Documenting congresses

Shooting an interview in Krakow. 

While attending the 19th Jubilee International Congress of Aesthetics
(Berlin 1913 – Krakow 2013) I also produced a short video describing the event.  It is available on their website. 

The production accompanied the process of gathering material for another project currently in production.  This time I had several cameras working simultaneously and got a lot of "behind the scenes" shots which reveal interesting dynamics between the people who articulate philosophical ideas and those who attempt to capture them (the ideas and their carriers, that is) into images.  This theme elbows itself into my current interests and will be reported on later. 

After over a decade of making philosophical conference videos I got somehow addicted to the process.  I enjoy meeting fabulous minds and exciting personalities.  The Krakow conference video, while attempting to be a "corporate" piece, in its selection of the people on the screen, reflects my personal likes, although with such a huge event it was impossible to include everybody whom I found intriguing. Nothing lost, however, my philosophical image library is growing!  

The living blackness

My Mom watches Rothko

I’ve just read an amazing interview with the daughter on Mark Rothko. 

Everybody remembers him being nervous and going on and on about philosophy and art, to her he was always silent and contemplating his art, almost hypnotized by it.  Or to be precise, she specifies, when he didn’t know yet what to do he was indeed laud and analytic and opinionated.  Once he got into his true groove he became silent and concentrated.  That’s a very telling story: beware of the talkers.  

Rotho called his works “tragic”, although he never spoke with his daughter about the Shoah.  

The most important for him in a painting were strong emotions evoked in a viewer.    

The fact that he killed himself is devastating.  

The pleasures of restrain

Man in Black 3

Last night I caught on HBO Men in Black 3 and loved it.  Pity I didn’t see it on a big screen.   There are many strong elements there out of which the performances stand out the most.  Everybody hits the same tone of restrained pleasure from acting.  Even the evil Boris delivers “You complete me” with the full relish of the knowledge of its cultural origin.  The same goes for everybody else - they know what they are doing and are having fun doing it.  Thank god it’s controlled and not over the top.   I should scrap the last sentence - the actors on the screen are the masters in their game and the director is in top form so the fact that the movie works should not be a surprise.  Except that the perfect pitch does not happen in all movies with big names, not to mention the cacophony of false notes in (too) many screen attempts regardless of the class of actors/directors involved.  

The playfulness is imbedded in in the story itself.  Andy Warhol’s true identity, or an alien confused by too much insight into “the way things are” are delightful concepts. 

I am a sucker for stories with aliens and it’s usually difficult to unglue me from a flick with them.  Time travel on the other hand (with the exception of “Back to the future”) most of the time (!) leaves me cold. I find boring the mechanical aspects of narratives that have to be employed in such scripts.  Yet, MIB 3 manages to surf with ease the dangerous waters of “I have to go back to fix what causes the misfortunes in the now”.  

Can’t wait for the next installment in the franchise. 

Directing philosophy

Pawel Kuczynski and Richard Shusterman 

on the set of "The Pragmatist."  

Photography by Piotr Rejmer

Below is the press release for an upcoming premiere screening of my new project.  The screening will take place in Krakow at the Contemporary Art Gallery Bunkier Sztuki on July 25th at 5 PM. 

Delos Films presents:

“Philosophical Encounters with Richard Shusterman”

This three-part video series paints an intellectual portrait of a noted philosopher and founder of the interdisciplinary field of somaesthetics, a project concerned with body consciousness, perception, and aesthetic stylization.  The video material is based on conversations recorded at and around Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Shusterman’s current academic home.  Additional scenes present his international lectures and workshops with an emphasis on three recent visits to Poland.  

This video series is intended as an educational tool but it is also a preparatory work for a more personal documentary - “The Pragmatist,” currently in the works.

The Krakow screening will consist of the first two parts in the series:  “The Role of a Philosopher” (27 min.) and “Making a Difference” (30 min.)

Dr. Shusterman will be present at the screening and available for a Q&A. 

The series and the upcoming documentary are directed by Pawel Kuczynski, a Polish-American filmmaker whose recent productions focus on philosophy and art.  He will also be at the screening. 

