Philosophy of Life: An Intimate Talk between Harvard’s Robb Moss and UT’s Nadia Maftouni

On Jan 28, 2021, this dialogue was organized in the Faculty of Theology and Islamic Studies between Nadia Maftouni, Iranian philosopher, author and artist and Yale senior research scholar and Professor Robb Moss, documentary filmmaker and Chair of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. The host was Mahmoud Nuri, filmmaker and PhD, Art University of Tehran.

The talk was in most part about Robb’s lifetime achievement including his movies and academic career. 

Nadia Maftouni said about Robb’s work: “You might find a cornucopia of philosophical books and papers about the meaning of life. But one can find it all in a single documentary like The Same River Twice.” 

Introduction to Robb Moss

Mahmoud (Host): If you allow me, I will try to give a proper introduction to you Robb and then move on to Nadia, and begin our chat about maybe your lifetime and the passage of your lifetime.

So, we were pleased, honored and thrilled when Professor Robb Moss warmly accepted our invitation. He has been teaching filmmaking for three decades at Harvard, where he's now Chair of the Department of Art, Film and Visual Studies (AFVS). His films have been funded by and awarded at top tier festivals like Sundance and Independent Spirit Awards. His documentary film Containment was televised on PBS’s Independent Lens series and his earlier autobiographical and essay films, including The Tourist (1991) and Riverdogs (1981) are shown at such venues as Lincoln Center, the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, the Cinema du Reel in Paris and the Independent Film Festival Amsterdam.

He has worked as a festival juror at Sundance, San Francisco, Denver, Camden, Seattle, Chicago, New England, and Ann Arbor.

There are many things to say about his biography, but I tried to make it short so that we can move to himself and ask him about the dilemmas that he has solved; for the mind of an ordinary film studies student like me, and a person who is engaged with filmmaking—the questions about how he has managed to connect his filmmaking career with his academic career. So, please!

The Shift to Scholar-Practitioners

Robb: So, thanks. I mean, … I don't know where to start exactly. We could start with, I think … I mean for me, I'm a filmmaker. I'm not a scholar. I'm a filmmaker, and I came into the academy as a filmmaker, and my filmmaking was my scholarship. And I think that the fact that it was appreciated as such is what makes it everything else possible. And then in a way, the question is, what is the relationship of filmmaking to academia or art making to academia, they're often thought of as separate things.

But I think there's at least in the United States in many liberal arts institutions, and partly driven by student interests, partly by the changes in the way in the world, even the way we started this conversation, thinking about how people see movies and how all that is, there's a shift.

And there is a way in which, you know, art making and filmmaking are different ways of knowing the world. And if academia and scholarship is about knowing the world through our disciplines, then why shouldn't art of filmmaking be part of that thinking, part of that interrogation of the world, that you see the world if you're a filmmaker, or an artist, you see the world in a certain way that is a rigorous, historical, theoretical, as well as expressive. It's the expressive piece that in a way distinguishes much scholarship. I mean, lots of scholarship is also expressive. But expressivity is like an integral part of artmaking and filmmaking.

And I think that the way of the world is that people making things that making things embodied in the author as an artist as a filmmaker is a way of knowing the world not unlike any other ways of knowing the world. And if the academy thinks that, then people like me, perhaps like you Mahmoud as well, that your film work would be a valued piece, not an extracurricular piece. It has to be at the same level, it has to be thought of at the same level and that things like tenure, promotion would be, that would be a part of it. Now it can be part; I mean here.

I mean I'm a filmmaker. But a lot of the people I teach are also scholars, I mean, young scholars, graduate students who are studying something, but also making things and that making things in at the same time that you're doing your scholarship makes toward this powerful, in my view scholar practitioner, which I think is the future.

And I think it's the future of liberal arts that without that piece, that liberal arts education will be cut off from our ability to attract students, our ability to know what the world is like, as we become ever more connected in these different kinds of ways and art making and filmmaking is central to our way of understanding what the world is like.

So, in a way the shift, I think needs to be in the academy. And then, in that shift people like us can make the work that we think is also important; and that we're training people in that way, those people in our Ph.D. program, say in Art, Film, and Visual Studies, it's called Film and Visual Studies in the graduate program in our department, many filmmakers, many artists are coming, (I'm starting to get an echo, but I'll try to ignore it.) are coming through the academy in this twin way, and that their scholarship and their filmmaking or art making is a part of what makes them employable once they graduate.

And we're seeing many, many examples of universities all around our country and in the world, where such people have an advantage, not a disadvantage.

I would say 20 years ago, if you wanted to do both, it was a disadvantage. But I think now, there's a growing understanding that that's the future and in a way the present, which of course is the topic of my films.

But I also think it’s—I just think it's something to think about and to argue for. And I think that it's the future of liberal arts education.

