Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life
by Michael Paxton
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Actor: Daniel E. Greene, Harry Binswanger, Michael S. Berliner, Sharon Gless, Sylvia BokorDirector: Michael Paxton
Cinematographer: Alik Sakharov
Producer: Michael Paxton
Writer: Michael Paxton
Editor: Christopher Earl
Editor: Lauren A. Schaffer
Producer: Ellen Raphael
Producer: Jeff Britting
Edition: VHS Tape
Audio: English (Original Language), Analog
Format: Color, NTSC
Running Time: 145 minutes
Release Date: 2000-05-16
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Publisher: Strand Home Video
Studio: Strand Home Video
VHS Movie Reviews of Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life
Movie Review: Ayn Rand movie suffers from a lack of objectivity
Summary: 4 Stars
The memorable, and ultimately appalling, thing about Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life,the new film biography of the right-wing novelist-philosopher, is that it is perfectly true to its subject. Just as Rand, who was born in 1905 in Leningrad as it was convulsed by revolution, declared that she had not changed her ideas about anything since the age of 2?, this reverential documentary presents her thoughts as uncontested truth.
The evangelical tone is set by filmmaker Michael Paxton, quoted in the press material as saying that he first found Ayn Rand when he was an adolescent trying "to find a book that would answer all of my questions and give my life meaning." A Sense of Life contents itself with interviewing her friends and acolytes. It acknowledges that she was much criticized, and even considered a crank, but her critics don't appear onscreen and their views are not explained.
But neither Rand nor the film should be dismissed, if only because she is widely read and her ideas have been deeply influential. They lie behind much neo-conservative commentary, which recasts democracy -- essentially an untidy contest of ideas and interests -- as a secular religion (she called it Objectivism) where competing points of view are greeted with adolescent impatience.
But more particularly, Rand's influence helps explain the concealed romanticism of much right-wing commentary, which replaces iconic figures from other belief systems with buccaneering businessmen and entrepreneurs. As this film unwittingly makes clear, Rand herself was one of the great romantics. A worshipper of Hollywood, and partly successful screenwriter, she laments that the film version of her novel The Fountainhead "lacked the Romanticism of the German films she had loved as a youth." That these films were the precursors of fascism seems to have escaped the notice of Rand and her disciples.
This appealing simplicity, a charming oblivion to her own contradictions, gave Rand a widespread following among those looking for answers, even as it exasperated intellectuals. She believed that each individual has a sacred core of personal talents and dreams which can be expressed in a free society. People may choose to co-operate, but these choices must ultimately serve their self-interest. If an action is truly selfless, she often said, it is "evil." Her reasoning was that selflessness in one's own life can be enlisted by political systems such as communism that call on human beings to sacrifice themselves for the state.
These views were apparently burned into Rand's consciousness by the horrors she witnessed during and after the Russian Revolution -- a period the film recalls through family photographs and archival film footage. She decided that capitalism was the only hope for mankind. "Capitalism leaves every man free to choose the work he likes," she declares onscreen, oblivious to the deadening monotony of most people's jobs, not to mention unemployment.
Like her spiritual successors she prefers the grand and distant vista, and does not approach closely to see the outcasts and victims who are part of every great undertaking. She loved "the view of the skyscrapers where you don't see the details," declares the film, unselfconsciously.
This made her a formidable popular writer. She was seriously able to declare that Marilyn Monroe seemed to have come from an ideal, joyful world, that the star was "someone untouched by suffering." The hero of her last novel, Atlas Shrugged,was the direct descendant of Cyrus, the hero of a boy's adventure story she read at the age of 16. Like most libertarians, she had a deeply childish world view.
Never beautiful, Rand's intensity (and searching black eyes) seduced more than a few men. According to Harry Binswager, one of her academic admirers, "her idea of feminity was an admiration of masculine qualities." This was also Hitler's idea of feminity, and Rand's screenplays invariably include an idealized hero or heroine standing on a distant promontory, Leni Riefenstahl-style, but these fascinating parallels are of course not examined in A Sense of Life.
Rand had a powerful, if not searching, intellect. In many onscreen interviews seen in the film, she gives apparently convincing answers to her critics. But the answers are always framed in absolutes -- "man wants freedom, suffering has no importance" -- which are essentially empty postulates. But they have an attractive ring.
A Sense of Life is worth seeing because its naive presentation of Rand is consonant with Rand herself. In fact, it feels like nothing so much as an in-house biography of the founder of some fundamentalist religious sect. It acknowledges its subject's imperfections (her infidelity to her husband of 50 years, for example), but only to declare them redeemed by her quest for truth.
Rand was, of course, a lifelong atheist. But her work is a testament to the yearning for belief. The film concludes on a lingering shot of a poster for Atlas Shrugged,"Don't call it hero worship: it's a kind of white heat where philosophy becomes religion."
Or, perhaps, the ashes that are left when you turn up the temperature on a new belief system to the point where human community and compassion are burnt away. Conrad Alton, Filmbay Editor.
