Tuesday, October 30, 2007

fascinating film alert!

As a fan of Mark Salzman's work (Iron and Silk, The Soloist, Lying Awake), I'm happy to see he's in a film called "Protagonist" directed by his wife, Jessica Yu. Part documentary, part quasi-Greek drama, the film deals with the question, What makes a hero? The trailer gives us a hint that the film will be, in part, about the road to knowing oneself. It looks to be a fascinating exploration of personhood, and of how we see ourselves as heroes in our own heroic narratives. Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death deals with this issue; it's Becker's contention that mental illness involves a dysfunction in the heroic narrative-- an interesting theory, to say the least. I hope "Protagonist" comes to Korea, though I won't be holding my breath.


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2 comments:

Horace Jeffery Hodges said...

Looks interesting.

Jeffery Hodges

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gordsellar said...

Looks excellent, but yeah, the only way we'll see it here is via P2P.

Iron and Silk was a book a friend sent me, which I read in my first year over here. Didn't inspire me to take taekwondo, but I think it did inspire me to study the language a little harder, so I ended up a Salzman fan.