Cartesius [TV] (1974)
Directed by Roberto Rossellini

Film Review

Cartesius (a.k.a. Descartes) was the last of three prestigious biographical films that Roberto Rossellini made for television in the 1970s, the other two being Agostino d'Ippona (1972) and Blaise Pascal (1972).  Towards the end of his career, the director who first popularised neo-realism in the 1940s with such films as Roma, città aperta (1945) and Paisà (1946), enjoyed a late flourishing of creativity through the medium of television, which afforded him greater intimacy than cinema.  A Franco-Italian production made for Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI) and Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française (ORTF), Cartesius was first broadcast on Italian television in February 1974.  Although it was filmed in French (with a cast of mainly French and Italian actors), ORTF declined to screen the film once it had been completed, and so it now only exists in its Italian dubbed version.

Whilst it is a lavish production, paying close attention to period detail both in its design and content, Cartesius retains the cold realist austerity of Rossellini's early work and consequently has a quiet authority about it as it carefully dissects the man who is now considered the father of modern philosophy.  It doesn't only recognise René Descartes' achievements (which effectively rebooted philosophy in the 17th century and put mathematics and physics on a sounder footing), it also shows us the kind of man he was - and it is hard to imagine a less flattering portrait of genius.

Rossellini makes no secret of the fact that he was no great fan of Descartes, and this is probably to the film's advantage.   A more admiring filmmaker would have found it hard to depart from the popular image of Descartes as a disciplined and austere man of intellect.  Rossellini is nearer the truth when he portrays him as peripatetic slob, the stereotypical student who finds it impossible to settle and who rarely stirs from his bed before midday.  Whilst he doesn't refute Descartes' genius, Rossellini never lets us forget that, for all the impact he had on modern thinking, he was still a sloppy young man with a sloppy young man's failings, which involve getting his servant girl pregnant, leaving his work (i.e. partially dismembered animal remains) all over the place, and picking an intellectual fight with just about everyone he comes up against.

In modern parlance, we would call Descartes a drifter.  Freed from the necessity of having to work for a living (thanks partly to his knack of attracting sponsors), he wanders around Europe hoping to meet and insult as many interesting people as he can.  Like most of today's students (but not necessarily for the same reasons), he is most at ease in Holland, the country in Europe that was most receptive to new ideas in the 17th century (everywhere else you were likely to be flayed or burned alive), but he can't help nipping over to France or Germany as and when the mood takes him.  He scorns those who spend all their time reading books, preferring instead to formulate his own ideas whilst lying in bed until lunchtime.  Descartes was the model of the modern student, in more ways than one.

Descartes may have been a free-thinking radical, but he wasn't a fool.  He was not going to repeat the mistake of Galileo, who had recently been imprisoned for heresy by the Catholic Church.  Having written his breathtakingly original Treatise on the World (which, among other things, gave a neat explanation for the motion of the planets around the sun), he decides not to publish and be damned.  Instead, he makes a great play of working the Almighty into his intellectual peregrinations, even coming up with what he believed was the definitive proof for the existence of God.  Rossellini leaves us to make up our own mind as to whether Descartes' theological reasoning stemmed from sincerely held beliefs or was merely a cunning survival tactic, but considering the philosopher's subsequent career as an overpaid court lackey (an episode which, alas, the film does not show us), it is a question worth considering.

The film ends not with Descartes' premature death (through pneumonia brought about by the ordeal of giving early morning lessons to Queen Christina of Sweden) but with the publication of his great work Meditationes de prima philosophia (Meditations on First Philosophy, or Metaphysical Meditations), the text that upended Western philosophy and laid the foundations for much of modern science.  This is where Descartes first used his famous phrase 'Cogito ergo sum', although the French equivalent 'Je pense donc je suis' had appeared in his earlier Discourse on Method (1637).  "I think therefore I am" encapsulates the simplicity of Descartes' philosophy, and is just the turn of phrase you would expect from someone who habitually spent his entire mornings lying in bed, staring idly at the ceiling.

Some will doubtless consider Rossellini's tongue-in-cheek depiction of Descartes to be a little unfair, if not downright heretical, but it it brings us much closer to the man than a more reverent approach would have done.  It certainly helps to make him easier to identify with, and, to be fair, Rossellini does show a more sympathetic side to Descartes, through his concern for his faithful servant, his devotion to his infant daughter, and his distress at the death of those nearest to him.  Whilst the film shows us only a part of the philosopher's colourful life, it says pretty well all that needs to be said and goes as far as any biographical work can to reveal the true Descartes, the man, not the myth.

Film Synopsis

By the time he leaves the Jesuit school he has attended since childhood, René Descartes has a keen fascination for mathematics and philosophy.  Wary of the prevailing ideas, which have changed little since the time of Aristotle, he contemplates a new philosophy, founded on incontrovertible truths.  Abandoning a career in the law, he travels to Holland and enlists in the army of Prince Maurice of Nassau, but, owing to a truce with Spain, he sees no action and has time to continue his studies in mathematics.  His geometrical solution to a problem in algebra impresses Isaac Beeckman, the principal of Dordrecht school.  Travelling widely, Descartes gets to meet many men of learning, but the more he hears the more convinced he is that their approach to philosophy is flawed.  If only it were possible to extend the comforting certainties of mathematics to other spheres of knowledge...  Then, on a cold November night in 1619, during a stay in a heated room at Neuburg an der Donau, Germany, Descartes has his eureka moment.  He experiences three dreams which open his eyes to a new philosophy built upon incontrovertible truths.  All true knowledge, he is convinced, should be deduced from a set of fundamental precepts, the truth of which no one can doubt.  But what are these essential axioms of knowledge?  Then he has it: Cogito ergo sum.  I think, therefore I am....