DETECTING ERROR AND ILLUSION (working tittle)
by Mónica Lima in collaboration with Gonçalo Branco
"The mind of every human being is subject to self-deception, a permanent source of errors and illusions. Egocentricity, the need for self-justification, the tendency to project the cause of evil onto others, make people lie to themselves without detecting their own lies."
"Error and illusion have been parasitizing the human mind from the first days of homo sapiens. When we consider the past, including the recent past, it seems to us that people were blinded by countless errors and illusions. In German Ideology, Marx and Engels observed that men have always had misconceptions about themselves, about what they are doing and what they ought to do, and about the world in which they live. But neither Marx nor Engels was able to avoid the same kind of errors."
(Edgar Morin, in Seven complex lessons in education for the future, 1999.)
Strating form the analysis of the texts “Seven Complex Lessons about Education for the Future” that Edgar Morin, French philosopher and sociologist, wrote after an invitation by Unesco in 1999, and of his relation with cinema. Chronicle of a Summer (1960) is a documentary film directed as a collaboration between Edgar Morin and the anthropologist and director Jean Rouch. The film starts with a discussion between Morin e Rouch about whether it is possible to act with sincerity in front of the camera. A cast of real people (not actors) (e are then presented and conducted by the directors to discuss themes of the French revolution and about happiness in the working class. In the end of the film, the directors show their subjects the compiled material and set a discussion about the level of reality that each of the persons considers that have been able to achieve.
We are interested in this self-reflective attitude of cinema véritè and specially in the premise set by Morin and Rouch – are we sincere before a camera or the other’s gaze when we are aware of being observed, or are we always representing a role?
It is not only about crossing boundaries between documental and fictional genres, nor only to understand the tangencies between the person and the persona/character.
"Knowledge cannot be handled like a ready-made tool that can be used without studying its nature. Knowing about knowledge should figure as a primary requirement to prepare the mind to confront the constant threat of error and illusion that parasitize the human mind. It is a question of arming minds in the vital combat for lucidity."
Edgar Morin, in Seven complex lessons in education for the future, 1999.
We are interested in that cinema/film/video, as a mirror of the individual can become a mean of understanding the human nature; we are interested in understanding if it is possible, and in what ways, can we evolve into a new paradigm; we are interested in the idea of "truthfulness" (the capacity that each individual can be honest with himself) in relation to the idea of truth. We are interested in the idea of rationality (the capacity to reflect openly about any problem) in relation to the ideia of rationalization (what was thought about and appears to be rational but has constructed a perfect logical system based on deduction and induction).
This work investigates individual processes such as Connection of the Being with herself, in the sense of self-knowledge and how this kind of knowledge is a way of acting in the world, a political movement. To change the individual (oneself) as the first movement of transformation of the cosmos and as a form of integral politics.
“This larger engagement with the cosmos will require of us a profound shift in what we regard as legitimate knowledge. It will demand an initial act of trust in the possible reality of an ensouled cosmos of transformative beauty and purposeful intelligence. In the inner politics of the modern mind, a “hermeneutics of suspicion” has completely overpowered and eclipsed a “hermeneutic of trust”. That suspicion has been directed towards nature, towards the universe, towards other cultures and worldviews, towards the spiritual dimension of life, even towards the human being in her embodied and ensoulded wholeness. From Bacon to Descartes on, the modern mind directed its suspicion at everything except its own stance of skeptical objectification. The modern blindness to its own posture was precisely what many postmodernist thinkers sought to correct, yet doing so the postmodern strategy tended to produce an even more absolute negation: all reality perceived as nothing more than a social-linguistic construct, a local projection serving power and enforced by power. Because the postmodern intellectual milieu uncritically continued the modern assumption of cosmic disenchantment, the major modes of postmodern deconstruction essentially made their valid critical insights the final limit of any metaphysical understanding. Every attempt at a larger coherence, every discernment of an underlying spiritual meaning or purpose, was fundamentally suspect as nothing more than another totalizing move, another surreptitious attempt to expand the power of one part over the whole. Every imagination of an intelligible whole imbued with a larger significance drew deconstructive forces towards it like heat-seeking missiles.”
(Cosmos and Psyche, Intimations of a New World View, by Richard Tarnas)
September, Berlim, 2009
