Please watch the file/ movie “ Synecdoche” New York 2008 and answer the following questions.
1. What is “synecdoche” and how does it concern the film?
2. Caden says he is concerned with “brutal truth” – how is truth a concern of this film?
3. What is the film saying about truth and art or truth and representation?
4. How is lighting and color important in the film?
5. What is the role of fatherhood in the film?
6. What is the role of accident and choice in life?
7. What is the “fire” in Hazel’s house?
8. Caden says that “theater is the beginning of thought” – how is that true? In what way? What is the film saying about this idea?
9. What is the role of the body and bodily illness in the film? Why is it important?
10. Why does Caden involve everyone in representing/playing his own life? (Could this concern subjectivity and suffering?)
11. “The end is built into the beginning” says Hazel – how is this related to the other texts we have read and can you draw connections with the film?
12. What does it mean that “Caden Cotard lives in a world already dead…in a half world between stasis and antistasis”…
13. How does the idea of “actor” and “director” function here? What is an “actor” ? What is being acted? What is a director?
14. How do all of these questions concern identifications that we do not control?
15. What is the “lesson” of the film?