The current issue of the Boston Review features a piece by my friend and colleague Oded Na’aman (Ph.D. candidate, Department of Philosophy, Harvard) on the experience of working at a checkpoint in the West Bank. Besides the obvious political significance of the piece, it should be of interest to anyone concerned with the problem of other minds, reciprocal recognition, and the conditions of speech. You can access the article here. This is how it begins:

One morning, when I was about four years old, I proudly announced from the back seat of my family’s car, “Mother, I want you to know that I am the first kid in my whole kindergarten to think inside my head rather than out loud.” The car slowed to a standstill as we waited for the light to change. My mother turned to me, smiled, and said softly, “How do you know you’re the first?”

I was speechless. With one brief question, she had made the world a stranger to me and made me a stranger in my own world. She unveiled a universe of goings-on, a whole new brand of human activity that everyone I knew—the friends I played with, my sisters, even my parents—was engaged in, which I could have no access to. I sat on the staircase that day in kindergarten, observing the other kids play. Using my recently acquired skill, I wondered silently, with unmistakable trepidation, “Who knows what they are thinking?”

I soon regained my trust and grew up believing in the people around me. I knew there were dangers, but I felt certain I was not alone and therefore not helpless in facing them.

Fourteen years after my big kindergarten discovery, I was conscripted into the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). At the West Bank checkpoints, the terror of other minds took over again. It occupied my soul.

-B.D.

This weekend the Boston University Philosophy Department will be holding the first in what promises to be an annual series of workshops on Late Modern Philosophy (roughly the period from 1750 through 1900). This year’s workshop will focus on philosophical psychology and ethics. Information is available here. The schedule is below.

Friday, October 14th

1:30-2:50   Bernard Reginster (Brown University)
“The Will to Nothingness: Nietzsche on the Meaning of the Ascetic Ideal”

3:00-4:20   Sally Sedgwick (University of Illinois-Chicago)
“Freedom and Necessity in Hegel’s Philosophy of History and Philosophy
of Right“

4:30-6:00   Keynote Speaker: Alexander Nehamas (Princeton University)
“Nietzsche, Intention, Action”

6:00-7:00 Reception

Saturday, October 15th

9:00-10:20  Paul Katsafanas (Boston University)
“Kant and Nietzsche on the Will: Two Models of Reflective Agency”

10:30-11:50   Maudemarie Clark (Colgate College/University of
California-Riverside) and David Dudrick (Colgate University)
“Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology: Will to Power as a Theory of the Soul”

12:00-1:30  Break for lunch

1:30-2:50   Charles Griswold (Boston University)
“Loving Another as though Yourself: Rousseau on Narcissism, Self-Love,
and Social Decay”

3:00-4:20   Frederick Neuhouser (Barnard College/Columbia University)
“Hegel on Life, Freedom, and Social Pathology”

4:30-5:50   Michael Rosen (Harvard University)
“The Darstellungsproblem“

6:00-7:00   Reception

Apropos the previous post, I’m excited to announce to our Boston-area readers that Elaine May will be visiting the Harvard Film Archive this weekend to discuss two of her films as director, Mikey and Nickey (Friday November 12 at 7 PM) and Ishtar (Saturday November 13 at 7 PM). Both events are open to the public and cost $12. May’s two other films as director will be screened on Sunday November 14: A New Leaf (7 PM) and The Heartbreak Kid (9 PM). Here is the HFA’s description of the series:

The extraordinary films and career of Elaine May (b. 1932) defy easy classification. One of the only woman filmmakers active in postwar Hollywood since Ida Lupino – and, like Lupino, also an accomplished actress – May had to fight at almost every step against an increasingly obstructionist studio establishment in order to direct the four remarkable features that have cemented her reputation as a willful iconoclast, unyielding perfectionist and brilliantly original artist. While May’s first two films – A New Leaf and The Heartbreak Kid – together won her acclaim as a director of comedies, both effectively challenged traditional audiences and expectations for American film comedy with their distinctly unflattering portraits of incurably self-absorbed characters willing to sacrifice anything or anyone – even their newly-wedded spouses – to live out their selfish and quixotic dreams of success. Updating the Thirties screwball comedy of remarriage for the Seventies age of the anti-hero, the films strike an unusual balance between the abrasive and the affectionate by rendering their rakish lout protagonists as strangely vulnerable and sympathetic, cracked emblems of human vanity and foible. May’s next films were brave risks that each took unexpected, often controversial, turns away from her earlier work – first the dark and caustic deconstruction of the gangster film, Mikey and Nicky, and then the gleefully trenchant satire of American foreign policy and cockeyed optimism, Ishtar, whose infamous box office failure seems to have forced an effective and woefully premature end to May’s filmmaking career to date.

