Albert Camus : The Madness of Sincerity - Un combat contre l'absurde - 1997

Opening with a childhood story from his life, the documentary above, Albert Camus: The Madness of Sincerity, tells us that the philosopher/journalist/novelist’s first love was “the howling and the tumult of the wind.”

A French/English documentary produced by ARTE, the French-German cultural channel which provides innovative programming for the European community. This documentary examines the life of the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Albert Camus and includes interviews with Camus's family members, friends, and colleagues, as well as home movie footage. Also featured are readings from some of his most celebrated novels, including The Stranger also published in English as The Outsider (1942), "The Plague" (1947), "The Rebel" (1951), and "The Fall" (1957). Topics discussed include the following, among others: the way he charmed and befriended women immediately; the mysterious and intriguing aura that surrounded him; the reason he was not ashamed of his womanizing; the way he treated his various lovers; his daily editorials for "Combat," the newsletter which grew out of the French Resistance in 1944; the way he met and felt love for young Maria Casares while he was happily married; the reason the entire community knew of his relationship with Casares, despite efforts to keep it a secret; the way people in the U.S. responded to him and his literary work; why reviews of "The Rebel" were extremely harsh, considering the subject matter and the escalation of the Cold War; the reasons he became involved in the theater as a respite from writing novels; how he was persuaded to appear on television to promote the play, "The Possessed," which he was directing; the way his wife's mental health began to deteriorate as they spent more and more time apart; his difficulty in comprehending the fact that his wife was having trouble dealing with their unfaithful marriage, even though from the start they had agreed to permit extramarital liasons; what receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature for "The Fall" was like; his ostracization for several years, after receiving the Nobel Prize, due to his strong views against communism; the reason he decided to live almost in exile during the late 1950s; the sort of relationship he had with his children; why a reader can understand Camus from his posthumously published novel, "The First Man"; and his portentous decision to write sentimental letters to his many lovers just days before the car accident that killed him in 1960.

Cataloging of this program was made possible by ARTE, The Cultural Services of the French Embassy, and the Goethe-Institut New York/German Cultural Center, 1997.

Pervert's Guide to Ideology

Cultural theorist superstar Slavoj Žižek re-teams with director Sophie Fiennes (The Pervert's Guide to Cinema) for another wildly entertaining romp through the crossroads of cinema and philosophy. With infectious zeal and a voracious appetite for popular culture, Žižek literally goes inside some truly epochal movies, all the better to explore and expose how they reinforce prevailing ideologies. As the ideology that undergirds our cinematic fantasies is revealed, striking associations emerge: What hidden Catholic teachings lurk at the heart of The Sound of Music? What are the fascist political dimensions of Jaws? Taxi Driver, Zabriskie Point, The Searchers, The Dark Knight, John Carpenter's They Live ("one of the forgotten masterpieces of the Hollywood Left"), Titanic, Kinder Eggs, verité news footage, Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" and propaganda epics from Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia all inform Žižek's stimulating, provocative and often hilarious psychoanalytic-cinematic rant.

Arise! - The Church of Subgenius

A brain-crushing collage of music and video presented in the form of a religious recruitment video. The topics covered (in deadpan narration) are basic psychology, the origin of the human race, spiritualism, religious dogma, UFO's, the end of the world, and the group's figurehead, J.R. "Bob" Dobbs.

The Church of the SubGenius is a parody religion that satirizes better-known belief systems. It teaches a complex philosophy that focuses on J. R. "Bob" Dobbs, purportedly a salesman from the 1950s, who is revered as a prophet by the Church. SubGenius leaders have developed detailed narratives about Dobbs and his relationship to various gods and conspiracies. Their central deity, Jehovah 1, is accompanied by other gods drawn from ancient myth and popular fiction. SubGenius literature describes a grand conspiracy that seeks to brainwash the world and oppress Dobbs's followers. In its narratives, the Church presents a blend of cultural references in an elaborate remix of the sources.

