Terminated
Notes for a movie by Albert Camus & James Cameron
We are biological machines programmed only to survive.
We are born condemned to death.
To survive we must not take that ludicrous condition lying down.
We must rebel against it with kindness (as in ‘mankind’).
We need to learn to live in the present to maximise our own happiness.
That happiness must be available to the whole of our kind as a context for our individual happiness.
Marking the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on 27th January 1945
“He who postpones the hour of living is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.”
Horace
[…] In a tribute to him on Radio 4 this morning, a resonant phrase from Kierkegaard (via psychiatrist Viktor Frankl) was cited to capture the man he was : The door to happiness opens outwards. Leslie Hardman dealt with the chaos he experienced in the front-line by dedicating himself to the well-being of others. […]
“This country will not be a permanently good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a reasonably good place for all of us to live in.”
Theodore Roosevelt, 26th US President (1858-1919)
[…] that you can’t be individually happy without having collective happiness. I applied this in an old post – looking back no idea where it came from, probably from thinking about The Terminator […]
BBC Radio 4 21/03/20 Lights Camera Inaction: an Existentialist guide to the movies
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000gksj
From Woody Allen to the Truman Show via Groundhog Day and Taxi Driver; Matthew Sweet examines the many and varied ways that cinema communicates existentialist ideas. Both in ways we expect and in ways that we don’t (step forward Bridget Jones).
Cinema is very good at explaining Existentialism and capturing its various moods and feelings; but its deeper than that. The language of existentialism with its heroes, choices, and crises sounds suspiciously like the language of screenwriting. They are, after all, both ways of trying to create meaning and narrative out of nothing. The blank page that confronts a screenwriter trying to create authentic characters confronts all of us as we decide how to live. As Jean Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir and Albert Camus would tell us – the blank page is us; the film of our lives is waiting to be made.