Michel Foucault

Writing

Michel Foucault

Born — Died

1926-10-15 — 1984-06-25

Place of birth

Poitiers, Vienne, France

Known for

Writing

Credits

14 titles

Paul-Michel Foucault (15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984) was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationships between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, criminology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, Marxism and critical theory. Born in Poitiers, France, into an upper-middle-class family, Foucault was educated…

Known for

Apostrophes poster
8.5

Apostrophes was a live, weekly, literary, prime-time, talk show on French television created and hosted by Bernard Pivot. It ran for fifteen years (724 episodes) from January 10, 1975, to June 22, 1990, and was one of the most watched shows on French television (around 6 million regular viewers). It was broadcast on Friday nights on the channel France 2 (which was called "Antenne 2" from 1975 to 1992). The hourlong show was devoted to books, authors and literature. The format varied between one-on-one interviews with a single author and open discussions between four or five authors.

Apostrophes

1975

Michel Foucault: Beyond Good and Evil poster
NR

Michel Foucault: Beyond Good and Evil explores the philosopher and his complex and controversial life through interviews with colleagues and biographers and re-enactments of Foucault’s storied exploits in the American counterculture.

Michel Foucault: Beyond Good and Evil

1993

Maids of Honor poster
NR

Las Meninas is a brilliant essay on illusionism, mirrors and perception in art, life and video, articulated by Downey as a subjective interpretation of Velasquez's eponymous Baroque masterpiece. Through a theatrical reenactment of the painting's pictorial tableau and a re-articulation of its complex perspectival structure, Downey brings to life the spatial dynamics, illustrating the psychological tension of the relationship between viewer and subject. Placing Las Meninas in a historical context, Downey relates the painting's thematics to Spain's economic and political systems of the late 17th century.

Maids of Honor

1975

Foucault Against Himself poster
6.5

In both his private and public life, Foucault often contradicted himself, especially when his ideas collided with the institutions where he worked. Contemporary critics and philosophers reframe their legacy in an effort to build new ways of thinking about his struggle against the mechanisms of domination within society, demonstrating how the conflict lies at the heart of his life and work.

Foucault Against Himself

2014

Michel Foucault par lui-même poster
NR

A voyage to the center of the thought of Michel Foucault (1926-1984), a tireless explorer of the margins, a brilliant and atypical thinker, through excerpts from his books and lectures, and the use of images that resonate with them.

Michel Foucault par lui-même

2003

Vincennes, l'université perdue poster
8.5

Recounts the epic of Vincennes Experimental University Center, from its creation after the events of May 68 until its demolition in the summer of 1980. To talk about Vincennes is to relive unique ten years of intense intellectual and political extravaganza, educational and artistic inventiveness, utopias, hopes, and betrayals that marked the history in a unique place, the forest with the eponymous name.

Vincennes, l'université perdue

2016

Film credits

2020s · 3 titles

The Angst and the Bliss poster
6.5

One summer’s evening in 1933, the writer Raymond Roussel closes the door of his hotel room in Palermo. He swallows pills, drags the mattress to the centre of the room and lies down on it. The next morning his companion finds his corpse. But is he really dead?

The Angst and the Bliss

2022

Hervé Guibert, la mort propagande poster
3.7

From this "inexorable disease", Hervé Guibert did not recover. The miracle he had so much hoped for did not happen. But, before his death in 1991, three years after learning of his HIV-positive status, he engraved in his literary and photographic work "the places of [his] suffering", "the stations of [his] way of the cross". With his thin body and sunken cheeks, the handsome man with curly hair that he was, the one whose clear gaze radiated from the seaside photos, fought a fierce battle against AIDS. A fight of every moment against the decay of the body, observed and commented with a methodical care in his autobiographical novels, in particular "To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life" (1990) and "The Compassionate Protocol" (1991), and of which he testified on television on the set of "Apostrophes"...

Hervé Guibert, la mort propagande

2021

Michel Foucault: Knowledge and Power at SOAS and beyond poster
NR

An insight into the life and works of Michel Foucault and how his work on Knowledge and Power still has an impact on daily life. This is applied practically to the real world of SOAS University and the online world of Social Media. Presented by Merle Tschirschnitz, Kiran Thomas and Adam Brocklesby

Michel Foucault: Knowledge and Power at SOAS and beyond

2024

2010s · 2 titles

Series credits

Behind the camera