Simon Chu, “Human, All too Human (Episode 1: Friedrich Nietzsche)” (1999)
This is the first of a three-part BBC series made in 1999 about three significant existentialist philosophers, of whom the first might be surprised to be called “existentialist” since he died well before the term was even coined. Friedrich Nietzsche is one of those intellectuals who for better and for worse have entered mainstream pop culture as a caricature, often wrongly associated with advocating a dog-eat-dog, social-Darwinist outlook and philosophy. In reality, Nietzsche was a highly original and creative thinker and writer with an unusual and intense style, so much so that his writings are not only popular but have been parodied by others since they were first published and they sometimes overwhelm the real import of the ideas they express.
The documentary covers Nietzsche’s life from his early years to his death. Interesting to see that his early relationship with his pastor father, cruelly cut short when Karl Ludwig Nietzsche died when Friedrich was five years old, may have had some influence on his philosophy and decision to break with Christianity and belief in God: how could God allow his father to suffer in pain and to die in pain when he had faithfully served Him all his life? Through interviews with Nietzsche’s biographers and researchers, the use of archived materials, readings from his works, fictional dramatisations and shots of buildings and landscapes where Nietzsche was known to have lived or visited, we learn about the events and people who influenced him and his developing philosophy, and the impact of his fragile health on his life.
The film has the style of another BBC series “The Romantics”: it is visually arresting with an emphasis on moody mountain landscapes and grey lakes, overlaid by a soundtrack of voice-over narrative and quotations from significant Nietzsche-penned works, and coasts along at a leisurely pace. It’s actually too calm and steady to convey the intensity and bombast of Nietzsche’s writings and the way he expressed his beliefs about how people must take responsibility for their own lives and be open to new experiences and new ways of thinking. Much of the film focusses on Nietzsche’s most famous work “Thus Spake Zarathustra” and his concept of the Ubermensch and how it was misinterpreted by his religious and racist sister Elisabeth for Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist party, to which she was devoted in her later years. The documentary emphasises that for Nietzsche the Ubermensch symbolises someone who, confronting a society where old certainties were either moribund or dead, decides to make his/her own values and meaning and goes forth on a life-path never before trodden by others, a life-path for which there is no guide or experience to rely on, a life-path that may be full of terrors, doubt, wretched failure and profound dangers.
Inevitably the film speculates on the possible causes of Nietzsche’s frail health and mental collapse from which he was never able to recover, allowing his sister to tamper with his writings and present them as something he would never have approved of. Syphilis is mentioned as one cause of Nietzsche’s dementia though the fact that he remained in a near-vegetative state for so long, neither improving nor ailing further, would rule out that dreadful disease and photographs and film of Nietzsche in the last decade of his life when he had become completely mute and unresponsive don’t show any obvious physical symptoms or dementia associated with neurosyphilis. It might be surmised that the enormous impact of his thoughts, ideas and the implications of them for himself and the future of humanity was more than Nietzsche with his particular upbringing, knowledge and experiences was able to bear and the collapse might be due to the huge existential void that opened up to him in his mind. This speculation detracts from the film’s superficial investigation into Nietzsche’s philosophy and ideas so that viewers come away with very vague notions about what Nietzsche wrote and are no better prepared to explain to themselves and others as to how and why the Nazis adopted and trashed his philosophy. A central tenet of Nietzsche’s philosophy – the “will to power” – is never fully explained, leaving viewers to labour under the perception that this is something innate in humans which is purely brutal and lacking in pity and compassion.
The film is best viewed as an introduction to Nietzsche the man and writer but not as a philosopher; if viewers want to know more about Nietzsche the philosopher, they are best advised to take an introductory course in his work run by a tutor or lecturer who is sympathetic to the man’s writings and philosophy.