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What is understanding? Is it the identification of an idea, a feeling, an image, a texture, a structure—a form? Is it the articulation of a logic, or even a story, about an act, an idea, an image, an event, a place, or a person? One watches Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Despair, and one’s sense of which characters are in control and wise changes as the film moves. What is understanding? Does it merely identify, or explain; or does it narrate—possess by surrounding with a story that connects to other acts, ideas, things? Is understanding always subjective, or can it be objective? Do facts exist beyond us, without us? Fassbinder’s Despair was made in the late 1970s, in 1977, some thirty years or so after the twentieth-century’s second world war. Had the German people come to terms with that war? Is meaning only what we know now; and, of what lasting value is current knowledge, when what we know is always becoming deeper, larger, more? Are we always learning—or are we also forgetting? Is meaning only what we accept, only what we remember; or is it also what we have exiled, what we have refused to know but that which might still drive us? What is understanding? Is yours as good as mine? Is there an unimpeachable authority that can know, decide, and teach?

 

http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1669