Richard Shusterman’s web site: http://www.fau.edu/humanitieschair
Pawel Kuczynski’s web site: www.directing.com

The meeting

It turns out that a modest project which I produced as a byproduct of “Lawnswood Gardens” found its way to the independent existence.  This Sunday in Wroclaw, Poland there will be a public meeting between two giants of Polish culture: the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and the sculptor Miroslaw Balka.  Both are the subject of “The meeting”, the video I made three years ago with the aim to describe the starting dynamics of an encounter between the two creators.  The idea was to explore complexities of any intellectual encounter and in particular those that happen between the two specific intellectuals who are intrigued be their respective takes on reality.  

This video will have its premiere during the Wroclaw event, which is to promote the Bauman/Balka book - a collection of their conversations.   I made “The Meeting” for National Center for Culture which organizes the event and is also the book publisher. 

I am glad “The meeting”, conceived as a sketch has been considered worthy a public presentation.   If anyone is going to attend, please let me how it went. 

The event details are at http://www.nck.pl/artykuly/100840.html

Unique?

An advice from the great Paul Schrader (I am reading one of those screenwriting books that compile wisdom from Hollywood insiders) is not to compete with what’s out there but rather to ask “what do I have that no one else has, but other people can understand and identify with?”  If you ask that question you will be only in competition with yourself. 

Great advice but difficult to execute.  Going into our own lives and psyche requires some mysterious mechanism to be able identify what’s unique in us.   That mysterious mechanism, usually called talent, does not automatically appear when we gaze inward.  In fact it is quite rare.  Obviously. 

The key element in Schrader’s thought is knowing what’s unusual in us but this perspective to many of us is simply unachievable.  Many a time when reading scripts by beginners I wished they did not stick so closely to their lives.   I know what I am talking about: several of my early writing attempts also painfully suffered from being too close to home.  (I am not saying that what I write now is great, it is just devoid of the early pitfalls - I am sure from a broader perspective the stuff I work on right now will reveal its flaws).   

Usually we slide on the surface of our existence perceiving common events as unique (they are unique to us since they have not happened to us before) and erroneously assume others will find the externality of those events interesting.  Very few can go deep enough to write about motives and reactions and sensitivities that others would be too blind to notice or too scary to acknowledge. 

Why are we so deaf to ourselves?

SIEMEK - Truth on screen

Prof. Jean Pierre Lasota-Hirszowicz
in a documentary about Marek Siemek
“The View from a Cathedral”

According to Marek Siemek, prof. Jean-Pierre Lasota-Hirszowicz (an astrophysicist specializing in black holes) was not only his best high school friend but also was intimately connected with Siemek choosing philosophy over physics.

You will have to wait till the film comes out to hear how prof. Lasota remembers “the Siemek’s choice”. Within the context of the narrative it will be revealing and quite shocking.

For now however I want to share a snippet from the shoot. It has to do with a remark made by the Professor when I suggested he enters a classroom with the camera ready to catch his natural reaction.

“ok, but it always seemed to me
that a natural way (“naturalność”)
does not come out well (on the screen),
that everything has to be set up first.”

This is an astonishing observation (at least for a "fly on the wall" filmmaker focused on chasing and catching happy accidents and in this way getting unfiltered “truth” of the moment).

I suspect that the people who deal with the Universe and the Way Things Work must know something that we “the civilians” don’t not only about the dimensions above us by also about life itself.  That the bigger and more grand perspective somehow sharpens their perception and understanding of not only the cosmos but also of the life on Earth. This is one of the reasons why the remark stopped me in my tracks.  (The Professor rejects my way of seeing his profession as needless romanticizing of his trade.  Of course he is right.)

Still, the offhand observation brought me back to muse over the old documentary dilemma of “the natural” versus “the prepared way”.     I am leaning to conclude that quite possibly the difference between preparations versus catching the stuff as it happens lies in the self understanding of those who appear in front of the camera. Clearly some need to be prepared more to come out naturally, while others are better when caught in the act.

Perhaps those who have issues with themselves, who are existentially unsure, have to be “caught in the act of being” without realizing it. Once they are made aware of the camera they start presenting their take of themselves, they try acting and since they don’t know who they are they instantaneously flex their “psychic” muscle trying to prove something. A disaster usually follows.

Those who are secure in themselves, who down deep know their boundaries, their self and their worth are usually game for whatever happens and come out naturally. Preparations and rehearsals don’t freeze them because they know who they are and remain themselves no matter what.