A variety of film buffs, philosophy students, and visitors from outside of The New School came together last Friday night for the Philosophy Film Club’s screening of the 1934 classic L’Atalante, the fourth and final film of influential French director Jean Vigo. 

Hosted at The New School for Social Research (NSSR) building on 16th Street, attendees enjoyed an evening of pizza, drinks, and conversation led by Veronica Dakota Padilla, a PhD student in philosophy at NSSR, Christoph Cox, the Dean of Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts (and enthusiastic club member), and professor of philosophy Dmitri Nikulov who opened the discussion.

L’Atalante follows a couple that gets married and begins a strange honeymoon on a barge in France. A surreal comedy, its playfulness, and distinct visual aesthetic were greatly informative to the French New Wave movement and the history of cinema. 

The room filled with laughter throughout the night as characters stumbled onto the screen along with a cast of cats, clowns, and peddlers that brought light to the discussion afterward. People chipped in to offer everything from historical analyses to open-hearted declarations of enjoyment to literary analyses of the film.

Nearly a third of the audience were students from Lang and NSSR, according to Padilla and Cox, but many others were unaffiliated with The New School and found out about the screening through friends, other events at the university, or simply by googling free events in New York online. “I think the audience changes every time,” Cox said. “There’s some regulars but it changes every time too, which is super cool and a little mysterious how that happens.”

The club was started five years ago by Padilla as a way to bring together the two schools of Lang and NSSR, as well as people outside of the school. According to Padilla, it was part of The New School’s goal to create an “open university” where academic life could blend with city life, and all members of the community could participate in a shared space rather than putting up barriers to who was allowed in. 

“It was about thinking about what kind of space can we hold that can create bridges and doors,” Padilla said. “And philosophy, it can seem mysterious, esoteric, arcane, exclusive, it can seem a lot of things that I don’t think it is. I think it’s a really powerful practice that must happen in dialogue. So how do we hold a space that enacts that?”

The Philosophy Film Club hosts three screenings a semester, and L’Atalante wraps up the final screening for this fall. In the past, they’ve held popular screenings of the A24 film Past Lives, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood, and the 2015 Oscar-sweeping Mad Max: Fury Road. Their movie choices range from Hollywood blockbusters to anime thrillers to film school favorites and cult classics, depending on the faculty member or graduate student who hosts the discussion. Future screenings will be posted on The New School’s events calendar for next spring. 

Within the landscape of current events, Padilla and Cox are hopeful that spaces like the Philosophy Film Club still exist to create dialogue between people in the community. Addressing the audience before the screening began, Padilla spoke with gratitude to everyone who showed up. “You being here is a reminder. Not a reminder. It’s an enactment of why and how art matters and why and how philosophy also matters. And if we’re gonna make it through, we’re gonna make it through together.”