What Is Democracy? doesn’t deliver an answer to its titular question or a remedy for our bleak times in the United States. What the film offers instead is a peripatetic and sweeping glance at a centuries-old problem through a chorus of shrewd assessments.
The resulting narrative is nothing like a cable news debate. All the various thinking in the film combines to a cogent, difficult argument about the troubled relationship between bounded democratic communities and unbounded global capital.
This is a documentary essay in the guise of an investigation. The movie is radically democratic: Taylor poses the question to philosophers, activists, a poet, politicians, trauma surgeons, a barber, and refugees.
Taken as a whole, Taylor’s practice gives us an anti-specialist model that shows us the interconnectedness of artistic, cultural and political activities—and this is a useful example that is all the worthier for being uncommon.
Girish Shambu
January 5, 2019
The latest philosophical documentary by Astra Taylor (Examined Life, Zizek!) takes on a very timely question, one she can’t be faulted for failing to answer in just under two hours. However, What is Democracy? does suffer from a rather scattershot approach, as though the sheer monumentality of the problem undermined the clear inquiry that defined Taylor’s earlier films.