Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

1 results

  • Chapter 5 - Shadows and Caves: The Cinema as Platonic Idea and Reality

  • from III - Complex Cinematism
  • Martin M. Winkler, George Mason University, Virginia
  • Book:
    Classical Antiquity and the Cinematic Imagination
    Published online:
    15 February 2024
    Print publication:
    22 February 2024, pp 156-214

  • Summary

    This chapter juxtaposes Plato’s Cave Allegory and our visual media. Plato’s detailed text, in which Socrates describes the projection of shadows onto a wall by means of firelight, readily lends itself to a cinematic understanding. Various film theorists, directors, and cinematographers have pointed to this analogy for their own approaches to cinema. Henri Bergson was the first to incorporate the Cave Allegory into his philosophy of the cinematographic mind. The chapter traces such a development from the birth of cinema until today, e.g. in texts by Maxim Gorky, Susan Sontag, and others. Specific films, such as Chris Marker’s La Jetée and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist, address the Platonic symbolism of light and shadow as stages of knowledge or enlightenment. Related to this topic is the power of moving images (e.g. in A Clockwork Orange), the question of their truth or reliability (documentaries, “fake news”), and their relation to historical memory (Agnès Varda, Marcel Ophuls).