This interview was first published in Another Gaze 03
Astra Taylor is a Canadian-American activist, writer, musician, and documentary filmmaker. Her political organising has included participation in Occupy Wall Street (Taylor co-edited Occupy!: An OWS-Inspired Gazette, a broadsheet about the movement later anthologised by Verso Books) and co-founding the Debt Collective, a group which exposes and tackles predatory debt collecting practices. Taylor’s feature-length documentaries, Žižek! (2005), Examined Life (2008), and What Is Democracy? (2018), revolve around philosophical topics and thinkers. In Taylor’s films, viewers have the rare opportunity to see theorists think on their feet about contemporary economic, political, ecological, social, and cultural concerns. Esmé Hogeveen spoke to Taylor by phone in May 2019, on the eve of the launch of Taylor’s latest book, Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone and during What Is Democracy?’s tour on the festival circuit.
Another Gaze: I just re-watched your second feature, Examined Life (2008), and Cornel West has an amazing line at the beginning of the film: “democracy [constitutes] attempts of people trying to render accountable elites.” You’re obviously interested in asking questions about social accountability, and so I’m wondering about the origins of that interest?
Astra Taylor: It’s a complicated question because [laughs] I’ve never been in therapy. But a concern with justice and injustice has been there since the very beginning. As a child, the first big project I had was to make a magazine about ecological issues and animal rights. It was called Kids for Animal Rights. I was the editor, the writer [laughs], I did the layout, but I also wrangled a few other kids to help… So there’s always been this combination of creative expression and ethical outrage and wanting to effect some kind of social change.
AG: Do you know what sparked the interest in animal rights?
AT: Well there was actually a funny article that came out in the local paper about the magazine where the writer attributed my social consciousness to my sister being disabled. My sister is disabled because of industrial pollution that was in the water supply and even aged 12 I remember rejecting that journalist’s interpretation as being too reductive, but now I think there might be truth to it. Who knows why we are the way we are?
For a while I almost wanted to reject the ethical aspect of my work. I thought trying to persuade people was just inherently flawed, so I explored painting and other creative practices that were a part of my family’s life. And then I got into philosophy, particularly movements that were in the ether then, you know, poststructuralism and critical theory, which is critical of a kind of humanist or a more Marxist tradition. It actually came out of a rejection of political efforts. But I’m someone who wants to combine my values with my way of being in the world. I think the reason that What Is Democracy? and the book feel more true to who I am is that they refuse binaries: of theory and practice, of ideas and a lived mode of being in the world, of the intellectual and the emotional, of the mind and the body. For me, that’s all just part of being human. I have a hard time getting motivated by beauty alone. I want my political expression to be beautiful and moving and to not be didactic, but if something doesn’t have that political dimension, it just doesn’t fully engage me.
AG: How does that aesthetic standpoint sit with your filmmaking practice?
AT: Well, at the same time, I do see film ultimately as a work of art. I see What Is Democracy? as a piece of art and therefore I want it to be something I like aesthetically. And it’s not slick because I don’t like slick. It’s not gratuitous with drone shots, because I think gratuitous drone shots are stupid. It’s not laid over with propulsive music, because I cringe when I hear that. These are all choices that I think serve the content or the meaning of the film. To me, if you want to create social change, there are way more direct ways to do that than making a film.
AG: So I’m wondering how you feel about the challenge of helping individuals tell their truths, so to speak, while also bearing in mind the aesthetic and narrative dimensions of documentary? In all of your films you talk to ‘philosophers’ and ‘regular people’ – I’m doing air quotes. And we see you trying to exhume and distil perspectives without forcing conclusions.
AT: I don’t believe you can separate form and content. No matter what formal structure you use, as soon as you incorporate other people’s voices you’re transforming them and you have to be conscious of that responsibility.
What Is Democracy? is crafted almost as a kind of hearing aid, so the audience can hear the voices in the film as profound. I often quote the classicist Mary Beard who says that we’ve been trained to hear deep voices as being deep in meaning. And so What Is Democracy? is set up so that we can hear the voices of school girls as deep. So that we hear the voices of refugees as full of wisdom. But I also really didn’t want to be reductive and go after sound bites. It was important for me to be careful in the interview process. Before I sat down with people, I would always remind myself: this is a human being and not a subject. So I really tried to resist the temptation to get the essential statement and instead let things be digressive.
