Word: laborites
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...personal mental-emotional-physical "health" is our supreme god and psychology, or sociophysiology, or physio-socio-psychology, or whatever they're calling the practice these days, is the new religion of millions. Director Alain Resnais has discovered a new high priest of the faith; his name is Dr. Henri Laborit and he's certain that he knows all of us better than we know ourselves...
...Laborit is the real star of Resnais' controversial new film, Mon Oncle D'Amerique. The script, by the esteemed Jean Gruault, centers on the good doctor's theories on human nature and Laborit himself is on hand to comment on the story of three people whose inter-connected lives demonstrate just how accurate Laborit's conclusions are. If you still cling to the belief that man is a superior and complex creature whose existence can never be fathomed, Laborit will probably convince you that man is nothing more than an extremely intelligent rodent--with neuroses. Resnais and Gruault...
...Oncle opens with a close-up of a stoplight-red neon heart blinking ominously as Laborit's solemn, soothing voice intones "A being's only reason for being is being." The following sequence is more than a little dull and, at first, bewildering, as Resnais bombards us with shots of rocks, plants, frogs, and turtles while Laborit tells us that many living things do not need to move to live but that human beings do need to move to live. It seems that Laborit would prefer to have been born a daffodil, as he drones through a monologue that sounds...
...which programs man for his needs for food, shelter, and copulation and the general survival instinct; the "affective" brain which contains the memory and responds appropriately to pleasure and pain, reward and punishment; and the "associative" brain which connects events from the past and enables us to use language. Laborit doesn't really like this third brain, also known as the cerebral cortex, because it allows humans to be programmed by society; it gives us the power to create "excuses, reasons, and alibis" to mask our pure animal instincts. Language and culture, then, deny us the fulfilment of our strong...
...first like a film experiment as dry as the dust on a neglected library shelf turns out to be a spectacular juggling act: of documentary and fiction, analysis and creativity, determinism and free will, comedy and tragedy, the past and the present. The three jugglers-Gruault, Resnais and Laborit-work in perfect sync, perhaps because their own pasts have prepared them for this challenge. Gruault's scripts have often described characters dominated by their emotions or by the whim of the historical moment. And nothing could be more natural than that Resnais, whose films have played with the real...