Review, Film and Research for Philosophy class - Hegel and Nietzsche to come

Citizen Kane is not an Ealing Film but I'm sure that's a great train set too.

Our course leader at the local (Ealing) Philosophy course  Dan Williams kicked off last weeks' session with a viewing of the start of  Citizen Kane one of the films regularly voted by Film critics into position amongst the Top 10 Films of all time.

Review on The feminists

Of course our previous session had left us to look at the role of two significant 20th Century Women Philosophers.


Having looked at some background to Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt  on-line and taking part in discussions about their perspective it did become apparent that the feminist perspective is definitely worthy of consideration and that the Objectification of Women  has forced society into a patriarchal hegemony until fairly recently (and that this still holds a high degree of control).



It is fair so say (I think) that a revision of the dominance by men is now under-way in part due to the change in activity in societies to a more cerebral and less physical one  but the rebalancing is likely to take quite some time and is only just on the starting blocks in some parts of the world.

In Eastern Europe pay it seems used to be more equal

During our discussions it was also interesting to hear of one of our number with direct experience of life in Poland talking about how under the Communist rule pay had been equal but the liberalisation since the end of the Warsaw Pact had reversed this. [This paper seems to confirm the report by our fellow student]

Film

The use of film by our  course leader has been intermittent due in part to technical issues for me it has not always hit the mark in part perhaps because I have (only for a very short time) been a film student - I am derailed by a curiosity around the film direction rather than a Philosophical perspective, the chance that Citizen Kane gave  Director Orson Welles was the opportunity to play with "the greatest electric train set a boy ever had" (RKO's Film Studios) and what was clear for me watching the excerpt was the care and experimentation that was going on by the director/leads actor in what we saw.
The film is made using a series of flashbacks and attention was drawn by Dan to the importance of the mother of Kane and his development away from a slightly idealist position to a more corrupt one.

Dan asked us to look at the film about Public/Private and there was undoubtedly value in doing just this.

And research

The next Session is about  Hegel and Nietzsche and we're required to consider Eternal recurrence as well as Nietzsche on Art with the 'Birth of Tragedy' as well as  Hegel and the Dialectic State.