Mahmoud: The term “scholar practitioner” reminded me of one of the terms coined by Nadia, which is Philartist. She has worked on the idea that the philosophers of the Islamic Golden Age like Farabi, like Avicenna, they were at the same time that they were writing their essays, they were writing stories, and they were storytellers. So, they were sort of Philartists; at the same time scholars and practitioners. So, it's good to know that and perhaps when we move to Nadia, we would be glad to hear about that.

Robb: That's wonderful. By the way, I'd love hearing that. And I'm curious to know more.

A Lifetime at a Glance

Mahmoud: So, do you agree if I move to the movies and ask about the ideas in the movies?

Robb: Please!

Mahmoud: I'd like to begin with The Same River Twice which is my favorite. Because of its personal literature. And some notes I wrote as I was watching the film. I like to mention, one of them was agony of remembering. The other note I wrote was "filmmaker’s guilt: reminding… causing pain and troubling others." Does the film do that by reminding the people a golden time in their lifetime?

Robb: I think that making films about people, nonfiction films about people, is excruciatingly complicated—partly for the reasons we're saying, partly for the reasons, I mean, in a film like The Same River Twice, it's like about 80-minute long. And maybe, maybe 30 minutes is of … Well, there's the old footage in this about 30 minutes. So you have about, you know, an hour, 60 minutes of these five characters, like 12 minutes of a character.

And I’m saying that their entire lives—Alright, OK, I think that intense reduction of somebody's life to 12 minutes and to make the claim that those 12 minutes can express something serious about anybody's life, is monstrous.

I mean it's really just unbelievable, let alone the kinds of exposures like showing people naked when they're young and putting that in front of other people, let alone being there for very personal things and that I'm seeing those personal things because we're friends and they're letting me see it because I'm their friend.

This is a complicated thing and ethical thing. But it's also the nature of filmmaking and art. And I think for me the ethics of that are ... it’s funny. And what just to say the answer of the question as asked, that one of the things that I think for me works for The Same River Twice is that the characters inhabit their current lives pretty fully. They’re not really living in the past. They’re really living in the present. They’re kind of shocked and amused by seeing themselves in the past.

I mean, when Danny at the beginning the woman who's the Robert’s instructor is like looking at an image of herself and she kind of laughs. And I asked why are she laughing and she goes my breast, I recognized it, you know, from 20-years ago. and there is something so sweet about that and so telling and so direct.

But it does a couple of things, one of them, it makes it possible to look at people’s naked bodies. Because a person in the film has acknowledged that they are naked. It's not just the thought you have. It's a thought that the people in the film have and they are sort of saying it's OK, even a slightly embarrassing. But a slightly embarrassing is not in ethical violations; it's just a slightly embarrassing. And that seemed OK and that's at the front of the film precisely to allow people to watch and not feel, you know, uncomfortable.

Are we sure we have the permission of everybody? Is it really OK? These are real questions and that has to be dispensed with quickly. And I think Danny's like just her—she's abashed. She thinks it's funny. She's laughing. She's a little red-faced, but that's all. You know, that seems to me and that's like a real response in.

So, the ethical pieces, there is things in the film that I don't like; many things that I filmed but are not in the film. Because I thought they went too far. If the mechanism for the film is our friendship, I mean, this is the film was drenched in our friendships.

I don't have a voice-over. I don’t appear in the film as a character. But the ways in which they respond to me shooting, the ways in which the cameras embodied, that their friendliness towards the filmmaking process, and their authenticity, I think, gives a kind of permission to film. But I'm aware that permission is contingent. it doesn't have endless permission. It doesn't mean I can film everything or put everything in the movie. And I don't. There’s things I don't include that scene to take that permission too far. So that there's a relationship that our relationships is in a way that the medium of the movie. It's the medium in which the story is being told. It is through our people, and having known them for so long which is different than meeting people for the first time in a movie and getting their permission.

There’s something like a lifetime of experience. I mean, I’ve known, I knew Danny, you know, when I was 12 years old. I knew Jeff since I was 10 years old, Barry since I was 15 years old, and the newcomers to my life I've known for 45 years. So there’s something about that knowing that allows such a story to be told in a way that I hope is ethically responsible and intimate both.

Mahmoud: I remembered Katie’s words, when she said she feels stronger and perhaps better now. I mean some of the characters seem to be happy with their present lives, seem to be more happy. It seems they have made up their minds about their lives in better way than they had in their youth.

Robb: Yes, I think being young is incredibly beautiful and also can be incredibly difficult. It’s like, it's easy if to make it sort of hazy and wonderful. And that's a kind of nostalgia that I think if that was in the film, would kind of kill the film; that you know, not being in your life now, only looking back—it's not to say that how beautiful are they. I mean it's just extraordinary. And it's not just them. It’s just being young. I mean it's like and in a way if they weren’t naked, if they were just on a river trip, a camping trip, they would just seem ordinary. There’s something about their bodies before time has taken them into their middle age and then in my new film beyond middle-age, that just kind of shouts being young, it shouts youth, it shouts a kind of authenticity of being young in a way that you can’t claim.

