Film review: Astra Taylor, Examined Life, 90'

Astra Taylor, Examined Life, 90'

#review

Review by SF

‘The unexamined life is not worth living’, Plato

This review is based on all the sentences that popped into my mind whilst watching The Unexamined Life, which is more or less about philosophy and politics. The interviewer/filmmaker is moving from place to place, with the camera, which gives this film a dynamic aesthetic, triggering the viewer to continue watching.

Cornel West: Thank God you don’t have to go to school to be a philosopher! It is the lever of wisdom. It takes a lot of discipline and courage.

The philosopher tells the truth about things. Cornel gives a personal view on what he thinks the philosopher deals with in everyday life.

Avital Ronnel: Boredom has an offshoot of melancholy, which interests me as a response to these dazzling things we are producing.

Avital just said what I was thinking about when she started to talk. ‘Boredom’. How something so simple can entail such a large story if we are only philosophical about it.

Interviewer: Does life have a meaning, and what is it?

This question is something a lot of us deal with at a certain point of our career as artists. But this is also an important question that everyone deals with at a certain point in their lives. I wonder, why is it that creative people have to deal with it the most?

Kwame Anthony Appiah: Context we evolve as species in an aspect of globalization.

We evolve as species but do we change our behavior to better the world? Or, is it getting worse?

Martha Nussbaum: Women’s oppression has always been partly occasioned by their physical weakness compared to men. If you leave out that physical asymmetry you may leave out a problem.

Is that it? Is the problem solved just like that? Then why didn’t we solve it yet? But this does not do well for people with serious physical and mental disabilities. It’s a serious political problem. The change has to start somewhere, and sometimes you don’t have the power to make it happen. Sometimes the only thing you can do is make a painting.

Michael Hardt: All we can do is observe what their revolutions were. Democracy means the ruling of all by all. The only way to rehabilitate the concept of revolution is democracy. Rather than that, we are instigating utopia every day. Aristocrats talking about the revolutions sounds absurd. The funny part about this is that we still talk about it.

Slavoj Žižek: Part of our vision of reality is that this (‘trash’) disappears from our world. Trash doesn’t disappear. The way we approach ecological problems is the crucial field of our ideology today. Wrong ways of perceiving reality. Ideology addresses very real problems, but it mystifies them. Can you imagine what kind of unthinkable catastrophe would occur on earth?

To me, this was the most valuable interview in this documentary. It was a reality check. Let’s get rid of the trash; let’s make it invisible to our home.

Judith Butler: Most disabled people also say ‘go for a walk’. Buildings are accessible in San Francisco, which leads to social acceptability. We became aware of people with disabilities. Oppression of disabled people: housing problems, not enough career opportunity, socially isolated. Where do our boundaries lie as humans? And, does it become non-human?

Another reality check; Can you walk? I think this film only needed these two fragments. The interview with Judith Butler and with Slavoj Žižek. It would have been a shorter film, but an interesting one.

Cornel West: How do you generate an elegance of earned self-togetherness so you have a ‘stick-to-it-ness’ in the face of the catastrophic calamitous, the horrendous, the scandalous, and the monstrous?

And just like that the film ends with the fear of the unknown.