the primordial non-conceptual character of our experience of the lived world, which we make contact with primarily through acting and finding our footing in it. However, other philosophers also suggest that our conceptual engagement with the world through the use of language doesn't normally detract from our intimacy with it. Inasmuch as the world extends beyond the limited scope of our immediately perceptible surroundings or the immediate opportunities it afford us, for satisfying our desires and carrying out our plans, language can indeed enable us to get into more intimate cognitive contact with regions of the world that only are distant from us in a merely contingent manner (that is, just because we aren't presently concerned or engaged with them at the time when we are thinking about them, though we are still capable of such engagement).

    Hence, the remark from the dying man that he is losing contact with large swathes of his previously lived existence, and that the thin connection that he retains with them, merely through the use of elements of language (e.g. names and concepts) that now seem meaningless and drained of their significance, may actually be seen as exemplifying part of the truth that resides in both of the aforementioned accounts of language and embodiment. When the capacity for engagement is diminished through sickness or despair, language use becomes abstract because it is drained from the significance that it is normally endowed with when used in the context of a life filled with concerns and hopeful projects. This suggests that the "therapy" one requires -- if such is possible or desirable at all -- when faced with the diminishment of one's own capabilities is identification and empathy towards those who go on living (such as the children portrayed in the movie) rather than a narrow identification with one's own "stream of consciousness" or idle reflection about one's own foreclosed opportunities.

    On edit: Here is the post, mentioned above, by StreetlightX regarding Bergson and embodiment.
  • Cavacava
    2.4k


    This trailer as a prologue to Liompa. Reminded me of Bergman.
  • BC
    13.2k
    Same here -- haven't seen a Bergman film in a long time, but yes, similar feel. I used to groove on this sort of thing. In my youth I needed to see existential angst on the screen so I would know how to do it properly.
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