If you just talk about being young, it’s one thing. But if you see it, it's like it creates a kind of mythic in my view, a kind of mythical, potentially mythical quality that on that river trip it’s before they’ve taken a bite of the apple of their middle age, of their adulthood—not even their middle age, adulthood—that they had yet to make the decisions that will define them as adults.

And in a way that's what being in the garden was, it was like a lack of knowing, you know, a kind of innocence about what the world was. And there's something about what that looks like, what the garden looks like in a certain kind of way, and then juxtaposing that against, you know, the complexities of the way things turned out then no longer young. They’re middle aged, you know, they have all the problems at health and family and relationships and all of that; their place in the world and all of those questions. They're not living with those questions. And that's in a way the topic of the film was; what are those questions? what are they living with?

And if it wasn't juxtaposed against this sort of gaudy representation of being young, I don't think there would be any real poignancy to those choices. Because those choices are simply ordinary. But the frame of time passing allows us to know them as having been once young and transitioned into this new life and then going back and forth in time suggests that they're embedded in time in a way that characters … in non-fiction, you’re always filming in the present in non-fiction film, or you have archival material. In this case, the archival material is something not quite from the archives. It’s like from their lives and my life with them and in a way it takes it out of the archival and it's not distant; it’s personal. So, seeing them then and now suggests that they live in time and that their middle-aged choices, you know, weren’t secure; they were contingent. They just happen the way that they happen to their life choices and the film films them embedded.

And then the other thing about that is that it was filmed over four years.

Mahmoud: Wow!

Robb: Which is because they’re had to be velocity in the present. And the present had to have an ongoing, it was an ongoing present that generated its own past. So, every time you cut back to a character you were further down the road with them. You know, and that takes time in non-fiction for things to happen.

You know, Barry is running for office. He loses; he gets cancer. But he turns 50. those markers are shot over four years. And while it collapses and it doesn't seem like so much time has passed. In my view, I needed that time in the present to create it a present that movie’s moving forward rather than just being embedded in the present, which documentaries are often embedded in the now; often in really good ways. That's really good. But then here the frame of the film is time itself passing by going back to when they're in their 20s and as they're heading towards 50.

Mahmoud: I did guess that it should have taken a long time filming the present, but I couldn't think of four years.

Robb: Also, I'm slow. I mean it just take me a while to make it. And this is related to being, you know, having a fulltime job in the academy. It slows me down. Because I have a fulltime job. I'm working all the time; not all the time. I have summers; I have sabbaticals. I'm able to, once if I've got momentum on a film that I can be working part of the days, I can organize my time to keep a project going; very hard for me to start a project in the midst of my … (interrupting noise), But I can keep teaching. I can keep making a movie and teach, if I've got momentum heading into a semester.

Does Academia Slow Down the Practitioners?

Mahmoud: A personal question popped up into my mind, which is … any regrets about Academia slowing you down?

Robb: So, I would say, and it's a personal answer. I don't know how it's … how much it can be generalized. But for myself, I would say for the first, I don't know, dozen years of my teaching, I thought of my teaching and my filmmaking as deeply related but parallel, and I moved traffic, I moved back and forth between them.

And it was hard, I mean there was a way in which one always was taking, you know, one always was in some way taking time away from the other—even as each gave to the other. But I, you know, I had a complicated relationship between that. And at some point, somewhere, you know, after that, so in the last 15 or 20 years, my filmmaking, my teaching my engagement with the world of film, which has increased more and more over time, where I'm asked to look at films or speak or whatever it is, my connection to the, you know, all of that began to seem like one thing that this was my practice; my practice included filmmaking, teaching, being in the world of filmmaking. I've been in the world of academia. The speed of all of that was a function of all those things that I did. And I stopped being the least bit regretful. It was just what I did. It was my work. It's my practice. That's how I organize it. And it seemed unnecessary to think of them as competing. Why not think of them as allied? And I now think that, I feel that, I don't feel that tension.

You know, I just … it all means I have to live long enough to get my filmmaking done; you know, to have as many, you know, enough films and enough ideas out there to continue. So, I have to have the luck of longevity to make all of that work in the long run. But even in the short run, it's a decision I made a long time ago. But I'm happy to live with. It wasn’t always true Mahmoud, you know, so I appreciate the question. But for me, this is where I've ended up.

Mahmoud: You nicely summed up the dilemma of a lifetime.

Shouting Politics or Shouting Youth

Robb: And it is a dilemma of a lifetime. You know, how do you live your life and how does one live your life? How does one live a life that you believe in, that you care about, that's consistent with your values, that you know exercises your energies and intelligence and that's, you know, adding something to the world hopefully rather than taking away from it?

These are huge questions. And in some ways, you know, a film like Riverdogs was trying to approach that question in my 20s. This is how we were responding to those questions in our 20s in this kind of strange, but in a way it grew out of the 60s. It was like how do you live a life that's, you know, environmentally socially communal environmentally sound; not so invested in money, connected to your community, all these kinds of questions; and that's what it looked like. I mean that's what I was filming in a certain way.

