Happy Valentine's Day! Let's indulge ourselves with some conceptual, philosophical and playful short films about love
We’re the last to forget about Valentine’s Day… so here’s a few audio-visual treats about the Great Thing, at the level to which you are accustomed, from us… (Note: quite by chance, but all too appropriately, the examples here are French).
First, and embedded above, is a film based around a few statements on the question of love from the French philosopher Alain Badiou. Badiou regards romantic love as an “Event” that brings genuine novelty into our world. It’s also a real challenge to our culture of atomised individualism: love’s radicalism is that it wraps us up in the fate of a “Two”, beyond our “One”. More from Brain Pickings’ coverage of Badiou’s book, In Praise of Love.
Can romantic love ever be a shared joy? According to the 20th-century French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, for whom freedom was paramount, the answer must be ‘no’, since people want their partners to choose them freely, and this freedom leads to the possibility of falling out of love at any time. In Sartre’s view, this means love must always be fraught, a ceaseless conflict characterised either by masochism or sadism, as both lover and loved-one risk having their freedom compromised.
Before apps took over, speed dating was probably a fairly good option for people who valued consumer choice in their attempts at finding a partner. Perhaps it was an enjoyable pastime for certain kinds of extroverts, too. But, as the short animation Les mots de la carpe makes clear, the highest purpose of this enterprise must be to point out gleefully how dizzyingly varied and marvellously absurd we can be. At least, that’s what the French filmmaker Lucrèce Andreae conveys in a few brief minutes of astutely observed caricature.