AG: Thinking about the impulse to seek answers from other sources, I’m wondering if you usually begin making a documentary with a clear hypothesis in mind? Given the immense scope of the films, I’m curious about how much you plan ahead and what that preparation looks like.
AT: With [What Is Democracy?], there were principles and ways of seeing the world that I had developed over time, but I didn’t want to just write them into a script and paint by numbers. The challenge was more about creating breadth and an unhinged quality without letting it go off the rails, and I did that by not letting my analytic brain override my intuitive brain.
I like films that contain encounters with people. I love Agnès Varda and Heddy Honigmann, and I love Chronicle of a Summer [directed by Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch] and Le Joli Mai [directed by Chris Marker]. I love films that are political and astute but that don’t pretend the world is more simple than it is. How do you let that bigness and that complexity come forth without it overwhelming the project and swallowing up the frame? It’s a mix of knowing my shit and trying to have an intellectual framework and then not letting the framework…
AG: Over-dictate?
AT: Yes, not letting the framework kill the the spontaneity of it.
But also, we’re looking to cultivate wonder and curiosity, not confusion. I always try to mitigate against that by having a structure or architecture for a project that makes intuitive sense and that doesn’t have to draw too much attention to itself. I don’t think about it in terms of transparency or non-transparency. With the walks [in Examined Life], it’s self-evident! There’s a bit of a meta-discussion about why we’re on a walk, there are some quotes about walking, and I talk about the limits of the form because [each philosopher] only gets ten minutes.
What Is Democracy? is a little more conventional in that it’s just a series of conversations and encounters with people. I’ve been thinking about [Democracy May Not Exist] today. Each chapter is a paradox, and I was thinking about how [my] book is different to those by two men who are being hailed as the greatest intellectuals of our time. So there’s, you’d know him, Jordan Peterson—
AG: Ooh yes—
AT: —whose new book is 12 Rules for Life, and then there’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari, who wrote Sapiens. “Rules for Life,” it’s so presumptuous! Like, rules for all life? It’s imperial in its formulation, too. Something about “rules” and “lessons” seems to offer a pedagogy based on answers. My book is full of paradoxes, because there’s no easy answer. It’s not about confusion, but it is about complexity.
AG: I love this idea of complexity but not confusion. I’m wondering if your approach to asking philosophical questions changes a lot depending on who you’re interviewing?
AT: Yeah! It’s an interesting question. I think we do need to change the way that we talk depending on who we’re engaging. It’s part of communicating and not just speaking to hear yourself speak. That’s certainly part of our work in the Debt Collective – I can talk about high finance and the neoliberal situation since the late ‘70s or I can talk to someone about the bills they have to pay at the end of the month and how they’re struggling.
I think one thing I want to do is be able to simultaneously speak to the political philosophy professor at the illustrious university, and also speak in a kind of aspirational mode to the teenager who might be watching. When I was speaking to quote unquote regular people, I was speaking to them in a way that felt very elevated – at least that’s what people told me. Interviewees said things like, “Thank you for asking me these questions, for taking me seriously”, or “That was such a refreshing conversation”, or “I never get asked questions like that.”
For me, asking questions is never a position of weakness or of idiocy. It’s actually a position of true engagement and curiosity and courage. I think it’s also an explicitly feminist position because you’re inviting others to speak and you’re listening and not taking up space in the same way.
AG: How did that compare with interviewing the professional philosophers, or the other people you interviewed who were more used to being asked questions in the public sphere?
AT: Well, there was a moment with Wendy Brown when she was trying to articulate Rousseau’s Paradox and I just burst out laughing and looked right at my sound guy because she’d given us this big, complicated formation and used a double negative and all this academic speak. We all had a big laugh and I said, let’s try to say something with the same meaning but without unnecessarily complicated words. I think when it comes to academics I’m more conspiring to help make things clear, and for them that often requires real thinking.
On the one hand my film work is an homage to Socrates who thought while walking in the street and would ask random people: What is justice? What is the good life? I also think [What Is Democracy?] portrays my ideal of a feminist intellectual mode. For me, an intellectual is someone who’s constantly curious and expressing curiosity by asking questions, by being receptive and listening and reading and studying and looking at the world and responding to it. An intellectual isn’t just someone who spontaneously knows everything and gives lectures and…
AG: Pontificates immodestly?