I thought it would be more political, you know, as I was filming it actually when I was making Riverdogs in my 20s, I thought that material would seem political. But it never did. It just shouted being young and as time passed ever more shouted being young and not exactly politics. Although now in a way, you know, given people's lives now and what I'm filming now, … I'm making a third film. I've been filming for three years. I probably have another year of filming. And, you know, there were two mayors in the old in The Same River Twice, two people became mayors and another character had been highly involved in their local politics.

In his 30s and that person Jeff ran to be a state senator in Southern Oregon. At 68 he ran, you know, he got married at 67. At 68 he ran for office. Then at 69 he's won. And then he became a state senator, you know, during these turbulent times. And so now he's doing the thing that his whole life he’s wanted to do, which is to serve at that level. It was a kind of both personal belief and a kind of just personal ambition.

Interestingly for Jeff, he was somebody who went to Harvard as an undergraduate like he was like the smartest kid in his class. He entered Harvard as a sophomore. He got straight ‘A’s when he was at Harvard. And after two years he dropped out. Because he didn't wanna be trained in a society. This was 1970, and he didn't wanna be an elite in a society. He didn't really trust that the war in Vietnam was raging and our civil rights situation was really bad. There were so many things wrong and with so much division in the society; and he dropped out of college and he became a carpenter. And then he slowly sort of returned to whatever his aspirations were as a young man, not having dropped out of Harvard as a 20-year old. And as a 70-year old now, today, he's returned to his ambition to be a state senator which is what he's doing.

Mahmoud: I'm really eager to see the third part.

Robb: Me too!

Hellenistic Beauty of Film vs. Boredom of Analogue Video

Mahmoud: And one of the things that extraordinarily helps the theme of the film is the contrast between the technical formats of these two periods.

I mean the film quality in contrast to video quality, and I see a sort of Hellenistic beauty in the picture, and also in the technical format of Riverdogs. I mean, there was a sort of pleasing dynamic range in the film, which is all lost in the video, in the video of the 90s, and that nicely helps this contrast between the Hellenistic beauty and the boredom of everyday life.

Robb: Yeah, that's great.  Well, you know, so I shot, Riverdogs in 1978, I'm 28 years old. It's one of … it's really like, in a way, it's my very first film. It was insane to do 35 days outdoors; filming on a river, you know, I had solar battery chargers and, you know, it was just like, kind of a mess. And I was inexperienced, like very inexperienced. But I was so in love with the cinema, and the idea of making images and hearing the sound of the film go by my head and holding the camera on my shoulder and keeping everything safe and all of that and then trying to see what this world look like. And, you know, I have a light meter; it's completely different, I mean what how film renders light, how film and film as film renders light.

And I'm shooting reversal which was probably a mistake. But I didn't really trust negative film at that point. So, I'm changing magazines all the time because it has different speeds and the film that I loved was very very slow, and it was a fall trip so the shadows would get too deep and it meant I had to change mags to shoot with a higher speed film and they render light very differently—the stocks I was using.

But it has all the qualities of somebody in love with cinema, for me it's like I just was so young and, you know, and also just, I felt like if I just film, see really well with a camera that would reveal something of the world. This was my guiding principle that no voice-over, you know, no music track, just the ability to see and hear the sounds of the river and the sounds of that place, and film it as closely as I could.

And then the problem of filming people naked, it's like how do you film people naked in a way that's respectful—it's already complicated. But how do you do that? And so, I thought about that a lot as I was filming from. You know, whatever angles I was at? And what the light was like? And how to make sense of the bodies as a shooter, as a filmmaker?

And when I started filming The Same River Twice I was using a little standard def camera of VX1000, of Sony VX1000. It's a little dinky camera, one of the early 90s highly portable video cameras been around for a long time. 

This was one of the ones that I just sort of picked up. And I was aware. And it actually kept me up at night; it was like, I hope that the juxtaposition between the then and the now would be housed in the materiality of the film itself, or the medium itself that I was using, and that the then would look like something and the now would look like something.  And that difference meant something rather than just … that look nice and now it looks crummy, you know. Could that meaning like leak into the meaning of the film? Or would it just stand apart as a problem?

And I didn't know I mean, you never don't know, as a filmmaker. You try these things and until you try them, you don't know how it's gonna play. And hearing you say that, it's like exactly what I would hope that.

The other part was exactly—also that it would make the past seem too dreamy, and beautiful, and make the present seem too dreary and ordinary. And it does in a away. That's true in a way. And also, you know, the filming them in the present, which is now 20 years ago, It's kind of rushed, and talky and not beautiful. The meaning isn't embedded into the materiality of the meaning in a way the video itself is a face. And then they come forward a little bit as characters, and what they have to say, and our friendships, and make the present seem, I think, more alive, less regarded as there was a slight distance in shooting Riverdogs. And that's replaced by the nature of our friendships and our love for each other over so many years.

Contributions a Film Editor Can Make

Mahmoud: Maybe, we should credit the editor to some extent, too.

