University Times

In an existential twist of irony, William Pamerleau’s book, “Existentialist Cinema,” came about by accident.

“About 10 years ago, we were asked to do certain non-classroom events on our campus, to provide some additional academic contact with students in connection with our Academic Villages,” said the Pitt-Greensburg associate professor of philosophy.

Rather than delivering a philosophy lecture, Pamerleau decided to attract students by showing Woody Allen’s film “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” which he said is packed with philosophical issues and insights, then follow up with a discussion of the film’s themes. In preparation for the event, Pamerleau viewed the movie again and took copious notes.

“Two students showed up,” Pamerleau recalled with a laugh.

But, serendipitously, soon afterward he stumbled on a call for papers for the journal Film and Philosophy, which was doing a special edition on the films of Woody Allen. “I thought, ‘I prepared this stuff, I’ll just turn this into a journal paper. Why not? It sounds like fun.’”

That published paper, later expanded to include a discussion of another Woody Allen film, “Match Point,” became the foundation of a chapter in “Existentialist Cinema,” and Pamerleau was off and running toward a book.

At first he speculated that a book on existentialism and film already must exist, but after poking around discovered there were none. “There are lots of articles and lots of books that impacted that theme, but none that directly focused on that,” said Pamerleau, whose research and teaching center on existentialism, social philosophy and ethics.

He said he is not a film buff in the sense of studying film history or memorizing actors’ and directors’ names. “But there have always been films that are very powerful to me, that moved me, and I already had the professional interest in existentialism,” Pamerleau said.

As he writes in the book’s introduction, “Films and existentialism share the same goal: to say something important about the human condition; [films] also help us critique existential theories.”

To set the stage for his arguments on the intersection of film and philosophy, in Part 1’s three chapters Pamerleau lays out various theoretical issues of existentialism, then describes how film is a medium conducive to philosophical investigation and discusses film realism and narrative identity, all with the overarching goal of understanding how humans generate and maintain meaning in life.

“At first I thought: I don’t know much about writing about films, but I do know something about philosophy. As I started writing it, it became clear to me that I had to start addressing these existentialist issues. The academic in me took over. The way I operate is I feel like I have to get the theory off my chest before I get into the application,” Pamerleau explained.

“That’s the justification for Part 1. It was my theoretical development of how I came to understand the philosophy of film, and what sorts of new things I was doing, namely making film be a critical tool for the investigation of philosophy, something I felt had not been done as much as other uses of film.”

Part 1 also includes a summary of the positions of prominent existentialists, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Soren Kierkegaard, Simone de Beauvoir and Paul Tillich.

However, the book is not a philosophy text in the classical sense, Pamerleau said. “You can’t just boil it down to propositions the way philosophy is usually done. There’s always going to be this element, an artistic portrayal of the human condition that goes beyond the philosophy, which I think makes it worthwhile to discuss film in this way.”

He chose the 10 films covered in Part 2 of the book primarily for their realistic representation of human circumstances and the theme of searching for meaning in life. Two films each were chosen from directors Allen, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini, and one film each directed by Peter Weir and Hal Ashby. Each chapter is devoted to a specific existentialist theme coupled with a discussion of two films that in some way address that theme, using the films’ lessons to amend, critique, expand or strengthen the philosophical position.

“I really didn’t want to rely very heavily on films that try to be existential,” Pamerleau said. “The operating criteria I was using in picking the films had to do with one of the theoretical theses of the book, which was I wanted realistic depictions of the human condition and what it was like to live in the modern world in ways that got you in the mindset of people encountering these difficulties or rising to the challenge of searching for meaning.”

In his chapter “Rethinking Raskolnikov,” for example, Pamerleau writes, “‘Crimes and Misdemeanors’ has obvious similarities to the work of the Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. Though Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’ is not a philosophical text, it nevertheless speaks in important ways about our ability to make moral judgments in a world of contingent values. … This section will be a comparison of Allen’s movie and Dostoevsky’s novel with the goal of demonstrating how the movie addresses and goes beyond the book’s themes.”

The main plot of “Crimes and Misdemeanors” centers on prominent optometrist Judah (played by Martin Landau), who, after wrestling with the moral implications, has his mistress murdered because she threatened to expose their affair, which Judah sees as a threat to his marriage and livelihood. Following the contract killing, Judah suffers from guilt and fear that his crime will be exposed, and even comes close to turning himself in, a la Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov.