AT: Yeah, there’s so much more input and receptivity than output and productivity, but we don’t consider that intellectual.
AG: Is this why you organise your films as a series of segments focused on different individuals rather than, say, inviting two philosophers to have a conversation, or filming a philosopher speaking to a miner?
AT: With Examined Life, I was very into the idea of a filmic architecture, having there be a very formal conceit and ordering principle. That was my rebellion against narrative. And I was interested in the idea of peripatetic philosophy and philosophers walking and thinking, which I intuitively felt was a private act.
With What Is Democracy?, I wanted to have some insights into meetings within political organisations and how fundamental those kind of deliberations are. So in the film there’s a meeting at a health clinic and an activist meeting in Miami, but I never wanted [the film] to be based on argument. I see people argue all day long on the internet [and] I’m so tired of it.
And then there’s the question of how to set up the two poles. Should I have students face off against teachers or administrators? Should I have a poor person face off against a banker? An environmentalist and a climate denier? There aren’t really two sides to each story, there are multiple sides, but then an argument would become too hard to trace. I didn’t want the film to present a portrait of the people that’s too rose-coloured so I tried to include some ugliness, though I didn’t want the ugliness to be so over the top that the viewer could then feel superior and distance themselves.
There’s also a big strand of political theory, deliberative theory, that sees rational debate as the key to democracy and I’ve never agreed with that tradition. My agenda was more about weaving together issues of class, the material argument alongside all of these other social conditions and social exclusions, and not to make a case for whether or not deliberation works.
AG: I wanted to touch on the topic of education. I’m thinking back to the scene in Examined Life where Peter Singer refers to the student uprisings in the late ‘60s and asks: “Can we make our academic studies more relevant to the questions of the day?” I’m wondering how you feel about documentaries providing potential inroads to contemporary questions?
AT: I have mixed feelings about documentaries and whether they provide alternative inroads. In my mind, I’m always comparing documentaries with books, and cinematic language with written language, and they do different things. I would like film and documentaries in particular to expand what it means to become engaged with contemporary issues. Right now, there’s a very strong genre of issue-based, or even pedagogical, films. There’s issue-oriented filmmaking, where you’re presented with an injustice in the world and film is going to highlight it and hopefully galvanise you. And I think those films are valuable, but my question is: Can film as a medium do something additional? Can it ask questions and not just be a conveyor of information? Can it reflect or embody a philosophical mode at the same time?
I often go back to Chronicle of a Summer, which was the initial cinéma vérité, and which isn’t just following people passively; it’s the search for truth. And this search for truth can be staged, it can be theatrical, it can be playful. It doesn’t have to be pseudo-naturalistic. I wonder, is there this sense that if we just show people issues, then they’ll have understanding, and then maybe they’ll move into action? Or, are we trying to create a format that allows people to think alongside us? My vision of education is also more Socratic in that you don’t just tell, you engage, [and] you ask questions of and with other people. The challenge, then, is keeping things open, but also having a strong moral and political focus.
AG: Thinking about film as a tool for instigation and asking questions, then, has participating in filmmaking communities been encouraging or dispiriting? Or, in other words, how much overlap there is between your film life and your life as an activist and writer?
AT: I’ve become aware of the fact that there isn’t a lot of overlap. The journalists, editors, and cultural commentators I know on the left don’t spend much time writing about film or thinking about it as a political medium, and that includes documentaries. The thing I’ve been the most struck by while touring What Is Democracy? is the institutions that exist on the final stretch in terms of distribution. There are the non-profit cinemas and the groups that exist that are connected to a screening space. I’m thinking of cinéSPEAK in Philadelphia, which does these wonderful community-engaged screenings with a mix of new and old documentaries, and Cinema Politica in Montréal, who do an amazing job of connecting films to audiences who wouldn’t necessarily come to a film festival. I was just at the Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, New York, which is this old church, which has been reclaimed as a community space. I’m grateful for these spaces which keep film alive while pushing it out of the boundaries of the film world, and which help figure out how to connect it not just to audiences, but to communities and the crises they’re facing.