Robb: Yeah.

Mahmoud: What he did was very helpful in the process.

Robb: Oh my god, I always edited my own films until this one. I've always directed, produced, shot and edited, and taken sound mostly for all the films that I've made. I like having connection to the filmmaking process. And it's where authorship grows, you know, and for me, I didn't know how to make a film with an editor. I mean, I feared it.

And then I had this, you know, I had this idea that that having somebody edit my film was like paying somebody to make love to my wife. That's how I imagined it; seem like a really bad idea. But then I didn't have time to do it myself. You know, I was teaching full time. It's like, I would try to do it. And for the first two years of shooting, I cut but I was unable to kind of address the material. And there was a local editor Karen Schmear, who just a fantastic person and a fantastic editor and hadn't edited anything quite like this. And she was near the beginning of her career. But it took me so long to make the film that we both grew, grew together in the making of the film. She was hugely important in making the film. This was a collaboration, deep collaboration that I owe her a huge debt.

While I was making the film and raising money and still shooting over these four years, she would take other jobs. She cut Errol Morris's Fog of War, during the time that she was working with me. And she cut some other films at the same time. She was quite amazing.

And Karen, sorry … I'm just … Karen was killed in a car accident.

Mahmoud: Oh my God!

Robb: You know, something like 10 years ago, and I still miss her and she was amazing.

Mahmoud: May she rest in peace. I didn’t really know that. I wouldn't have brought that up.

Robb: No, no, it's fine to bring up that. You know, I can't stop myself from crying. But it's not like that's a problem. I mean, she was amazing human being, amazing person.

And then there's been lots of editing awards in the United States given in her name, the Karen Schmear fellowship and, you know, it's like her friends have really rallied for her. She was like a month shy of turning 40. She was in her late 20s when we worked together. And I'd always wanted her to edit the next one. You know, we joked about it; you know, what are you doing in 20 years? And, you know, we talked about it. So that's a sadness for me that that can't be the case would be so wonderful to have her. But there are other wonderful editors and life is the way it turns out. And mortality is a big part of it. And of course, a big part of what the third film would be.

4K Is Inhuman!

Mahmoud: How about the technical plan for the third film? Because as I mentioned, the film style, really contributed to the first part and videos contributed to the second part. And now we have all these crazy 4K technology and all the different equipment. In what way are you trying? Will you connect that technology with the theme of the film?

Robb: Right, exactly. And of course, it's just like I was 20 years ago, I'm just guessing that, you know, I have hopes for how that will work and what I'm hoping for.

So, I've been shooting mostly in HD partly, not 4K. I find 4K, like, so specific, you know every pore, in a way kind of inhuman, whereas there's something slightly smeary about HD, which I like.

Also, since I'm doing all of the shooting, I'm doing everything myself, when I go on a shoot, it's just me, there's nobody else. So, I'm shooting, I'm downloading and wrangling footage, you know, I'm producing, I'm directing, I'm doing everything. And 4K just takes a lot more time to ingest into the computer. And since I don't have anybody else doing it, it made more sense for me to keep shooting in HD.

So, HD is still radically different than standard def, which is the second film, and radically different than 16-Millimeter, which is the first film. And I'm shooting in 16:9 or 178. So, you know, the first film is in 16, which is 133, standard def that I was shooting was also 133. So, the 133 will be embedded in a 16:9 or 178-frame.

So, there'll be moving back and forth between aspect ratios as well as the kind of, you know, between the resolution and color, saturation, and chroma and all that of HD as distinct from standard def. It looks different. The weird thing is cutting them all together, which I've been trying to do, isn't as distinct as I would imagine, in a way the move between being 16-millimeter and being young and naked, is a much more dramatic move to being clothed and middle-aged then being elderly or on their way to being elderly or whatever it is that we are.

And being, you know, in your 40s; it's not like, you know, it's not like you can tell. But there isn't that instant recognition, even with a different aspect ratio of how the present and the past interacts as a visual trope. So, I don't know, you know, there may be other ways to augment that; and maybe that's not necessary.

And keep, keep looking at the space and we'll see what happens!

Farabi and the Power of Imagination

Mahmoud: Great! I can speak for another two hours about The Same River Twice and hear more. But as we have a tight schedule, I’m taking your permission to move on to Nadia, and I will give an introduction to her. And she has a short presentation and then we will keep moving to the other films, which I could put it in my background.

Robb: Good.

Mahmoud: Great, thank you. Professor Nadia Maftouni has a distinguished background in philosophy and philosophers of the Islamic era, their movement from Greek philosophy towards Neoplatonism and beyond. She specializes in philosophy of art. She is also an artist and besides being a painter and having held many international exhibitions.

She has been engaged with documentary filmmaking too, even in the technical aspects like photography and editing. She is a professor at University of Tehran and a senior research scholar at Yale Law School. Her works on medieval philosophy, Islamic philosophy, their relation to modern-day art and media has been published in numerous scholarly books and academic journals. So, Professor Maftouni are you here at the moment? I'm sure you were here.

