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Examined Life

  • 2008
  • Not Rated
  • 1h 27m
IMDb RATING
7.0/10
1.9K
YOUR RATING
Examined Life (2008)
Examined Life pulls philosophy out of academic journals and classrooms, and puts it back on the streets...
Play trailer2:05
1 Video
9 Photos
Documentary

In Examined Life, filmmaker Astra Taylor accompanies some of today's most influential thinkers on a series of unique excursions through places and spaces that hold particular resonance for t... Read allIn Examined Life, filmmaker Astra Taylor accompanies some of today's most influential thinkers on a series of unique excursions through places and spaces that hold particular resonance for them and their ideas.In Examined Life, filmmaker Astra Taylor accompanies some of today's most influential thinkers on a series of unique excursions through places and spaces that hold particular resonance for them and their ideas.

  • Director
    • Astra Taylor
  • Writer
    • Astra Taylor
  • Stars
    • Kwame Anthony Appiah
    • Judith Butler
    • Michael Hardt
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • IMDb RATING
    7.0/10
    1.9K
    YOUR RATING
    • Director
      • Astra Taylor
    • Writer
      • Astra Taylor
    • Stars
      • Kwame Anthony Appiah
      • Judith Butler
      • Michael Hardt
    • 12User reviews
    • 13Critic reviews
    • 64Metascore
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • Videos1

    Examined Life
    Trailer 2:05
    Examined Life

    Photos8

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    Kwame Anthony Appiah
    Kwame Anthony Appiah
    • Self
    • (as K. Anthony Appiah)
    Judith Butler
    Judith Butler
    • Self
    Michael Hardt
    • Self
    Martha Nussbaum
    • Self
    Avital Ronell
    Avital Ronell
    • Self
    Peter Singer
    Peter Singer
    • Self
    Sunaura Taylor
    • Self
    Cornel West
    Cornel West
    • Self
    Slavoj Zizek
    Slavoj Zizek
    • Self
    • Director
      • Astra Taylor
    • Writer
      • Astra Taylor
    • All cast & crew
    • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

    User reviews12

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    Featured reviews

    7Chris Knipp

    Talking, walking, and thinking at the same time. Is it possible?

    'Examined Life' introduces what may be a whole new sub-genre: the philosophical chat documentary. The title's an obvious allusion to Socrates' famous statement, 'The unexamined life is not worth living.' The film's eight philosophers are peripatetic, though Taylor doesn't claim this alludes to Aristotle, who, they say, walked around while lecturing. The philosopher of running, Dr. George Sheehan, liked to quote Thoreau: "Trust no thought arrived at sitting down." If that's true, maybe we'll have to distrust two of the speakers, because one is in a car and another is rowing a boat on a lake.

    It's good if you can lure the public to watch a documentary film that provides a taste of what philosophical thinking is like. Unfortunately the talkers, Cornel West, Avita Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Judith Butler, and Savoj Zizek, aren't really making philosophy as they go along, the way Wittgenstein and G.E. Moore did, as well as their followers A.J. Ayer and Gilbert Ryle. Instead, they're just summarizing some of their main ideas or repeating riffs they've done before or answering questions from Taylor as they're being filmed walking, rowing, riding, or, in the case Zizek, fidgeting around in front of some piles of rubbish at a London dump. (Taylor previously made a film about the showy, provocative Slovenian.)

    While each of us asks about the meaning of life at some point or another, it's not a sure thing that philosophy is of any use, even to itself, in answering that question. Wittgenstein famously said that of what matters most to us we can say nothing. After a pungent name-dropping riff by West sitting in the back of Taylor's car, Ronell, a "deconstructionist," begins her sequence, pacing a Central Park sidewalk, with a strong dose of skepticism, not to say metaphysical and moral angst. "If you have a good conscience, then you're worthless," she opines. Disdainfully asserting that though ten minutes to speak may be fine for the others, it's ridiculous for herself, she haughtily makes a point of distinguishing between philosophy and thinking. So there's some question whether anything said by these eight people is of any use, or whether presenting them sequentially (with Cornell West injected at three points as a sort of unifying voice) makes any logical sense. But it does, because philosophers do get back to basics, and all of them are talking in one way or another about how to live.