Ivan Stang, who co-founded the Church in the 1970s, serves as its leader and publicist. He has imitated actions of other religious leaders, using the tactic of culture jamming in an attempt to parody better-known faiths. Church leaders instruct their followers to avoid mainstream commercialism and the belief in absolute truths. The group holds that the quality of "Slack" is of utmost importance, but it is never clearly defined. The number of followers is unknown, although the Church's message has been welcomed by college students and artists in the United States. The group is often compared to Discordianism. Journalists often consider the Church an elaborate joke, but some academics have defended it as a real system of deeply held beliefs.

The Mindscape of Alan Moore (2003)

"Escape the limitations of your origins" - Alan Moore
The Mindscape of Alan Moore is a psychedelic journey into one of the world’s most powerful minds; chronicling the life and work of Alan Moore, author of several acclaimed graphic novels, including “From Hell,” “Watchmen” and “V for Vendetta.” It is the only feature film production on which Alan Moore has collaborated, with permission to use his work. Alan Moore presents the story of his development as an artist, starting with his childhood and working through to his comics career and impact on that medium, anarchism, and his emerging interest in magic.

Ghosts......of the Civil Dead

The inmates and guards of a modern, clean and efficient maximum security wing are slowly and increasingly brutalised until they erupt in violence. Dark and macabre, and based in truth, the story is told in a traditional dramatic style combined with telephone interviews and narration.

More than ever, this dark postindustrial vision of the cacereal society, where one man is imprisoned in order to lock up the minds of the entire world, is relevant. The cruel and brutal inevitability of the prison system, where boys are mutilated into men, with violence and fear, power and intimidation. Everything has a price, and a cost. In this savage account of an isolated maximum security prison in the Central Australian desert that is in lockdown. Pressure is building in the facility and the weak will not survive what is coming. It is almost like the screws are making it happen. Boiling the pot hotter and hotter, until it boils over. And it will.....Welcome to Hell.

Ghosts... of the Civil Dead is a 1988 Australian drama-suspense film directed by John Hillcoat. It was written by Hillcoat, Evan English, Gene Conkie, Nick Cave, and Hugo Race. It is partly based on the prison diaries of Jack Henry Abbott.

The story is set in Central Industrial Prison, a privately run maximum security prison in the middle of the Australian desert. An outbreak of violence within the prison has resulted in a total lockdown. A committee is appointed by the prison's governors to investigate the cause of the outbreak, but their findings are in stark contrast to the facts behind the riot.

It is revealed that both the prisoners and the guards are slowly and deliberately brutalised, manipulated and provoked into the forthcoming eruption of violence by the government and the private company that runs the prison, in order to justify the construction of a new and more "secure" facility.

The script was based on the book In the Belly of the Beast by Jack Henry Abbott and research done with David Hale, a former prison guard at Marion, Illinois. who features as a character in the film.

Devi (1960)

Devi (1960), directed by Satyajit Ray, is a haunting critique of blind faith and patriarchal control. Set in 19th-century Bengal, it tells the story of a young woman who is suddenly declared a goddess by her father-in-law. What follows is a slow, painful unraveling of her identity and autonomy. Through quiet visuals and subtle performances, Ray exposes the dangers of superstition and the suffocating expectations placed on women-making *Devi* one of his most powerful and unsettling works.

Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin

Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, a feature documentary by Arwen Curry about the life and legacy of the late author.

Mark Fisher : The Slow Cancellation Of The Future

The late Mark Fisher speaking at MaMa, Zagreb @ May 21, 2014, a talk held within the event "Everything Comes Down to Aesthetics and Political Economy".

The "slow cancellation of the future" is the idea that culture is re-running itself within the larger frame of capitalist consumption. Endless return to "classic sounds" within music, the revival of "retro fashion" or yet another band from the past getting back together to play their hits. There are millions of examples of how we are stuck culturally in a nostalgia extraveganza. Why this is so could be debated, but I believe it is to do with the promise of market capitalism now being exhausted under the weight of economic and ecological failures. Even the presently much flouted Artificial Intelligence is a dominance of technology over content, with much of it being derivative and process oriented. 

The result is a need, from economic, social and political perspectives, to maintain the ideology that supports consumption. But at the same time there is a necessity to pacify and direct the population within the possibilities of culture, towards a benign state of passive consumption.

To quote Fisher:

“The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflatioat then of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly.