Nadia: Yeah, I'm here. I’m here and I'm actually grateful to Robb for accepting our invitation on behalf of myself as well as my colleagues at University of Tehran.

Also, I should welcome my colleagues and students from Iran and US. Thank you all for your participation.

I wanted to say a few words in honor of you Robb. I'll quickly mention a notion of Philosophy of Art here in a few seconds. Since your work The Same River Twice is of a philosophical theme, its second episode which I actually impressed by makes the first episode highly philosophical. You know, you might find a cornucopia of philosophical books and papers about the meaning of life, for example. But one can find it all in a single documentary like The Same River Twice. In this respect Farabi, the great philosopher of 9th and 10th century, has some ideas which are nothing short of remarkable today. Focusing on the arts of his own time like paintings, statues, crafts, poetry and music, Farabi says that art is the best language for philosophers and philosophical truth. And without art, Farabi believes, philosophical ideas and philosophers cannot make their ways to people’s mind and people’s emotions.

I’m not gonna bother you. the gist of it is that among the different powers of mind, imagination is solely capable of portray the sensible as well as intelligible beings. It can even depict the intelligible truth of utter perfection such as First Cause, abstract beings, Active Intellect ... and so on. Actually, for them, for philosophers, final happiness is the state in which a human being successfully perceives the intelligible and achieves the nearest possible status to the Active Intellect. However, people usually don't follow the intelligible, it is not feasible to speak of or bring into action particular details of nonsensible beings such as ten intellects or Active Intellect or First Cause. You can only imagine them. People might imagine them through analogy, parallelism, or allegory. Majority of people are not used to reasoning about the intelligible. In most people, the soul is attracted to the imagination and the imagination controls the mind, Farabi argues.

In effect, the proper method for educating the public is transferring images and resemblances of intelligible truth and intelligible happiness into their imagination via arts and art works. Probably, since you are Chair of AFVS, the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard, these critical topics, probably matter to you. Anyway, it was just to say something in honor of you and again many thanks.

Mahmoud: Thank you Professor Maftouni, please!

Subtle Presence of Philosophy in Art

Robb: No, just to say thank you also. And that was lovely to hear and I’ll pick more but those things. And I agree that art has access to human experience in complex ways that are hard to reduce; yet completely present. And also, if those works are designed to do what you just said I think they won't work. I mean they don't make sense if they're like an argument and an orderly argument that leads to something.

They have to be somehow synthetic and holistic about what they are. And then what they are can begin to approach those questions.  

It's a kind of indirectness that has much more direct power in the people. it's, you know, one of the complex things is people, students often think that, like … they have a complicated feeling about work at the end. And they think that making work leads to that. So, how do you make something that produces that experience? And then it becomes too direct to line and too literal somehow. And then it really is this complicated thing of making sense of the work you’re doing in the deepest way you can within the medium that you're doing with no sense of what it's adding up to at that level; at level you're talking about. But once you do that, if you can possibly succeed at that, then I think it can translate in the ways that you’re describing, in a way that I think is quite beautifully said.

And one of the complexities of including it in the academy because it, you know, there's a slight mismatch between those two things, between you know, scholarly argument and an artistic work can get to very similar things; but they can't by doing it the same way; they have to do it in their own way. They have to believe in their own way for that to be the case.

 So, I appreciate your thoughts about that and also connecting it to Iranian philosophy and history.

I know Stanley Cavell. I don't know if you know Stanley Cavell. He is a philosopher. He was a philosopher in Harvard for many years. And our department was created partly through him. Because he believed that film could be what you just described. And he was like a fantastic supporter and also somebody, you know, he started playing saxophone. I mean this was as a young man he was saxophone player came to philosophy kind of late. And showing him your work, you know, if you were lucky enough to kind of ask him to come to see your work and progress on the editing table and sitting with him and showing him my work and just the things he would say so fantastic and so inspiring. He loved film and he loved thinking about film in the same way of that he loved thinking about Walden Pond or romantic comedies from the 40s. He just had such an active imagination in mind and I think philosophy can be that.

It’s like it's another way in which philosophy can keep hold of the present and make that alive for people in a way that I think you just described. I appreciate it.

Mahmoud: As I understand from your words maybe we could say that film and art naturally does that.

Robb: Yes, it can, it ought to if it's not designed to do that. If it designed to be itself it can do that, yes.

Ordinary Characters or Existentialist Philosophers

Mahmoud: Like The Same River Twice; I mean, one of the notes that I wrote was that "characters become, sort of, existentialist philosophers." I mean when one of them is seeing her own images of her youth—I think it's Katie. I don’t know; it's Katie I think—you ask her "why did we do that?" and she says "cause we could!"

Robb: Danny, yes.

Mahmoud: Yeah, right.

