Damon:
How about a lengthier and less vulgar account of what you mean in your reference to Levinas, in terms that a novice to his work (but not to the Continental tradition) might understand. Though I'm also not familiar with the Bier film, I am with Breaking the Waves, so if you could expand on your thought with reference to it I might grasp your point.
Dan
-----Original Message-----
From: Damon Stanek [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tue 7/29/2003 8:02 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Cc:
Subject: Re: Ethics and Film
Dan,
I find the ethical dilemmas of everyday life far more interesting than
archetypical good/evil struggles, and I think that Susanne Bier's Open
Hearts (2002) offers a wonderfully knotty ethical situation. A
physician is asked to hold together the emotional lives of a pair of
accident participants. While neither is physically injured the
physician attempts to both aide his wife, the driver, devastated by her
inability to bring any relief to herself or the situation, and the
victim's lover who is lost and helpless in offering her lover support
in his recovery. Although I am offering a vulgar reduction of Levinas'
ethics, this narrative presents the physician with a pair of unpayable
debts to the other which triangulates the asymmetrical (and normally
binary) relation between the I and other. Although I have never seen
it, I believe Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves (1996) may also yield
a similar knot.
Damon Stanek
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Art History
CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016
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