It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those thirty years has been a time of massive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher’s neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist economy. The shift into so-called Post-Fordism – with globalization, ubiquitous computerization and the casualisation of labour – resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore.” ― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Full PDF)

Daises/Sedmikrásky (1966)

If the entire world is bad, why shouldn’t we be? Adopting this insolent attitude as their guiding philosophy, a pair of hedonistic young women (Ivana Karbanová and Jitka Cerhová), both named Marie, embark on a gleefully debauched odyssey of gluttony, giddy destruction, and antipatriarchal resistance, in which nothing is safe from their nihilistic pursuit of pleasure. But what happens when the fun is over? Matching her anarchic message with an equally radical aesthetic, director Věra Chytilová, with the close collaboration of cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera, unleashes an optical storm of fluctuating film stocks, kaleidoscopic montages, cartoonish stop-motion cutouts, and surreal costumes designed by Ester Krumbachová, who also cowrote the script. The result is Daisies, the most defiant provocation of the Czechoslovak New Wave, an exuberant call to rebellion aimed squarely at those who uphold authoritarian oppression in any form.

My Dinner With Andre ( 1981)

My Dinner with Andre is a 1981 American comedy-drama film directed by Louis Malle, and written by and starring André Gregory and Wallace Shawn as fictionalized versions of themselves sharing a conversation at Café des Artistes in Manhattan. The film's dialogue covers topics such as experimental theater, the nature of theater, and the nature of life, and contrasts Andre's spiritual experiences with Wally's modest humanism.

Begotten (1990)

Begotten. God dies, Mother Earth, the Son of Earth, Flesh on Bone.

Presented in a surreal, gory and entirely visual manner, Begotten tells of the death of religion, the abuse of nature by Man and a nihilistic outlook on what life ultimately is.

La Controverse de Valladolid/Dispute in Valladolid (Eng Subs)

Dispute in Valladolid is a TV movie released in 1992 and directed by Jean-Daniel Verhaeghe, which is a fictionalized account of the real “Valladolid debate”.

The director was Jean-Danielle Veren, Jean-Pierre Marielle played Las Casas, and Jean-Louis Trintignant acted as Sepúlveda.

The Valladolid debate (1550–1551) was the first moral debate in European history to discuss the rights and treatment of an indigenous people by European colonizers. Held in the Colegio de San Gregorio, in the Spanish city of Valladolid, it was a moral and theological debate about the conquest of the Americas, its justification for the conversion to Catholicism, and more specifically about the relations between the European settlers and the natives of the New World. It consisted of a number of opposing views about the way natives were to be integrated into Spanish society, their conversion to Catholicism, and their rights.

Bishop of Chiapas Bartolomé de las Casas, argued that the Amerindians were free men in the natural order despite their practice of human sacrifices and other such customs, deserving the same consideration as the colonizers. Opposing this view were theologian Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who argued that the human sacrifice of innocents, cannibalism, and other such "crimes against nature" were unacceptable and should be suppressed by any means possible including war.

The P-Orridge family (and guests) at Beck Road London 1985

The P-Orridge family (and guests) at Beck Road London 1985 from Thee MediaShaman on Vimeo.

"It teaches that mind is the sovereign power of the universe, and that when its forces are properly concentrated upon any particular object, the true nature of that object will be revealed. Instead of using" How To Be A Yogi by Swâmi Abhedânanda

[1902] p. 66

Genesis P-Orridge at home speaking about culture, art, magick and revolution. Say what you want about Genesis, (self-absorbed, demanding, greedy, attention seeker, martyr syndrome, opportunist and performance junkie?), they were not stupid. The ideas and actions were forerunners and templates for millions of people who woke up and saw through the consumption and lies of post-Industrial culture.

This was filmed at 50 Beck Road, in the poorest East-London district Hackney, winter 1984/85. An italian film-crew makes a spontaneous visit to the family and home of UK-avantgarde musician and industrial music pioneer Genesis P-Orridge. Throbbing Gristle had split up and Genesis and Sleazy aka Peter Christopherson were committed to their new band-project Psychic TV and launching the Temple Ov Psychick Youth as a worldwide network system.