Robb: She goes on to say—it's not in the movie; I don't think it's in the movie. I remember this has been a conversation with Karon. it's like she, I ask her that ...why did we do that and she said she thinks because we could and then she thinks about it again and she says it less convincingly because we could and then she goes, I don't know. Just seemed this was about being naked and she said it just seemed to go with being outdoors and being wet. And then she’s kind of devolves into not knowing. But her first answer she says in a kind of defiant way.

Mahmoud: Yes.

Robb: You know, which I loved. And the truth and nonfiction could stop in any one of those answers whether you included part B, part C, part D, and it would make something different at each part.

And I think we get out at part A, although it's something we talked about a lot. Documentary is complicated that way, because it's a constructed nonfiction, which is different than fiction, but not the same as actuality.

Mahmoud: Or a lot of the male characters when he views the voting session whether we should end the trip or we should go on. And now he's a middle-aged man. He says, I changed my vote.

Robb: Because I changed my vote. Is it too late?

Mahmoud: Right, yeah, yeah.

Robb: That he says next time—it's not in the movie, actually don’t begin. But he goes on to say, next time I see Jim, I'm gonna change my vote and next time I see Cathy, I'm gonna apologize.

Agony and Ecstasy of Co-Authoring

Mahmoud: Great! So how about your more recent productions and your cooperation with Peter? Could you elaborate on that?

Robb: Sure! This is another one of these great pleasures of teaching in a university. I mean, it's just like, in a way, what a pleasure. What a wonderful thing. And there's this version of that is that in 2000.

2000 while I'm in the midst of shooting and editing The Same River Twice, Peter comes to our department looking for somebody to teach a class with about film and science. And he ends up talking to me. And I'd always been really interested in film and science. And I had made some science films just because I was interested early on.

And we started to teach this course every other year since 2000, called Filming Science. And it was a kind of hybrid course, in which there were ten students. There were a mix of graduates and undergraduates of historians of science and filmmakers and even, you know, neurobiologists and other people in the sciences. And the question in the class was, what happens to film when science is its topic? And what happens to science, when it's filmed? What is the relationship of these two things? What is the relationship of these different ways of knowing when you put them together, and you have each interrogate the other and that became the kind of rolling, understanding and people made films in scientific environments broadly construed sometimes as laboratories, sometimes it was in, you know, recycling centers and other ways in which science was handled in different kinds of vernacular ways, as well as hard science in laboratories.

Things like, you know, fluid mechanics, or you know, all kinds of things.

And this was incredibly fun. I mean, this was such a fun and dynamic... I learned a lot by co-teaching. It’s a lot our work to co-teach them to teach on your own. It's like, it's not like you half the work, it's twice the work. Because you have to say everything out loud. And there were many things that would happen in a classroom like, you know, if you share a classroom with somebody, how do you know who to call on? How do you share calling on people? How do you share where the conversation goes? What do you think of is the most important thing that's happening? How do you notice the little micro moments of somebody’s discomfort; or somebody is unusually silent or somebody needs to stay silent, or they need to be called on.

These are like complicated, then these kinds of micro assessments happen in classrooms, especially seminar-style classrooms, all the time and to share that in a way that you can’t talk over, you can't decide ahead of time. So, it turned out that Peter and I could share a classroom in those ways that our intuitions about teaching and learning were very much aligned. And our curiosity about things very much aligned.

Peter had always loved film and he'd made a film before he met me. But, you know, Peter is extraordinary. He has two PhDs, one in history of science, and while he was getting his history of science PhD, he got a second PhD in theoretical physics. Because he didn't wanna be a historian of science without being a physicist. He wanted to be able to know a field as well as study the field. And, you know, he is a MacArthur Fellow. I mean, he's just amazing guy. He's a university professor at Harvard, it's like, you know, what a guy! He is just a wonderful person, incredibly smart, speaks in simple, straightforward language about very complicated things. He's never obscure. His clarity of mind can reduce even the most complicated topics, the kind of, a way of talking about things.

You know, we would be in the car driving for hundreds of miles together to do a mix for a film that we made. And he would describe to me the way that, you know, the way that your phone keeping track of where you are was connected to Einstein's second theory of relativity, and just giving me the sort of history and technology and how it all works.

Of course, I understood about 20%, but better than no percent. And I would say over this time, he became a filmmaker, but I did not become a historian of science. But I became a lot more familiar with the ideas and had the great pleasure of working together with him. And then over some time, over some years, we thought, well, our ability to successfully negotiate a classroom together and thinking together like that, maybe we should make a film together.

How to Avoid Jumping to Conclusions

And that film became Secrecy. And Secrecy was chosen, in part because of its, in a way, it's like, my feeling was if I'm going to make a film with somebody else, I don't want to make a film like I would ordinarily make and just with somebody else.

I want to make something quite different. I want to see what that's like. I want to really collaborate. And in our collaboration, this idea of how do you know things if the government's keeping things from you? How does the democracy work? What's the relationship of government secrecy to national security and democracy? How do these things work? And then a really complicated idea to explore. Because it violates one of the basic tenets, I have about what good filmmaking is, or the first question in filmmaking for me, is what do you point the camera at? Somebody will have an idea. And so, what will we see? What do you imagine we will see?

