![\"Benito](\"http:\/\/wordpress.fau.edu\/lifelongexchange\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/14\/2015\/11\/rakower.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nBy Benito Rakower, Ed.D.<\/p>\n
When World War II ended, France was the only European nation that tried to reduce the horror to literary analysis.\u00a0 Pre-eminent among various writers was the high school teacher and writer, Jean-Paul Sartre.<\/p>\n
From the vantage point of a caf\u00e9 table – where he sat and officiated – Sartre observed how people actually interacted and spoke.\u00a0\u00a0 Sartre discovered that authentic behavior and thinking can only be expressed through pretending to be what we want to be.\u00a0 Sincerity is invariably an admission of failure that leads us into circles of ineffectuality.<\/p>\n
Sartre\u2019s concept of authenticity was arduously confirmed through philosophy and psychology.\u00a0 What he concluded was that each individual is responsible for the immediate world from a basis of total subjectivity.\u00a0 Within this subjective realm, we are free to pretend to be our ideal conception of ourselves.\u00a0 Or we can simply lie.\u00a0 The right pretensions are the key!<\/p>\n
These ideas are reflected in several films of my winter film course.\u00a0 In one of them, set in Tuscany, a British male writer and a French female antiques dealer meet at a lecture.\u00a0 The writer asserts that even fake paintings and forgeries are \u201cauthentic\u201d in some sense.\u00a0 The woman is intrigued and leaves her phone number with the lecturer\u2019s translator.\u00a0 They meet and are mistaken for husband and wife.\u00a0 What happens shatters any notion that we \u201creally know\u201d who we are. It is only by maintaining the \u201cpretense\u201d that the two reach deeper truth.<\/p>\n
As Sartre had recognized, proclamations of sincerity do not establish our authenticity.\u00a0\u00a0 This goes totally counter to American attitudes and dogmas which have deified such proclamations.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 In this case, penetrating another person\u2019s identity and authenticity forms the plot and becomes the problem.<\/p>\n
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Benito Rakower, Ed.D.
\n<\/u><\/strong>Eight 21st<\/sup> Century Films:\u00a0 The Reinvention of Cinema
\n<\/em>Fridays, January 12, 19, 26; February 2, 9, 16; March 2, 9, 2018 (No class on February 23<\/strong>)
\nFilm: 1:30 \u2013 4:00 p.m.; Discussion: 4:00 \u2013 4:30 p.m.<\/p>\n