This unedited open talk interview-documentary includes Gen's beautiful wife Paula - highly pregnant with her second daughter Genesse - and friends discussing society and (po-)culture, religion, art, fear, media- manipulation, the heroin-boom and Dr. Margaret Patterson who treated drug addiction using electric stimulation aka "neuro-electric therapy", as well as war and existentialism during England's Thatcher aera ... and how it feels as a young family.

Participants and guests were Monte Cazazza, co-founder of the Industrial Records music label from the US who phrased the slogan "Industrial Music for Industrial People", as well as Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, Jym Daly and Dorothy Max Prior, who released her song 'I Confess' (1980) on industrial records. youtube.com/watch?v=35ONE_dc2pQ

The original of this privat recording got confiscated when Scotland Yard raided the family's home in Brighton (1991) due to absurd accusations made in UK-tabloid newspapers and a 100 % fabricated one hour TV documentary (Channel 4, Dispatches). The Orridge's and their kid were touring through Nepal at that time and went into exile to the United States (California), where the father of Wyona Rider, US-publisher Michael Horowitz, helped them to settle down.

The VHS-tape was copied and archived by Boris Hiesserer aka. Eden 123, founder of the Pyromania Arts Foundation, a former german access point to the TOPY.

Jerry Garcia Explains Life Mind and Music

An interview with Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia for the mini-series "The History of Rock 'N' Rolll". I believe this was from Volume 6. This is the unedited interview. A brief tour of the GD Vault with Dick Latvala is an added bonus at the end of the interview.

Jerry speaks about the counter culture, his journey through music and his career with The Grateful Dead. Witty, reflective and exteremly profound.

The Life and Politics of Monica Sjöö

Monica Sjöö, (December 31, 1938 – August 8, 2005), was a Swedish painter, writer and a radical anarcho/ eco-feminist who was an early exponent of the Goddess movement.

Her most famous painting is the controversial God Giving Birth (1968), which depicts a non-white woman giving birth; it was censored multiple times and at one art show, Sjöö was reported to the police for blasphemy.

Sjöö was the main author of Towards a Revolutionary Feminist Art (1971) one of the first, and most militant, feminist art manifestos. It was discussed widely in the feminist press, and The Guardian published an article in response. Ann Pettitt, one of the founders of the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp, contributed to a later iteration.

In 1976 Sjöö was the subject of a film documentary shown at the ICA and NFT.

Sjöö wrote the original pamphlet that, with Barbara Mor's re-write and expansion, would become the book The Great Cosmic Mother (1987). It covers women's ancient history and the origin of religion, and is one of the first books to propose that humanity's earliest religious and cultural belief systems were created and first practised by women. It is currently in print and has been, and still is, a part of many women's studies, mythology and religious studies syllabi. Her research and writing helped uncover the hidden history of the Goddess. Sjöö's successful use of interdisciplinarity in her research has led to its acclaim within the Goddess movement.

Her art and writing became well known outside of the UK, and throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s she corresponded with influential American writers, artists and pagans such as Jean and Ruth Mountaingrove, Starhawk, Zsuzsanna Budapest, Lucy Lippard, Alice Walker, and Judy Chicago.

Some of Monica Sjöö's writings:

• —— (1977). "Women's Spirituality" (PDF). Goddess Shrew. Vol. 1. London: London Matriarchy Study Group. pp. 5–6.
• —— (1978). "Some Thoughts on Menstruation" (PDF). Menstrual Taboos. Vol. 2. London: London Matriarchy Study Group. pp. 11–13.
• —— (1979). "An Avebury Experience" (PDF). Politics of Matriarchy. Vol. 3. London: London Matriarchy Study Group. p. 55. ISBN 978-0906663004.
• —— (Fall 1980). "Art is a Revolutionary Act". WomanSpirit.
  • Excerpted in: (2001). In Robinson, Hilary. Feminism Art Theory: An Anthology 1968–2000. Malden, MA: Blackwell. ISBN 9780631208495.
  • (2015). In Robinson, Hilary. Feminism Art Theory: An Anthology 1968–2014. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell. ISBN 9781118360606.
• —— (1983). "Sagan om St. Göran och kvinnan". Hertha (in Swedish). 70 (2): 2–4, 38.
• —— (Summer 1984). "The Bleeding Yew Mother and Pentre Ifan Cromlech" (PDF). Wood and Water. 2 (12): 6–8.
• —— (1998). "Sinister New Age Channelings: Who or What is Speaking?". From the Flames – Radical Feminism with Spirit. 22. Archived from the original on March 4, 2016.
• ——. "The Unofficial Herstory of the Externsteine, Ancient Sacred Rocks of Germany". The Pipes of Pan. 19. Archived from the original on March 14, 2016.
• ——. "Challenging New Age Patriarchy". Women of Power (19). Archived from the original on March 14, 2016.
• —— (May 28, 1993). "Going To Church: Breaking the Taboo – doing the unthinkable". Archived from the original on March 14, 2016.
• ——. "The Artist As Reluctant Shamanka". Archived from the original on March 14, 2016.
• ——. "St Non's Well, Pembrokeshire". Archived from the original on March 14, 2016.
• ——. "On Death and Dying". Archived from the original on March 14, 2016.

