The philosopher Henri Bergson’s visit to New York in 1913 was the cause of Broadway’s first traffic jam. His fame and influence at the time are somewhat hard to believe now given that he is a thinker mostly forgotten save for a few specialists and enthusiasts. But Emily Herring’s fascinating and lively biography, Herald of a Restless World, has not only rescued Bergson from obscurity; it reminds us how much his philosophy has to say in our afflicted age. In his review of the biography, John Banville finds much to admire in Bergson’s writing, which was not only painterly and impressionistic, but also sought to say something about the nature of reality that feels salient today: “Rather than seeking out a Platonic sphere of ideal forms and eternal verities, Bergson advocated for a philosophy that was set firmly on the common ground where humans live and have their being—even if that ground was constantly shifting.” While Bergson was dismissed as anti-science later in his life, and a famous debate with Einstein would cast serious doubt on his intellectual project (especially in regards to his conception of time), what remains so fascinating about the French philosopher was his “subtlety, sensitivity, and imaginative reach.” Indeed, this mode of thinking, the very heart of Bergson’s method, is one we need today. Read “Henri Bergson’s States of Change”
Family dinners, Mike Leigh once told an interviewer, gave him “a lifetime’s ammunition” for his filmmaking. In his new film, Hard Truths, one of the most revelatory—and painful—scenes takes place at the dinner table: Pansy, played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, turns her acid tongue on her silent husband and son, unspooling a diatribe aimed at the excesses of modern life she finds so exhausting, from stupid pet owners who swathe their dogs in fashionable clothing to charity workers begging for cash outside of grocery stores. The film is about two sisters, Pansy and Chantelle (Michele Austin), whose opposing reactions to the death of their mother and the grinding quality of their working lives are made into the stuff of a searching domestic drama about grief and class. It’s a fitting entry in Leigh’s oeuvre of bleakly comic social realist films, one whose framing, J. Hoberman observes in his review, “imbues this latest account of a dysfunctional family with a measure of tragic gravitas.” “Initially funny in an outrageous, Marx Brothers sort of way,” the film morphs into a careful and pained study of one person’s almost intractable inability to relate to the world around her. What makes it so true to life, Hoberman writes, is that in the end we are given “no promise of reconciliation or emotional catharsis.” Read “The Uncomfortable Genius of Mike Leigh”
