Educational transformation and the force of film: Viewing Michael Haneke’s The Seventh Continent

In recent years, educational philosophy has sought new modes of inquiry with which to respond to our current conditions. In light of the diagnosis of our being immunized from the world and its problems, these experimental and empirical practices often take their cue from Arendt’s call to find a way to move in the gap between past and future. These experimental practices have used film-making and film-viewing, in particular, as a means to attend to the present and to counter our immunization from it. 1 The work of this paper connects to this recent trend in educational philosophy. The inquiry this paper is based on and arises out of our viewing of the film The Seventh Continent,2 and the conditions of this viewing. We share with these other engagements with film a concern with the possibility of (personal) transformation and (societal) change and take seriously the idea of an “education of grown-ups” as expressed by Cavell, in which change is conceived as transformation of the self (what Cavell calls a continual search for a next self4), or alternatively the idea of work on the self, as expressed by scholars such as Foucault and Wittgenstein. This paper articulates how we conceive of (educational) transformation of the subject in relation to the viewing of the film The Seventh Continent.status: publishe