“Toddlers wrestle with philosophy in new French documentary” plus 1 more |
| Toddlers wrestle with philosophy in new French documentary Posted: 17 Dec 2010 05:58 AM PST PARIS (AFP) – A group of French three- and four-year-olds gather around a lit candle to tackle the big issues of life: love, death, liberty, other philosophical questions that flummox many an adult. "Next time, we'll be asking 'What are parents for?'," teacher Pascaline Dogliani announces as she wraps her latest philosophy class for toddlers. More than two years of these sessions at a school just outside Paris have been distilled into a French documentary, "Ce n'est qu'un début" ("Just a Beginning"), which is intriguing audiences around the world. Filmmakers Jean-Pierre Pozzi and Pierre Barougier recorded 180 hours of footage from classes introducing philosophy to young children and condensed them into a sometimes amusing, sometimes intense hour and 35 minutes. The teacher first lights a candle that serves both to signal the start of the session and as a focal point for the attention of the children gathered around. And then the group launches into weighty topics, starting with simple questions that led to more complicated ones. The children's answers range from the cute to the acute. In a discussion about intelligence, one child says his mother is intelligent "because she never puts the Nutella in the fridge." Another is asked if adults are more intelligent than children. "Err, no," comes the reply, "because they say, 'You don't know anything, you don't know anything, you don't know anything,' even though we do know things!" Pozzi was initially concerned that his cameras and mikes would disrupt the sessions by distracting the group, and his team took pains to be as discreet as possible. "But very quickly, the children ignored our presence," he says. The children -- Azouaou, Abderhamene, Louise, Shana, Kyria, Yanis and the others -- express strong views on some issues but struggle to answer others. Freedom for one of them is "when you can be a little bit on your own, breathe a bit and be a kid." For another, it was simply leaving a prison. One question that stumped them all is whether there are rights that adults have that children do not. It was only after filming was finished that an underlying theme emerged, Pozzi says. "The big issue, in nursery school? It's love: you don't hide it, you exchange kisses, it's very direct," he says. What is love? What is the difference between friendship and love? How do you love when you are in love? The thread became apparent only when the filmmakers went back over their footage. "It was there that we discovered the 'listening' shots: the intensity of the reflection, the attention, the confusion of the children," Pozzi says. Even for the teacher, that came as the biggest surprise, he says. The sessions brought drama too, with the passion of emotions written across the children's faces. One boy announces that he is no longer in love with his girlfriend, that he is tired of her "looking at him all the time". His former beloved looks on aghast. The film follows the classroom experiment into a second year of school, with the same teacher leading the sessions. By this time, the film shows, the children are more confident, to the point where they almost conduct debates themselves without Dogliani's guidance. "The most striking thing is that you get to the point where you forget that these are nursery school kids, that they are only four or five years old," Pozzi says. The film has already reached audiences beyond France, winning a prize at a festival in Stuttgart in Germany and positive receptions in Rome, New York and Montreal. Its distributor has sold it on to Australia, Japan and Taiwan, while still negotiating with countries in Europe and the Americas. It is too early to say if the production will enjoy the success of Nicolas Philibert's award-winning 2002 film "Etre et Avoir" ("To Be and To Have"), a touching portrait of a teacher and his pupils at a picturesque French village school. But Pozzi is happy about at least one thing: everywhere the film has been shown, he says, the audience comes out smiling. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| WikiLeaks philosophy under a scholarly microscope Posted: 17 Dec 2010 03:45 PM PST | 17 December 2010 BERKELEY — While reporters, pundits and politicians write and rail about the latest WikiLeaks revelations of secret documents and the activities of its founder, Julian Assange, an online scholarly assessment of the WikiLeaks philosophy developed from Assange's 2006 essays has turned a spotlight on a University of California, Berkeley, graduate student in African literature. The online analysis by Aaron Bady, a Ph.D. student in UC Berkeley's English Department, had been drawing a respectable 500 to 1,000 visitors a day to his Zunguzungu blog about literature, film, higher education and other topics. But after his Nov. 29 entry on "Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy," the number skyrocketed to 60,000. The post exploring Assange's philosophy and mission for WikiLeaks was quickly cited, excerpted and republished around the world by leading news and social media critics, journalists, policy wonks and even WikiLeaks' Twitter feed. In The Atlantic, writer Alexis Madrigal observed that Bady's "probing analysis of Julian Assange's personal philosophy and possible motivations quickly became an oft-cited piece of the global conversation about what WikiLeaks might mean." Madrigal added, "At a time when stunned traditional media outlets and bloggers were struggling to understand Assange's motives, Bady's essay delivered a clear and cogent view that was also fascinating." Bady said his interest in WikiLeaks-released cables regarding Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia made him curious to learn more about WikiLeaks and its collaboration with mainstream media. His online explorations took him to the Assange essays "State and Terrorist Conspiracies" and "Conspiracy as Governance," both explored on the "Word Without Dread" blog site of another literary scholar, Rei Terada, a professor of comparative literature at UC Irvine. "The journalistic world is now aware of these writings, but only because two serious literature scholars wrote about them," Bady said in an interview. "The prominence of Aaron's blog and his post are a testimony to him and to the field and its training," remarked Samuel Otter, chair of UC Berkeley's English Department. "I could write this (about Assange) because I spent years learning to write this. I kind of submerged myself and tried to let those essays speak," Bady said. He also credited his mother, an activist and founder of an Appalachia-based environmental group that opposes mountaintop removal mining methods, for teaching him "that you find your own way to be a good citizen, and you can't do that if you don't put yourself out there." In his post on Assange's early writings, Bady guides his Zunguzungu readers, a good number of them Web 2.0 types accustomed to reading short bits of text at a time, through the Assange essays by breaking the material into easily digestible pieces and accompanying them with insightful, intriguing and often entertaining exposition. In his blog, Bady made connections between Assange's expressed philosophy and theories to a wide spectrum of social, political and historical points ranging from the cable TV series "The Wire," James Bond, "The Battle of Algiers" film about French counterterrorism, hacker theory, Facebook wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg and the mid-term elections, to Assange's own self identification with Theodore Roosevelt, who applied the originally disparaging term "muckraker" to journalists. "Most of the news media seems to be losing their minds over WikiLeaks without actually reading these essays, even though he (Assange) describes the function and aims of an organization like WikiLeaks in pretty straightforward terms," wrote Bady. In Zunguzungu, Bady quoted Assange: "The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie…Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of government." And Bady offered his own online assessment, saying that the leak "is only the catalyst for the desired counter-overreaction; WikiLeaks wants to provoke the conspiracy into turning off its own brain in response to the threat." He continued: "And whether you buy his argument or not, Assange has a clearly articulated vision for how WikiLeaks' activities will 'carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity,' a strategy for how exposing secrets will ultimately impede the production of future secrets. The point of WikiLeaks – as Assange argues – is simply to make WikiLeaks unnecessary." Bady has since posted a video of Assange speaking last November at a UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism event, along with a transcription of the talk. Now Bady is interested in monitoring the unfolding WikiLeaks controversies, an alternative offshoot of WikiLeaks that has sprouted, the effects of WikiLeaks on free speech and terrorism, how the news media at-large may be affected by WikiLeaks' strategy of releasing entire, raw documents rather than select excerpts, and how Assange's philosophy may change. And, said Bady, this issue, like Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers back in the mid- 1970s, "is much bigger than Assange is." This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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