When filmmaker Charles Mudede read Russian novels, one key question stuck with him – the question of morality, a predominant theme in this type of literature he studied. Today, he is merging political philosophy and film to engage people to think about the nature of human morality.
On Feb. 18, Mudede will lead, The Cinema of Human Morality, a narrated tour using poetry, politics and the environment as tools to examine questions of morality and the human condition, as part of Western Front’s Scrivener’s Monthly.
Looking for a wider sense of morality
Filmmaker Charles Mudede.
Mudede thinks morality is a big subject in the anthropological sense. He is conducting an inquiry into the nature, or the true core, of human morality, using film to say exactly what it is, what it does and how often it is misrepresented.
“When I watch films or when I read something, I’m always looking for signs of what we think about what morality is against what I think it is, so I’m presenting my opinion, but I’m making an informed opinion,” he explains.
Instead of referring to obscure texts, he refers to more accessible mediums for audiences. In his presentations, he likes to use images and present films as he sees it, giving the viewer a sense of adventure of travelling to an island and the events that happen before they arrive at the destination.
“By the time we get there, we should be able to say what it is or what the island is like and therefore have less confusion about the subject,” he says.
He feels that the United States is confused about the concept of moral majority.
The Zimbabwe-born filmmaker, who spent most of his life in the United States, thinks the Americans’ version of morality is essentially family values according to their specific experience of the world, which is very limited.
“They see themselves as being moral because they emphasize the importance of family, going to church and things like that. They think that makes you moral. They’ve taken control of the word,” says Mudede, who has written for The Stranger Weekly in Seattle for the past 15 years.
In 2013, he began to think about human morality. The European migrant crisis drew his attention to the subject as some (in even many) of the migrants were stateless subjects. He refers to related readings from two important philosophers, Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben, both of whom argue statelessness deprives the subject not just of rights, but of their humanity and therefore can be killed without consequence.
“But what I was trying to argue with these two readings, is that statelessness does not mean you have no rights, [it means] you don’t need politics to ground your rights as a human being. If this is the case, then where do your rights come from?” he says.
Images of morality
By using film, Mudede feels he can show what he’s thinking.
“Images are powerful. Film tends to be a language that draws people in,” he says.
He also draws on Baruch Spinoza, the Dutch-Jewish philosopher who wrote The Ethics, who views the body as a foundation for the human universe – essentially an emotional universe. Mudede imagines the human universe as a moral one and founds it on the basis of the body.
“I just doubt that anybody would want to read Spinoza’s Ethics. It’s a wretchedly difficult book. That would have been the worst kind of lecture in the world,” he says.
He draws on examples from popular films such as Star Wars. He sees that film as a having a moral universe struggling between good and evil forces, but the film still positions those forces to be external to the characters.
“To me, that is the problem. What I’m trying to do is the reverse,” says Mudede.
He refers to the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who wrote The Essence of Christianity in the 1860s. In the book, Feuerbach tried to show that what people attributed to God were really abstractions of their own making.
“We say, ‘I want to thank God for giving me the ability to run fast,’ or something like that. No, it is actually in you. There is no force outside. I’m doing that similar thing but now for morality,” says Mudede.
For more information on The Cinema of Human Morality, visit www.front.bc.ca.