Eventually Judah realizes he will not be caught and with time his guilt erodes until it disappears and he returns seemingly unscathed to his successful life, although that interpretation has been challenged by certain film analysts, Pamerleau noted.

A similar theme of getting away with murder is explored in Allen’s “Match Point.”

“What I found myself concluding was that Allen was doing something here that even Sartre didn’t do. What Allen was saying was: ‘Look, you can get away with murder. People rationalize it. This is what the world is really like,’” Pamerleau said. “Even Sartre, when he’s accused of saying, ‘We make our own choices. There is no absolute morality, therefore everything is permitted’ — the criticism directed to Sartre is: ‘Aren’t you existentialists, then, basically amoral people?’”

But, Pamerleau said, Sartre likely would disagree. “I think Sartre would say that all there is outside of the human choice is just luck. So it’s within the realm of human choice that we have to provide the meaning,” he said.

Allen, on the other hand, seems stuck in a world view that holds if the human condition is a purposeless place, life must be purposeless as well, Pamerleau said.

“I think the existentialists, especially Sartre, would say, ‘Well, no, even though the world may be inherently without purpose, we make the purpose with our own choices. You don’t wait for the purpose to come from outside of you.’ I think Sartre sounds too much like a moral traditionalist when he says, ‘The thinking person would not choose evil because they realize their responsibility,’” Pamerleau said.

“In contrast, Allen is saying that you really can choose to do evil and get away with it. Allen may be more accurate about the human condition than the existentialists are,” Pamerleau said. “That’s the genius of Allen’s contribution here. This is a hard thing to accept, that people like the character Cliff in the movie you want to succeed and they don’t, and people like Judah, who don’t deserve to succeed, do, and that’s the way the world is.”

The questions become: What should be thought of a world where such unfair consequences can prevail? What sense can be made of ethics? As Pamerleau writes, “If we accept the world view of philosophers like Nietzsche, Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus, who all take for granted that there is no justice forthcoming from an all-powerful God or an inherently just universe, then the question of the film extends to existential philosophy as well: What sense can we make of morality in such a universe?”

Does Pamerleau think the directors he chose would consider themselves existentialists? How might they react to his book?

“Antonioni would probably be interested in my analysis. In an interview at one point Antonioni says, ‘I can’t help but be influenced by these [existentialist] ideas,’ and he says he did think in these terms. I don’t know exactly what he read, but in the interview he was clearly acknowledging the influences, and I think Bergman did too, to a lesser extent,” Pamerleau said.

“Fellini doesn’t strike me as intellectual in the sense that he would articulate the views the way I do. He just wants to make a movie. I think that Fellini would say, ‘I just show what I want to show.’”

Pamerleau said Woody Allen speaks directly to the question with his quote: “I think all worthwhile films are to some extent existential films.”

“But all these guys would say, ‘I’m an artist, I’m not a philosopher, I’m not a theorist,’” he said. “These are people who by and large are trying to make a statement about what it’s like to live in the real world. I doubt that many of them if they read the book would say, ‘Oh yeah, that is what I was thinking.’ But I would hope, at least, that most of them would say, ‘Yes, that’s a reasonable reading of my film. I can see how you can articulate the insight like that, but that’s not what was going through my mind as I made it.’”

Pamerleau plans a sequel to “Existentialist Cinema,” tentatively called “The Art of Authenticity in Philosophy and Film,” that will expand on the range of themes and films he covers. “The way I want to take it next is taking authenticity — which requires self-honesty as well as realizing one’s values through accomplishments — in a larger scope than just the existentialists by looking at philosophers like John Dewey, who developed a more social view of the self and wrote about how do we become free,” Pamerleau said.

“In ‘Existentialist Cinema,’ I talk a lot about how existentialists don’t really acknowledge that social element of the self. Some do better than others. But the next place I want to go, in addition to more films that depict how we really live, is to open it up to different kinds of films that can affect you, more impressionist films. They make you look at the world from a different angle,” he said.

The main philosophical theme of finding meaning in the modern world will remain in the next book, he added.

So, what is the meaning of life?

Pamerleau, laughing, answered, “You choose.”

—Peter Hart