And in Secrecy, the answer is nothing! Secrecy was redacted. It's like, it's held from view. You can't look at it. So how do you make sense of something you can’t look at in cinema? And we took that on as a problem like, well, let's just see what happens. It's a terrible idea. In a way, I don't recommend it. Because it's a work against, you know, what cinema can do.

Yet, I sort of loved the idea of the challenge of how do you make such a thing. And also historically, this took place just as the war in Iraq was starting. And there was a real absence of news. The New York Times really abdicated their responsibility, I think, and that American journalism abdicated their responsibility in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and the beginning of the Iraq war, again like, why are we doing this? What is the evidence for doing this? Why are we as a nation doing this extraordinarily complicated thing? And what is the ideology of that? And you know, in a way, it's a precursor to this moment–is how the facts interrogate the present as distinct from ideology, for example.

And the film wants to think about how governments have used in the United States secrecy over the course of time, and especially coming into our current moment, its relationship to nuclear power, and nuclear secrets, and then the current moment that we're in at that point. But it also was before a lot of the secrecy revelations of WikiLeaks and you know, all of that; this was before that. So, it anticipated that. And, you know, we used animation to try to represent worlds you can't see but you know about, you can infer it. You don't see gravity, but you can experience gravity, and that the animation was a way to create a gravitational field in the imagery, and music and then certain kinds of stories and also using people from all sides of the political spectrum; to think about those things.

It premiered at Sundance. And you know, it was used by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the sort of First Amendment rights organization in the United States to think about government secrecy and to show to its members and to surface the question.

It's a really fundamental question. How much the government owes to tell you and the limits of that, like where's the limits of that? When is it too dangerous to say things? And of course, that also exists. It's not only one way; but the whole system itself was shrouded in Secrecy. So, like exposing the secrecy system, not the secrets themselves, but how it all works, was the task of the movie.

Mahmoud: I thought the film works very fine in showing all the sides of the discussion. And it didn't end up in being a model or one part.

Robb: I'm suspicious to movies that you have to show your credentials to enter, like you have to say you already believe in the film's conclusions to enter the movie. I mean this, you know, metaphorically. But there's lots of films in which, you know, and there's nothing exactly wrong with it. Sometimes different sides need that kind of support to know more and to sturdy up your ideas and to, and to fight for what you believe in, you know. But for me, it's less interesting to make a film in which the conclusion is known from the beginning. I'd rather explore, I think, by the end of the film, I think it leans towards more openness than more closeness. But it acknowledges the complexity of that idea and that there are reasons to hold things from a population. But if you don't trust the system that just withhold it, you're not so much of your … (connection lost) beliefs. And democracy doesn't work if it's not grounded in an open flow of information. It just doesn't work in the same way. I mean, and we're experiencing that in our country right now, in the United States, that this ability for the internet to pick and choose between what's factual and what's not and what people believe in what they don't. This glut of information, in a way this unfiltered glut of information is promoting the balkanization of beliefs in our country and making democracy very difficult right now.

Significance of Iranian Cinema

Mahmoud: I don't want to bother you for a longer period of time as we have exceeded the one-hour limit that we have for such sessions and I don't want to give you too much of more headaches.

But I will try to move to a little bit of Q&A. If any of participants write their questions in Persian, I can translate it and another question that I received was that about your view, do you want to mention any notes about the Iranian cinema?

Robb: I was thinking about this because especially the second new wave. I'm not an expert in Iranian cinema, but I've loved Iranian cinema and very moved by Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf and many others. It's like it's a kind of cause of celebration when new films come out from Iran that my friends and I that the people I know and people who love cinema. And also, I'll say one other thing about this, that at Harvard, there's a every other year, there's a thing called the Norton Lectures in Poetry, but it's not about—it's about poetry broadly construed maybe in a way that Iranians would understand more than most. But, you know, it's like T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), or Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990), or Toni Morrison (1931-2019), the writer. And we were thinking about a filmmaker for the first time and the only filmmaker in the world that our committee thought could be somebody at the highest levels of cinema, who could speak for contemporary cinema in a way that could hold six lectures—it’s six lectures—it's a lot of time, and filmmakers aren't necessarily the best at lecturing. The only person that we all agreed upon was Kiarostami, just before he died. And so just to say that, there's some way in which the poetry of the image, the kinds of stories, the ways in which they're told, sometimes the fluidity between nonfiction and fiction, a kind of freedom within a lot of discipline, which is like the best kind of art in a way, the best kind of cinema. I'm, you know, I've just been moved by it. So I just, you know, I'm speaking less as a scholar than as a, you know, a kind of devoted fan. But as a devoted fan, it's been an important part of my life and an important part of my cinematic growth.

And let me thank you Mahmoud and you Nadia also for the invitation and for organizing all this and doing this work, it doesn't just happen, I know doesn't just happen and I appreciate all that as well as the invitation.

Nadia: Thank you Robb and bye!