    In his 'Village Voice' review of 'Examined Life' J. Hoberman falls into the inevitable trap of rating the speakers one by one. He finds Singer smug and obvious and says his "neo-Kantian platitude" about "commitment to the common good" "stops the conversation" and illustrates that distinction between philosophy and thinking. Actually Singer's stroll down Fifth Avenue while advocating vegetarianism and suggesting it's better to donate a thousand dollars to charity than to spend it on an elegant suit seemed effective and thought-provoking to me; and Singer had the best command of everyday, unpretentious language.

    Singer's position coheres with those of Nussbaum and Butler, both of whom speak of the need to act democratically. The image of a Bushian un-compassionate conservatism hovers behind their assertion of our collective obligation to provide for and protect those who are different, or poor, or handicapped. Nussbaum points out that everyone is "handicapped" in infancy and old age, so the need for help is universal. Butler explores a San Francisco second-hand clothing store with a wheelchair-bound friend, Sunaura Taylor, discussing accessibility and gender issues. All of this adds up to the need for a more liberal and humane society. Appiah adds another consideration: culture. As he walks through the international wing of a airport, en route to somewhere, he talks about growing up in a shack and having a Ghanan mother and English father and describes cosmopolitanism--and distinguishes it from cultural relativity. It's important to realize that people can live well (be good), he says, while following different values.

    One may be a cosmopolite like Appiah, but it may be better to stay at home. So you might conclude from the words of Michael Hardt, co-author of the book 'Empire.' In his youth he and others went to Latin America to engage in revolution, but they were advised to go back and make their revolution here. As he rows around the lake and runs aground looking at big turtles, he may seem ineffectual. There is the danger in this medium of peppy visuals and extended sound bites that these important thinkers and writers may wind up over-simplifying or parodying themselves.

    Zizek, like Jean Baudrillard, delivers provocative pronouncements that seem to defy common sense. It may simply be that while he can devastate you in the sound bites, with a kind of hit-and-run effect, he can't ever be properly understood in such small chunks. His primary point this time is that "shit" doesn't go away as we imagine, when we flush. We need to as it were "embrace" our mountains of waste, forget about living in nature, and accept being more artificial. But since he acknowledges that global warming is a real problem, why does he insist that "ecology" is the comforting new orthodoxy, like "religion" to Marx? What are we to do with this information, if it be true?

    And it's hard to see what to do with Cornell West's dazzling high culture jive talk about history, jazz, blues, slavery, courage, and much else. The thing about West is that, like Zizek, you may come away only with questions, but you may also, especially if you're young, come away thinking you want to be able to talk like that and think like that and have all that stuff in your head. Somewhere out of this you may get the urge to think or act in new ways. And in that sense this philosophers' sampler will have justified its existence.
    johnjohnson68510

    I felt engaged in the dialog

    I really like the concept of this film: take philosophy off the page and put it back in the mouth of philosophers. Although each thinker only gets ten minutes, it is a great summary of their work. Visually it is interesting, as the director puts each philosopher in a different setting: walking in a park, rowing a boat, riding in the back of a cab, etc. (I don't understand the other reviewer who didn't like the cinematography.) Zizek, of course, was filmed amidst mounds of modern garbage.

    When you have to read these guys in school, you are treated the way I suppose a young Talmudic student is, who has to accept the great thought or go to hell.* But listening to them here, seeing their personality, their vulnerability and their quirks, it stimulated me greatly, and made me feel I could enter the conversation.

    This movie helps democratize philosophy, and I think there will be a lot more: digital cameras are so abundant and my guess is philosophers are like poets, they work for cheap. Thanks for reading.

    *(you can, in school, of course, challenge the ideas, but it is much much much easier to go along with the program.)
    5CuriousGrl

    Good Attempt, however a bit haphazard (All over the place) without a coherent structure

    For centuries only the privileged who didn't have to toil and work, had the luxury of discussing philosophy and theorizing ideas.