AG: Have different screening locations yielded similar or distinct concerns about democracy or about the film?
AT: It’s funny, I was worried that people would ask me about whatever was in the news or what Trump had tweeted or to ask me to do a close reading of the Mueller report, but the questions haven’t been like that at all. The same problems do keep coming up. I’ve touched on some of them, but the problems of scale, of boundedness and inclusion, of a resurgent anti-democratic right, the fact that there is a minority of elites in every country that are kind of conspiring with each other across borders, [and] issues of gender inclusion. In the Q&As, these topics were often reflected locally. For example, at the Oakland screening, we talked about gentrification and place and the right to stay. The top-level issues were overall pretty similar, which speaks to the topics in the film. We are in a global crisis right now and I think that crisis manifests in different ways, but there are real common threads that reflect that we’re living under capitalism, which is a global system.
AG: This brings me back to Žižek!, where Slavoj Žižek says at one point that he has a harder time envisioning the end of capitalism than climate change. Has your relationship to making a philosophical documentary shifted a lot since making that film?
AT: Oh yeah, wow, I started making that film in 2003, when I was 23 years old or something like that.
I have a very practical streak and at that point, I was like, this is essentially a version of film school. It’s an opportunity to learn. One thing I’m grateful for is that I’m pretty good at figuring out the next level creative project that will push me, but that I can actually do. I’m always asking myself what will be a satisfying, creative, and intellectual challenge that there’s a realistic chance I can finish, and that’s what you see in my work. I started in my first film with one philosopher, then nine in my second, and in my latest there are 35 people and that is more true to who I am and my voice. And I hope that my next project builds on that.
With Žižek!, I was captivated with the idea of film as a medium for exploring ideas, but I wasn’t ready to take the leap and make an essay film in the style of Agnès Varda. I hadn’t lived enough. What profound things was I going to say? There were a few intellectual biopics at that time: Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman’s film on Derrida had just come out, and I had grown up with the NFB’s excellent film [Manufacturing Consent] on Noam Chomsky. I felt I could do an intellectual portrait of Žižek and present a contemporary critique of capitalism and our psychic condition while also learning the ins and outs of filmmaking – not just how to direct a shoot, but also how to edit and incorporate animation.
AG: What was it like working with Žižek?
AT: He was a fantastic film collaborator. He was up for anything and didn’t micromanage me in the least. We had one meeting early on, and he was like, “You’re the boss, you’re editing this?” and I was like, “Yes, yes” and he sat for a few minutes quietly, which is very unusual for him, and he was like, “Okay, fine I’m in”. He loves cinema, so he was really up for trying to push the form and understanding that it was a visual medium.
I still see it as a successful first experiment with the medium and it left me really wanting to do it again, which is why I went right from making Žižek! to Examined Life, but by the time I finished Examined Life, I felt that I hadn’t done the thing I really wanted to do, which was write a book, and that’s why I went cold turkey until What Is Democracy?.
AG: It’s interesting to think about how your films have – or haven’t – been taken up as feminist projects given that there’s a feminist through line in your questioning methods, but then you’ve also made a film about Žižek…
AT: I really like that you’re interviewing me for an explicitly feminist publication. I was so young when I made Žižek! I remember getting into TIFF and opening the programme and it hitting me, whoa, hold on, they’re aren’t a lot of women film directors. I think I had taken the approach of thinking, I’m not going to let being a woman hold me back so therefore I’m not going to pay attention. Like, of course I’m a feminist, but I’m going to be a feminist by not making a big deal of it. But when I got to TIFF, I was like, why aren’t there more of us here?
There’s an Italian filmmaker, Alice Rohrwacher, who said something that I thought was so great. Someone asked her what it’s like being a woman filmmaker and she said that the question was like asking the survivor of a shipwreck why they’re the only person on the island. You need to ask the people who made the ship and who crashed it, you need to ask the people with power.
I see everything politically and gender is of course a political issue that has a material dimension. I bristle a little against feminism when it’s reduced to a limited set of topics, you know, reproductive justice, gender discrimination, body issues. Yes, feminism is that, but it also has to be so much more. For me, feminism should just be everywhere and it just be something that’s just infused into something, so in What Is Democracy?, I tried to make it be not so much about feminism as just feminist, right?
