Telling the Untellable: Experiments on Wisdom in Contemporary Cinema
Telling the Untellable: Experiments on Wisdom in Contemporary Cinema

Summary/Abstract: In “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin proposes the concept of wisdom as the underpinning of the act of telling stories. His inspiration comes from the oral traditions of the past and especially the tradition of religious wisdom stories. Drawing from this idea, I try to reflect on the meaning and impact of the Aristotelian theory of drama and its alternatives, as well as its current philosophical and artistic disavowal, and the possibility of there being other, more ancient, ways of telling stories based on experience. For that purpose, I discuss the concepts of wisdom, and experience, using them to analyze Richard Linklater’s films Waking Life (2001) and especially Boyhood (2014), as examples of audiovisual work that tries to create narrative experience based on wisdom, accident and the centrality of the storyteller, instead of the conventional Aristotelian centrality of plot and character.

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