Born into a family of stage actors, May first found fame in partnership with her University of Chicago classmate Mike Nichols when they formed the wildly successful and influential comedy team Nichols and May. The toast of radio, television and eventually Broadway during their seven years together, Nichols and May helped shape the course of contemporary stand-up comedy with hilarious improvisatory skits that playfully captured the absurdity of life in an increasingly bureaucratized, professionalized and sanitized society. A highly gifted and prolific writer, May quickly distinguished herself as a writer and director of such impressive plays as Death Defying Acts (1995) and Not Enough Rope (1962) that matched her mordant wit with dark satire. The resolute independence of vision and voice embodied by May’s comedic and theatrical work immediately defined her subsequent career as a filmmaker and placed her in inevitable and frequent conflict with the hierarchical creative process favored by Hollywood. Channeling the lightening quick comedy of her stand-up work and the elegantly taut structures of her plays, May’s films cut deep against the grain of the mainstream cinema by wielding sharp-edged humor and unusual caricature to offer a biting yet richly ambiguous critique of masculinity, social mores and politics. Although May’s adamant refusal to compromise may have fixed an inevitable expiration date on her filmmaking career, her four films continue to enrich the American cinema immeasurably by remaining always at the cutting edge, ahead of their time and still ahead of ours.

The Harvard Film Archive is located in the Carpenter Center (24 Quincy St. Cambridge, MA).

-B.D.

On Friday Oct. 28 and Saturday Oct. 29 the filmmaker Robert Gardner will be presenting some of his work at the Harvard Film Archive, which is located in the Carpenter Center (24 Quincy St. Cambridge, MA). Both events begin at 7 PM, are open to the public, and cost $12. The Friday program will follow a reception (beginning at 5:30) in the Carpenter Center’s Sert Gallery, where copies of Gardner’s new book, Just Representations, will be sold. The programs belong to the HFA’s series “Still Journey On: the Films of Robert Gardner” (continuing through Nov. 8). Here is the HFA’s description of the series:

One of America’s great documentarians, Robert Gardner (b. 1925) has remained committed to a fearsomely independent and uncompromising vision of the cinema throughout his long and prolific career. Gardner’s early films, such as Blunden Harbor, align with the tradition of poetic ethnographic cinema alternately pioneered by Robert Flaherty and the British filmmakers loosely grouped around John Grierson. In his first major works, such as Dead Birds, Gardner began to define his signature mode of lyrically classical documentary, equally distinguished by its rigorous yet nuanced structure and its often stunningly beautiful imagery, frequently shot by Gardner himself. Since his time as a graduate student of anthropology, Gardner has long been fascinated by ancient civilizations, tribal cultures and religions that together seem to describe an absolute “other” from the contemporary Western world. In celebrated films such as Forest of Bliss and Rivers of Sand, Gardner traveled to distant lands – here India and Ethiopia – to capture a distinct essence of the different cultures he studied while also evoking the texture of his own deeply personal experience. A devoted student of poetry, Gardner has an enduring interest in first person voices and in the nuances of language, which contributes to the richly textured voice-over narration frequently used in his films. Equally important as Gardner’s fascination with religious and cultural ceremonies is his abiding interest in art and the creative process, which has led him to direct an ongoing series of insightful and visually stunning “artist films.” Poetic in both their visual beauty and their structure, Gardner’s powerful cinematic essays document the human experience with a classicist’s eye for rhythm and framing and a deep compassion and understanding.

As a founder of the Harvard Film Archive and the founding director of the Film Study Center at Harvard, Gardner has exerted an immeasurable influence on the creation of the vibrant film community that continues to thrive here at Harvard and throughout the Greater Boston area. The Harvard Film Archive is honored to welcome back Robert Gardner for a celebration of his work and legacy, which includes a showcase of new work. This program coincides with the release of Gardner’s most recent book, Just Representations, a collection of journal entries written while working on films, anthropological essays and scripts of voiceover narrations from his films.

-B.D.

In October the Peabody Museum Press and Studio7Arts will publish a new book of writings by filmmaker Robert Gardner, Just Representations (edited by Charles Warren). Here is part of the book’s description on the Studio7Arts web site:

This book presents selected writings by Robert Gardner. There are journals he wrote during stays in different parts of the world, observing and reacting to diverse ways of life, traditional and modern. There are his accounts of film projects envisioned and planned but not completed. There are essays, more formal and systematic than the journals, on ways of life in pre-modern cultures that Gardner has observed first hand. We also read his voiceover narrations from the films Dead Birds (1961) and Rivers of Sand (1975), which come to life in a new way on the page. And in an interview, letters, and articles, Gardner addresses the subject of filmmaking—his own and that of others—and reflects on film’s relation to anthropology and, more broadly, to the very project of human beings to understand reality.

And here is a press release on the book from the Peabody Museum’s web site. In conjunction with the book’s publication, the Harvard Film Archive will hold a series running October 15-November 8 called “Still Journey On: The Films of Robert Gardner.” More on that series to come.

-B.D.