Marat/Sade (1967)

The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat ... Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade

English Subtitles

Cast:

         Ian Richardson as Jean-Paul Marat

         Patrick Magee as Marquis de Sade

         Glenda Jackson as Charlotte Corday

         Susan Williamson as Marat's mistress

         Clifford Rose as Asylum director

production:

         Royal Shakespeare Company

Directed by:

        Peter Brook

Based on the play by:

         Peter Weiss

The Marquis de Sade is locked in the Charenton mental hospital and decides to put on a play. His overseers agree as long as he follows certain conditions. He writes and directs the other mental patients in a play based on the life of the Jean-Paul Marat. As the play progresses, the inmates become more and more possessed by the violence of the play and become extremely difficult to control. Finally, all chaos breaks loose.

La Frequenza Fantasma / The Ghost Frequency

"La Frequenza Fantasma (The Ghost Frequency)" EXCERPT from Chiara Ambrosio on Vimeo.

“La Frequenza Fantasma (The Ghost Frequency)” is a feature film that paints a non-hierarchical portrait of a crumbling village nestled on the mountains of Calabria, in the south of Italy, balanced precariously between life and death.

Engaging with time as physical matter through a careful and protracted period of observation framed through the lens of an animator’s eye (keen on allowing for minute transformations to occur and unlock all kind of quiet epiphanies), this film attempts to uncover at once the layers of historical sediment that have accumulated in a particular space through time, and to reap new myths through a personal interpretation and direct encounter with place and narrative.

 

It is the story of a village, suspended in time and space, a place of sounds, smells and numberless thresholds where the memory of a mythical past and the present are inextricably intertwined. It is an investigation into the nature of collective and personal history, into the origin and preservation of memory- how it is etched and perpetrated, both in the minds of the people who still live there, and in that of the soil, the ruins, matter itself. It is the story of the relationship between animate and inanimate matter and of how this relationship turns into the motor and purpose of existence, the search for the sacred patterns of the quotidian within the rhythms of nature.

 

The physical presence of the body and the overwhelming power of a wild and untamed nature are the two forces which dominate all belief in this secluded and anachronistic stretch of land, where faith and superstition are the binding elements that help the continuation of identity and collective history. The survival of community relies on it. The few testimonies gathered in the film are the voices of the village’s guardians and have the power of an incantation, that grants survival and continuation to what would otherwise crumble into oblivion and loss.

 

The title of the film refers to the role that the telegraph, the radio, and the transmission of sound signals played in the studies of different dimensions and the otherworld, allowing to tune into frequencies that, although invisible to the eye, are nevertheless a fundamental aspect of our collective subconscious, following the understanding that sound, once released, will never disperse but will continue to haunt the ether, invisible and inaudible but an unquestionable trace of lapsed presence.

 

For more information about the film and the author please visit acuriousroom.com

For an interesting discussion about the ideas behind the film see Federico Campagna in Conversation with and Chiara Ambrosio Part I

“You may think that you do not know Verbicaro. Never set foot or imagined it. But you are wrong and The Ghost Frequency will prove it. This haunting epic poem of shadows and echoes will dream you every time it flickers inside a screen or whispers the ages under your approach. Don't be shocked by your knowing, unsettled by the familiarity, because it is tuned to your recognition and the phantom of your returning.”

