Episode 118 - Everything Everywhere All At Once (Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert, 2022) (with David Sorfa)
Everything Everywhere All At Once (Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert, 2022).
The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!
Prepare for more multiverse madness as Chris and Alex dive into the world of Everything Everywhere All At Once (Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert, 2022), the Oscar-winning absurdist sci-fi action adventure that engages head-on with the question of what it means to be human set against the backdrop of forking path storylines, a sumptuous mise-en-scène of colliding visual styles, and a maelstrom of digital VFX. The special guest for Episode 118 is Dr David Sorfa, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh and editor-in-chief of the journal Film-Philosophy, who specialises in philosophy’s relationship with cinema, Existentialism, phenomenology, the work of Jacques Derrida, and the presentation of thought and thinking in cinema. The trio cover a variety of topics appropriate to a film that slingshots spectators between multiple times and places, including what Everything Everywhere All At Once establishes in relation to feelings of worthlessness, apathy, and the power of choice; images of freedom and responsibility, and what it means for humanity to act in good faith; Michelle Yeoh’s star persona and her relationship to late-1990s/early-2000s Hollywood kung-fu cinema; the reflexive depiction of multiple femininities at breaking point; turns to chaos and fictional world theories rooted in what is made ‘possible’; and how a film like Everything Everywhere All At Once can add to and ‘do’ philosophical enquiry in positing how things might be otherwise than they are.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
Suggested Readings
Lewis, David. 1973. Counterfactuals. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lewis, David. 1977. “Possible-World Semantics for Counterfactual Logics: A Rejoinder.” Journal of Philosophical Logic 6: 359–363.
Holliday, Christopher. 2021. “Rewriting the Stars: Surface Tensions and Gender Troubles in the Online Media Production of Digital Deepfakes.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 27, no. 4: The Digital Face and Deep Fakes on Screen: 899-918.
Ronen, Ruth. 1994. Possible Worlds in Literary Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sorfa, David. 2003. “Architorture: Jan Svankmajer and Surrealist Film.” In Screening the City, edited by Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice, 100-112. London: Verso.
Sorfa, David. 2011. The Cinema of Michael Haneke: Europe Utopia. London: Wallflower.