Watch Badiou, the First Feature-Length Film on France’s Most Famous Living Philosopher

in Film, Philosophy | February 24th, 2021 3 Comments

Above you can watch Badiou, the first fea­ture-length film on France’s most famous liv­ing philoso­pher. On the film’s accom­pa­ny­ing web­site, the directors–Gorav Kalyan and Rohan Kalyan–write:

Niet­zsche wrote that all phi­los­o­phy is a biog­ra­phy of the philoso­pher. The life of philoso­pher Alain Badiou sug­gests that the reverse of this is also true: from one’s life sto­ry, we might deduce an entire sys­tem of thought.

From his birth in Moroc­co, to the events of May 1968 in Paris, to his twi­light years as a nomadic pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al, Badiou’s own biog­ra­phy is per­haps his most com­plex and thought-pro­vok­ing work. He is a man who demands to be con­sid­ered the ally of both Pla­to and Sartre, St. Paul and Lucifer, the math­e­mati­cian and the poet.

With inti­mate access, Gorav and Rohan Kalyan have pro­duced the first fea­ture-length doc­u­men­tary about Alain Badiou. By address­ing the inher­ent con­tra­dic­tions in Badiou’s life and work through cin­e­mat­ic means, the film­mak­ers are con­front­ed by the inher­ent con­tra­dic­tions of cin­e­ma itself: thought vs action, inte­ri­or­i­ty vs exte­ri­or­i­ty, pres­ence vs absence. And in order to bring to their com­plex sub­ject a sense of empa­thy, clar­i­ty, and cri­tique, they must ask a ques­tion as old as the medi­um: can cin­e­ma think?

Badiou has been made avail­able through Rohan Kalyan’s Vimeo page, and it will be added to our col­lec­tion of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Philoso­pher Alain Badiou Per­forms a Scene From His Play, Ahmed The Philoso­pher (2011)

Michel Fou­cault and Alain Badiou Dis­cuss “Phi­los­o­phy and Psy­chol­o­gy” on French TV (1965)

The Entire Archives of Rad­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy Go Online: Read Essays by Michel Fou­cault, Alain Badiou, Judith But­ler & More (1972–2018)


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Comments (3)
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  • Jay Quintana says:
    February 24, 2021 at 7:26 pm

    “Niet­zsche wrote that all phi­los­o­phy is a biog­ra­phy of the philoso­pher. The life of philoso­pher Alain Badiou sug­gests that the reverse of this is also true: from one’s life sto­ry, we might deduce an entire sys­tem of thought.”

    I’m not try­ing to start some­thing, but aren’t they say­ing the same thing as Niet­zsche?

    Reply
  • paulios says:
    March 9, 2022 at 12:13 pm

    Hel­lo and thank you for your won­der­ful web­site list of films to watch!
    Unfor­tu­nate­ly, this par­tic­u­lar film states here on the page, ‘Pass­word Required’ and there is no clue any­where as to what this elu­sive pass­word might be!
    Please can you assist me here?
    Thank you,
    Pauline.

    Reply
  • Keni Lynch says:
    December 24, 2024 at 1:33 am

    It is my excuse, to be or not to be a philoso­pher, to bring jus­tice, equal­i­ty, free­dom to all, or to await the final out­come, slow­ly, as time pro­gress­es and the human heart awak­ens to itself. Here we are, then, rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies before our time, glo­ri­ous­ly alive. To cure, to heal, to mend, to guide and to guard the line of those who stand for this new sen­si­bil­i­ty. The pos­si­bil­i­ty, final­ly, of being human.

    To change the world is to par­tic­i­pate, and to par­tic­i­pate is to achieve ‘the one’ in moments, in events, in action not sep­a­rate from the­o­ry. The great rev­o­lu­tion of the void in cre­ation, this vast expanse before our eyes, true beau­ty, true cause, the real­i­ty of our lives lived togeth­er in the sol­i­dar­i­ty we call love, laugh­ter, strug­gle and wine.

    To find peace, to speak the truth, to know it in our lover’s eye and our chil­dren’s play. To dis­cov­er Pla­to and Sartre togeth­er propos­ing the impos­si­ble ques­tion. How to live in truth, jus­tice, free­dom and for love to show us the way. Mon­ey isn’t every­thing and Che did not die in vain. The rev­o­lu­tions you speak about, I had assumed had retired to the beach…in India, in France, and in this movie but no.…it is the reverse. The play of the waves has joined us. The tide is turn­ing. And the sun is a mul­ti­plic­i­ty reflect­ed in every facet…and these waves go on and on for­ev­er uplift­ing, accept­ing, guid­ing our feel­ing of the uni­ty behind all things. The Event was not mere­ly your inven­tion then, of a clever philoso­pher, but the Truth..!

    Reply

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