Movie Review: More than a glimpse
Summary: 5 Stars
This documentary regarding Ayn Rand offered a real insight to her life. Very well put together, and a presentation that I will definitely go back and watch several times...or definitely when I am in an individualist, objective state of mind!Movie Review: The objectivism of Ayn Rand
Summary: 5 Stars
Ayn Rand wrote some of my favorite books: The Fountain Head and Atlas Shrugged.
Born at the beginning of the 20th Century Russia, in the beautiful city of St. Petersburg, Ayn Rand started to read from the early age of six. By the age of nine, it is said that she knew she wanted to dedicate her life to writing and to philosophy.
Russia of the times was focused in collectivism, something Ayn Rand despised. After reading the works of Victor Hugo her character starts to shape. She lived through the Kerensky Revolution and in 1917, through the Bolshevik Revolution. From the start, she denounced communism and when the revolutionaries are victorious and start the painstaking process of taking away property, confiscating the pharmacy her father owned, she decides Russia is not the country for her. The family undergoes poverty and lack of food. While at school, during a class of American History, Ayn develops the ardent desire to become an American citizen. The United States becomes her goal because she wants to join a nation of free men and women, where the rights of the individual are protected by its constitution.
The university where she was studying philosophy is overtaken by communists, but during her last years of study; she enjoys one great pleasure, watching Western films and plays, and decides to enter the State Institute for Cinema Arts to study screenwriting.
Finally, she is permitted to leave Soviet Russia and to visit the United States. Her trip was supposed to last a short time, but she was determined never to return to Russia. New York City, with its skyscrapers, thousand lights, and never ending activity becomes the city that shapes her interpretation of the finest achievements of humanity. For a while, following her acting career, she travels to Hollywood and meets Cecil B. DeMille, who offers this striking young woman, with piercing eyes, a ride to the set of his movie The King of Kings. Mr. DeMille gives her an opportunity, her first job in the USA, as an extra, a script reader.
She meets actor Frank O'Connor and they strike interesting conversations that result in a marriage until death did they part. She writes The Fountainhead, where she shapes a hero by the name of Howard Roark, an architect, an ideal man that reveals to the world a philosopher that clearly sees how "a man ought to be." She then moves to write Atlas Shrugged, a novel that shares her philosophy through a story, surfacing the concept of objectivism, or how to live on Planet Earth.
The beauty of this DVD is that you see rare interviews with this marvelous philosopher who believed that only through a free capitalistic economic system and process could humans express and reach their full potential. For us, it provided a rare view into a favorite writer and we thoroughly enjoyed learning that as her characters, she refused to compromise and demanded that the entire speech given by her character, Howard Roark, played by Gary Copper, be delivered in entirety in the production of The Fountain Head. Without a doubt, if you admire Ayn Rand's work, this is a DVD that opens the door to rare film where we can see the episodes of the life of an amazing woman, writer, and philosopher.
Movie Review: A true philosophical meaning of life and the condition of the human soul
Summary: 5 Stars
A true philosophical meaning of life and the condition of the human soul
is all I can say about this exquisite and grand minded intellectual account of Ayn Rand's "A sense of life". A must see that will shake your world and tickle your soul. It's as profound as diving into the answers towards purposeful living.
Movie Review: Ayn Rand: A Sense of Hagiography
Summary: 2 Stars
It's easy to be critical of Michael Paxton's documentary on Ayn Rand. It was produced with the cooperation of the Ayn Rand Institute (the religious wing of Objectivism headed by Leonard Peikoff) and, as such, presents a one-sided view of Ayn Rand.
Particularly disappointing is the documentary's slighting of Nathaniel and Barbara Branden, who played an enormous role in Rand's life from 1950-1968 and were largely responsible for the launch of the Objectivist movement. Nathaniel, of course, had an affair with Rand, with the consent of their spouses. Leonard Peikoff (who didn't learn about the affair until years later) blames Rand's split with the Brandens on Nathaniel's supposed failings. Of course, there is every reason to think the split was a bit more complicated than this. Unfortunately, Peikoff (mistakenly called Rand's "intellectual heir") even speculates that the affair did not hurt Rand's husband Frank O'Connor when the evidence is to the contrary.
Paxton did, however, have access to Rand's archives and the documentary contains plenty of interesting pictures and video of Rand. Even those who know a fair amount about Rand's life will learn a lot.
Summary of Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life
Perhaps the most widely read philosopher of the 20th century, Ayn Rand has delighted and infuriated people of all ideologies and, like it or not, has helped to create the political realities we deal with every day. With Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life you can follow her life story, from her childhood in the turbulent years of revolution in her native Russia to her great success as a popular writer and deep thinker in the United States. This comprehensive look at a fascinating woman uses interviews with friends and colleagues, family photos, clips of her speaking, and great moments from the films she wrote to portray a complex, passionate person with the brains to articulate her ideals and the guts to stand up for them. Trying to get work in 1930s Hollywood wasn't easy for such a rabid anti-Communist, but Rand persisted and the tales of her life in the theater, her lifelong relationship with actor Frank O'Connor, and her midlife career change from novelist to political philosopher are both inspiring and dramatic, just as she'd want them to be. --Rob LightnerGeneral Video
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