- Brian Catling, artist, author and professor of Fine Art at Ruskin School of Art, Oxford

"A compelling, lyrical and beautifully realized portrait of people and place, of the universal need for home and roots and at the same time a precisely calibrated site-specific exploration, La Frequenza Fantasma marks the emergence of a bold new film essayist in Chiara Ambrosio."

- Gareth Evans, Film Curator, Whitechapel Gallery

"A seance, an eavesdropping, a mysterious bolero: LA FREQUENZA FANTASMA is a striking essay film that enshrines and expands the poetics of place, people and memory."” –Sukhdev Sandu, NYU

"The Ghost Frequency- You have to make the journey. You can't bring it home. Look back and it dissolves into light.

- Tony Grisoni, screenwriter and filmmaker

Capitalist Realism and the New Hollywood

An exploration of Mark Fisher's concept of capitalist realism as it manifests itself in the films of the New Hollywood, such as The Godfather and Five Easy Pieces. The New Hollywood at once reveals the dominance of capitalist realism and, at times, attempts to pose a challenge to it.

The Metaphysics of Panpsychism (2016)

The Metaphysics of Panpsychism. 

Alfred North Whitehead's Process Philosophy, the Mystery of Consciousness and the Mind-Body Problem (2016)

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Compilation by Michael Schramm

Background Music by Michael Schramm

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Speakers & Quotations: 

Charles Birch, Susan Blackmore, David J. Chalmers, Daniel C. Dennett, Freeman Dyson, David Ray Griffin, Charles Hartshorne, Nicholas Humphrey, Christof Koch, Colin McGinn, Thomas Nagel, Karl R. Popper, John R. Searle, Rupert Sheldrake, Galen Strawson, Alfred North Whitehead. 

Tags:

panpsychism, consciousness, mind-body problem, process philosophy, process metaphysics, materialism, (property) dualism, quantum physics, indeterminism, free will

A Conversation with Bertrand Russell (1952)

Romney Wheeler interviews British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic Bertrand Russell (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) at Russell's home in Surrey, England.

Russel speaks about his work and thought, his life, including revelations about his grandfather, who was John Russell, 1st Earl Russell. He had been British Prime Minister 1846–1852, and 1865–1866 during the early Victorian era. Russell had a 90-minute meeting with Napoleon in December 1814 during the former emperor's exile at Elba. Bertrand was raised by his grandparents Bertrand was 4 years old when his parents died, his mother of diphtheria and his father of bronchitis in 1876. In his will, Bertrand's father John Russell, Viscount Amberley named Douglas Spalding and T. J. Cobden-Sanderson as Frank and Bertrand's guardians, not wishing his children to be raised as Christians, but Lord and Lady Russell successfully contested the stipulation and assumed full guardianship. The deeply pious Lady Russell, notwithstanding her undoubted disapproval of its content, made sure that her son's book "An Analysis of Religious Belief" was published a month after his death. Both Amberley's sons eventually succeeded to the earldom.

John Stuart Mill was Russell's secular godfather. But Mill died when Bertrand was 2 years old. His grandfather died in 1878, and was remembered by Russell as a kindly old man in a wheelchair. His grandmother, the Countess Russell (née Lady Frances Elliot), was the dominant family figure for the rest of Russell's childhood and youth.

Russell's adolescence was very lonely, and he often contemplated suicide. He remarked in his autobiography that his keenest interests were in "nature and books and (later) mathematics saved me from complete despondency;" only his wish to know more mathematics kept him from suicide. He was educated at home by a series of tutors. When Russell was eleven years old, his brother Frank introduced him to the work of Euclid, which he described in his autobiography as "one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love."

During these formative years he also discovered the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Russell wrote: "I spent all my spare time reading him, and learning him by heart, knowing no one to whom I could speak of what I thought or felt, I used to reflect how wonderful it would have been to know Shelley, and to wonder whether I should meet any live human being with whom I should feel so much sympathy." Russell claimed that beginning at age 15, he spent considerable time thinking about the validity of Christian religious dogma, which he found very unconvincing. At this age, he came to the conclusion that there is no free will and, two years later, that there is no life after death. Finally, at the age of 18, after reading Mill's Autobiography, he abandoned the "First Cause" argument and became an atheist.