By Benito Rakower, Ed.D.
When World War II ended, France was the only European nation that tried to reduce the horror to literary analysis. Pre-eminent among various writers was the high school teacher and writer, Jean-Paul Sartre.
From the vantage point of a café table – where he sat and officiated – Sartre observed how people actually interacted and spoke. Sartre discovered that authentic behavior and thinking can only be expressed through pretending to be what we want to be. Sincerity is invariably an admission of failure that leads us into circles of ineffectuality.
Sartre’s concept of authenticity was arduously confirmed through philosophy and psychology. What he concluded was that each individual is responsible for the immediate world from a basis of total subjectivity. Within this subjective realm, we are free to pretend to be our ideal conception of ourselves. Or we can simply lie. The right pretensions are the key!
These ideas are reflected in several films of my winter film course. In one of them, set in Tuscany, a British male writer and a French female antiques dealer meet at a lecture. The writer asserts that even fake paintings and forgeries are “authentic” in some sense. The woman is intrigued and leaves her phone number with the lecturer’s translator. They meet and are mistaken for husband and wife. What happens shatters any notion that we “really know” who we are. It is only by maintaining the “pretense” that the two reach deeper truth.
As Sartre had recognized, proclamations of sincerity do not establish our authenticity. This goes totally counter to American attitudes and dogmas which have deified such proclamations.
In another film, set in Boston, and featuring some of the best American actors, the ideas of identity and authenticity are present in a criminal milieu. In this case, penetrating another person’s identity and authenticity forms the plot and becomes the problem.
Benito Rakower, Ed.D.
Eight 21st Century Films: The Reinvention of Cinema
Fridays, January 12, 19, 26; February 2, 9, 16; March 2, 9, 2018 (No class on February 23)
Film: 1:30 – 4:00 p.m.; Discussion: 4:00 – 4:30 p.m.
To register: click here.
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