Ferrater Mora’s Movie Titles

It may be interesting to look at the titles Ferrater Mora gave to his movies and to his early short stories. Many of his movies were filmed in the United States and most contain dialogue in English. The exception is Díalogos sobre el cine, which is almost entirely in Spanish and Fragments of a Travelogue, which is in Spanish followed by an English translation. Two of Ferrater Mora’s movies, The Suit of Night and The Heartache and the Thousand Natural Shocks have Shakespearean titles, and, indeed, the latter is filled with Shakespearean allusions. The Suit of Night is primarily visual and did not lead to a short story, but The Heartache and the Thousand Natural Shocks became the short story Los achaques del corozón y los mil naturales sobresaltos. Three of his films have “existential” titles. The title of a proposed movie that was never filmed, A Useless Passion (an expression found at the end of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness), became the short story Una pasión inútil, while the film, Everydayness (a not altogether inadequate translation of Heidegger’s Alltäglichkeit), became the short story La vida cotidiana. The film, The Ecstasies of Time (an expression found in both Heidegger and Sartre), did not become a short story. Perhaps for cinematic or literary purposes an “existential mood” is more adequate than a strictly ontological, epistemological or scientific stance.