Whit Stillman’s Cinema and the Absurdity of Bourgeois Nothingness

Description

Whit Stillman’s films explore the lives of the upper middle class bourgeoisie and are presented in a highly stylised form that borders on the satirical but never quite tips over into outright irony. Part of what has been termed the “New Sincerity” in American cinema, Stillman’s small output engages explicitly, and perhaps ironically, with existentialist ideas and in this paper I wish to outline the way in which “nothingness” and the “absurd” work in his oeuvre. In Whit Stillman’s films the absurd world of the bourgeoisie is irrational in terms of the values it values, but it is entirely internally rational. The absurd is then the clash between one worldview and another, rather than a mismatch between the individual and the abstract, that is, physical, world. The nothingness of his film worlds is a sincere, but ironic, reflection on social kindness.

Period	7 Jul 2025 → 8 Jul 2025
Event title	UK Sartre Society Conference 2025
Event type	Conference
Location	Oxford, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International