And so [the film] has, I hope, a gaze that is of radical gender equity, and it’s constructed so you can hear the voices of women as profound. And the book [Democracy May Not Exist] is a history of democratic actions and thought that puts women into the story where they belong, instead of all these fucking ridiculous books that just somehow manage to leave them out as if half the human race didn’t exist. I just want feminism to be in there, but our society is so tone deaf that you do have to say: Hey, by the way, this is feminist! [That’s] why I have Sylvia Federici saying, “It’s important to present a feminist analysis.”
In the book, I explicitly say women developed a conception of freedom and women have been at the forefront of democratic struggles, and not just in the last 40 years. I don’t think there’s any topic that should be off-limits to feminism, whether it’s politics, science, architecture, or urban planning, it’s something that we need to suffuse everything with, including filmmaking. It’s frustrating to see that we still think feminist films are portraits of Gloria Steinem or RBG. The anti-liberal in me is like, I could make a case against those films.
AG: Totally. It feels so weird to know that, as an individual, the attention you put toward a cultural theme or topic can propel content into positions that potentially trap them into a trend cycle.
AT: Exactly, which is why feminism needs to be incorporated into a new common sense. I’ve joked about this before, but by making the theme of this film democracy, men show up because they think democracy is a male business. And then they have to watch a film that has lots of ladies speaking, and they’re like, oh okay, this is actually fine, I kind of like this. But they wouldn’t come if the film was [called] ‘A Feminist Exploration of Self-Government’, so we have to figure out how to be subversive in our feminist takeover.
I think often I’m making a film or writing a text that I wish existed, and I do like to think that in my late teens or in my early twenties, that I would have taken heart in seeing this movie, because I think my idea of an intellectual was a male image.
AG: Yeah, when I was a kid I used to picture myself ageing as an old man, because those were the images of people enjoying reading or having tea or whatever in a library. And now I hate that, of course, but I do think people often don’t have realisations about the limitations of our role models until their twenties because examples are not provided.
AT: Yeah, they’re really not provided. I think there’s power in a dearth of images, because then you have to invite yourself. I have a few ‘role models’ and one is Agnès Varda who opened my imagination, because it’s like, wow you can write a film and you can be an eccentric, philosophical woman, but I also could also never be her. She’s so different to me. So then you’re like, well, I guess I just have to be myself. There’s not a set of tropes that you can just latch onto. At the same time, though, I think if you don’t have that representation [of feminist filmmakers and intellectuals], then what fills your mind? You’re right, there’s still this idea of an old man in a wingback chair with a pipe, and it’s like, I guess I’ll never be that. It’s really tragic.
So I think issues of representation are important, they just get reduced in the typical feminist discourse to merely images and not the issues of redistribution and transformation that need to come with them. The images are just one component of a broader revolutionary shift we need to make.
AG: Moving forward, are there any questions you’d like to pursue through a film project?
AT: I’m cooking up a collaboration with my sister Sunaura [Taylor] who is a brilliant scholar of animals and disability and also a painter. She’s always translated her theoretical work into a visual medium [and] right now she’s writing her dissertation on water supplies. We’re in the early stages but we think our next project will be some sort of collaboration around the question of our place as human beings in the larger ecological, non-human world and that it’ll draw on our backgrounds. Our family used to paint – that’s all we used to do together – so we thought we’d spend some time talking about seeing and looking and paying attention, and I feel like there’s a way for us to weave together our thoughts on that, which is really thinking about art and representation, but with a political focus.
After making What Is Democracy?, I think the challenge is thinking more deeply about how the form expresses the philosophical content. I feel like I’ve been stewing over this since the beginning: what does the camera do? It directs your attention. To me, even more than educating or revealing, film can shift your perception, which can lead to a shift of understanding. It’s a technology of attention. I want to use that, maybe even very explicitly, in a future project. I’ve been thinking about how we see ourselves as human beings in relationship to nature and other animals. Capitalism is one of the bigger crises we’re facing, but I think there’s a deeper problem which is human-centricism. That we see humans as dominant and the world as resources, and capitalism exacerbates this by setting out resources to be extracted and commodified, essentially used up. But I think the problem is bigger than our economic system; it’s about the way we see ourselves.