    About the meaning of life. There is meaning. It is Subjective. Life's meaning is different to each person. Whether it may be servitude for some (like the man in the film, forget his name), it could be the rearing of family for another, making music, or the joy of writing or film making like this director. Again even objectivity can be very subjective. There is no objective answer to the meaning of life, the goal is to find it for each one of us through awareness and then follow our calling to ensure we lead a more fulfilled and thus a happy life.

    Good try Astra, maybe a better organized theme instead of haphazardly put material would prove more useful in the future.

    My two cents :)
    7MohamedQadir

    Good mind shaker

    I think what makes this movie good is because of two things: first it introduces you to some contemporary great thinkers, second, as it is also the task of philosophy, makes you wonder and question some of the most important philosophical questions. This movie is not at all an extensive view of philosophy, nor any chronology of history of philosophy, it is just a movie about how thinkers would like to discuss some issues with the audience in a form of monologues.
    7Urantia

    A Finite Journey Towards an Infinite Destination

    Through art and philosophy, the material-minded man or woman is inveigled into the contemplation of the spiritual realities and universe values of eternal meanings. And so it is largely due to my appreciation for philosophy and art that I enjoyed watching the streaming version of this movie that streamed its way into my cosmic consciousness like a raging river of deep thoughts with superior gems of theoretical conjecturing and speculative reasoning often flowing considerably faster than my ability to comprehend. In fact, I recall a few memorable instances where I even enjoyed the rapid rhythmic structure of verbosity-saturated sentences containing numerous funky words whose meanings were far beyond my limited intellectual grasp. They simply flowed like passionately-potent pastry-prose poetry combining the occasional street-slang slur with intricately woven phrases of subtle sophistication concealing their hidden mystery-meanings beneath lyrical layers of perplexingly abstract idea-patterns. The presentation style contradicted what I have come to expect from many documentaries, namely a question-answering talking head in a well-lit dull-looking room, just sitting there in that sleepy chair with the very absence of movement in the scene inherently evoking a sense of boredom in me unless I am hearing content interesting enough to sufficiently sustain my motivation to stay awake. So, in this film, the non-traditional use of walking alongside the talking philosopher (or being in a moving car) while they extemporaneously expounded about this or that was a refreshingly welcome change from the usual soporific format. And to me, it had philosophical implications as well since I perceive philosophy to be more about The Journey as opposed to The Destination. The Journey of Life is more about The Search for Truth and where that takes me rather than foolishly thinking I found all of IT at some hypothetically final destination point in time and space where the journey is no more.

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    Storyline

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    Did you know

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    • Quotes

      Cornel West: The unexamined life is not worth living, Plato says on line 38A of the Apology. How do you examine yourself; what happens when you interrogate yourself? What happens when you begin to call into question your tacit assumptions and unarticulated presuppositions and begin then to become a different kind of person. See, I put it this way, that for me, philosophy is fundamentally about... our finite situation. We can define that in terms of we're beings toward death, we're featherless, two-legged, linguistically conscious creatures born between urine and feces whose bodies will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms. That's us, beings toward death. At the same time, we have desire, why we are organisms in space and time, so it's desire in the face of death. And then, of course, you've got dogmatism, various attempts to hold on to certainty, various forms of idolatry, and you've got dialogue, in the face of dogmatism and then of course, structurally and institutionally, you've got domination... and you have democracy

      [...]

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    Details

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    • Release date
      • November 20, 2009 (United Kingdom)
    • Country of origin
      • Canada
    • Language
      • English
    • Also known as
      • Sorgulanmış yaşam
    • Filming locations
      • Chicago, Illinois, USA
    • Production company
      • Sphinx Productions
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Box office

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    • Gross US & Canada
      • $120,712
    • Opening weekend US & Canada
      • $12,085
      • Mar 1, 2009
    • Gross worldwide
      • $120,712
    See detailed box office info on IMDbPro

    Tech specs

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    • Runtime
      1 hour 27 minutes
    • Color
      • Color
    • Sound mix
      • Dolby Digital

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