Philosophy through cinema
The Faculty of Philosophy brings back the activity Cinema and Philosophy, a cycle to bring concepts on philosophy to high school students through cinema. María Isabel Méndez, vice-dean of the Faculty and head of this activity, says “one of the aims of philosophy is the study of ideas that can be generally applied, and the cinema is a good tool to reflect on universal concepts such as existence, truth, time, beauty or the good, among others”. This cycle, coordinated by the lecturer Marta Palacín, aims to treat these concepts and other questions such as chance, the free will, and rationality.
All sessions will take place between April and May at the Faculty of Philosophy at 10 a.m. The first session will take place in the Aula Magna and the other days the activity will take place in Sala Gran. The format is always the same: a brief talk by one of the lecturers of the Faculty to introduce a series of philosophical topics, and then a film, followed by a debate. Although it is specially aimed at high school students, this activity is open to everyone.
The Faculty of Philosophy brings back the activity Cinema and Philosophy, a cycle to bring concepts on philosophy to high school students through cinema. María Isabel Méndez, vice-dean of the Faculty and head of this activity, says “one of the aims of philosophy is the study of ideas that can be generally applied, and the cinema is a good tool to reflect on universal concepts such as existence, truth, time, beauty or the good, among others”. This cycle, coordinated by the lecturer Marta Palacín, aims to treat these concepts and other questions such as chance, the free will, and rationality.
All sessions will take place between April and May at the Faculty of Philosophy at 10 a.m. The first session will take place in the Aula Magna and the other days the activity will take place in Sala Gran. The format is always the same: a brief talk by one of the lecturers of the Faculty to introduce a series of philosophical topics, and then a film, followed by a debate. Although it is specially aimed at high school students, this activity is open to everyone.
The cycle starts with The Lobster
The first session will take place on Thursday, April 25, and will be dynamized by the lecturer Laura Llevadot, who chose the film The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2015). According to Llevadot, “with the dystopia the film director presents, we will analyse the obligatory nature of the monogamous couple, normative heterosexuality and romantic love as fundamental factors of the construction of contemporary subjectivity”.
On Monday, April 29, there will be a second session, with the film Deux jours, une nuit (Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne, 2014), brought by Montse Crespin. The film tells the experience of Sandra, who is helped by her husband and has a weekend to visit her colleagues and convince them to reject their salary bonus so that she can keep the job. Crespin says “the film is the base to think on whether there is room to talk about morals in the capitalist labour market; whether we have enough space to decide with empathy and support or whether we act as competitors; and whether it is fair to take decisions under a system of majorities -not a democracy- in which some decide the future of the others. The film, settled in the European crisis of values, brings the dilemma of having to decide between two options, none of them satisfactory, but both real in our atopic world, where it is not easy to answer to “what would I do?”.
On Wednesday, May 8, attendants will watch Enemy (Denis Villeneuve, 2013), which, like Saramagoʼs novel O homen duplicado (2002), explores the concept of the double. Professor Manuel García-Carpintero is in charge of this session. “In some cases -he says-, the figure of the double represents aspects of a self (Stevensonʼs Jekyll and Hyde, Poeʼs William Wilson), and in others, itʼs pure imagination of the other (Dostoevskyʼs The Double; Despair (1978), Fassbinderʼs film inspired in Nabokovʼs story; Based on a True Story (2017), Polanskiʼs film after Delphine de Viganʼs novel, or Hitchcockʼs Vertigo(1958)”. We will first focus on the interpretation of the film, we will think whether it belongs to any of these paradigms and then we will touch on the relation between reality and fiction”, he says.
On Friday, May 17, the lecturer Pepe Martínez will work on Cleo from 5 to 7 (1961), by Agnès Varda. Martínez works in the field of philosophical logics (in particular, the theory of truth and semantic paradox) and says this is one of the fundamental films of this film-maker, who died last March. “The film has a great existentialist power, and style. It follows the steps of a singer in Paris from 5 to 7 p.m., while she waits for the results of a medical test. The film treats how the characterʼs identity is built and what the sense of life is -when facing death as a possibility”, says Martínez.
The cycle will end on Tuesday, May 21. The last session will be brought by the researcher Esa Díaz León, with the film Disobedience (Sebastián Lelio, 2017), which explores the conflicts between religious faith and sexuality. The two characters of this film belong to a Jewish orthodox community in contemporary London, and the story tells how they cope with their romantic relationship. Díaz-León will talk about the main topics of the film and will introduce the concept of hermeneutical injustice, developed by the philosopher Miranda Fricker, who, according to the expert, “can help us understand the reaction of many people from the environment of the filmʼs characters”.