Philosophy and Movies are an inseparable couple, as theater and tragedy. Images are a powerful mean to send messages, maybe a better way than words and books. Images stroke people, impress mind more than anything. Ideas spread better trough images than written words. There are no philosophical questions ignored by cinema. God, mind, thruth, others, politics or metaphysics have all been dealt in many many films. Many of great movie makers / directors are ardent readers of philosophy. From Chaplin to The Wachowskis brothers or Bergman, here is a list of major philosophical movies:
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Film of the 2010’s:
Dennis Villeneuve: First Contact
Villeneuve stages the arrival of UFOs on earth. Subject many times treated, but never in this mode. Indeed, far from entertainment, Villeneuve takes advantage of these beings from elsewhere to pose the question of otherness and the difficult communication between the subjects. The result is both profound and overwhelming.
Topics: communication, otherness, death
Nolan: Interstellar
A science fiction film on paper, Interstellar is in reality a magnificent thesis film, posing a vision of time, heritage and the human condition.
Topics: time, the human condition, legacy
Bong Joon-ho: The Snowpiercer
The Snowpiercer, a film adapted from a French comic strip, takes place in a post-apocalyptic future where humanity has been decimated by an ice age. The survivors live on a train that never stops and is the only possible survival refuge. This train is a fact, a double metaphor:
- inequality: since the wealthy live in luxury in the front carriages, the people living in precarious conditions at the back: the hero, bearer of the class struggle, will have the mission of reassembling the train to free Its pairs
- speed: this train in perpetual motion represents the world running to its own loss, incapable of understanding that life is possible outside of its model. The polar bear seen at the end of the film designates this possible life, this alternative.
David Fincher: Gone Girl
Fincher has accustomed us to social criticism: from Fight Club to Social Network, the director depicts a decadent and idle America. In Gone Girl, he tackles mediacracy and the modern couple. All the characters are despicable (Amy, a mythomaniac, her husband Nick who cheats on her, the journalists, eager for scoops) and live under the reign of appearance.
Morten Tyldum: Passengers
In this science fiction film recounting the emigration of passengers from earth to a new planet, a journey lasting 90 years and during which the passengers are plunged into a deep sleep, one of them wakes up prematurely. Alone awake for 2 years, he chooses to break his loneliness by “waking up” another passenger, thus condemning her to live, or rather to die, during this crossing. The film describes, sometimes with strong clichés of course, the vertigo of loneliness, the difficulty in making choices and their irremediable nature.
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Films of the 2000’s:
Michel Gondry: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The film depicts a failed, impossible love between Joel and Clémentine, who have loved and separated for years, helped by technology allowing them to erase each other. But as in Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, they constantly fall in love with each other. Michel Gondry seems to present the following alternative: either forgetting to affirm the present life, or memorize to remain oneself. In this dialectic, his characters choose life.
Related philosophical questions: love, memory, destiny, identity
David Fincher: Fight Club
Fincher delivers with Fight Club a film with dual ambitions: social, through its criticism of consumer society, and existentialist, through the moral and identity invention of its main character, Jack.
Related philosophical questions: consumption, modernity, identity
Christopher Nolan: Inception
A high-flying metaphysical film, Inception asks the question, without answering it, of knowing if reality exists, constituting a kind of position of radical skepticism.
Related philosophical questions: dreams, love
Christopher Nolan: Memento
Leonard is the victim of very particular amnesia, or rather of a very short-lived memory. He tries to find back his identity. But through this impossible quest, it is the spectator who constitutes his identity, who “constitutes” him in the phenomenological meaning. The thesis is clear: identity is a creation of others, instead of being a self and autonomous construction.
Related philosophical questions: memory
Paul Thomas Anderson: There will be blood
A monstrous film retracing the life of an oilman in America of the 1920s, Anderson takes advantage of this golden subject to deal with the fight between capitalism and religion. Through this fight, Anderson tells the story of the birth of modern capitalism.
Related philosophical questions: religion, capitalism
Woody Allen: Match Point
Related philosophical questions: tragedy, love, ambition
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Films of the 90’s:
Terry Gilliam: 12 monkeys
Related philosophical questions: time travel, epidemics
Sam Mendes: American Beauty
Related philosophical questions: everyday life, despair,
Peter Weir: The Truman Show
Related philosophical questions: media
Andrew Niccol: Gattaca
Related philosophical questions: eugenics
Darren Aronofsky: Requiem for a dream
Related philosophical questions: addiction, TV, drugs
Tony Keye: American History X
Related philosophical questions: Racism, tolerance,
Wachowski: Matrix
Related philosophical questions: reality, identity, modernity, Plato
Amenabar: Open your Eyes
Related philosophical questions: reality, identity
Mann: The Insider
Related Topics: power, politics, journalism
Terence Malick: Thin Red Line
Related philosophical questions: war, meaning of life
Danny Boyle: Trainspotting
Related philosophical questions: addiction, destiny
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Films of the 80’s:
Clint Eastwood: Bird
Related philosophical questions: music, fate
Martin Scorsese: Raging Bull
Related philosophical questions: resilience,
Stanley Kubrick: Shining
Related philosophical questions: mind,
Jean-Jacques Annaud: Quest for Fire
Related philosophical questions: humanity, human condition
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Films of the 70’s:
Stanley Kubrick: A Clockwork Orange
Related philosophical questions: violence, society
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Films of the 60’s:
François Truffaut: Jules and Jim
Related philosophical questions: love
Jean-Luc Godard: Contempt (Le Mépris)
Related topics: love, jealousy,
Mike Nichols: The Graduate
Related philosophical questions: seduction
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Films of the 50’s:
Sydney Lumet: 12 angry men
Related philosophical questions: death penalty, justice
Elia Kazan: A Streetcar named Desire
Jean-Luc Godard: Breathless
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Films of the 40’s:
Orson Welles: Citizen Kane
Related Topics: media, power
René Clair: Beauty of the Devil
Related topics:
John Ford: The Grapes of Wrath
Related Topics:
Flemming: Docteur Jekyll et M. Hyde
Related topics: self, conscience, unconscious
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Films of the 30’s:
Jean Renoir: Great Illusion
Related questions: war, power, solidarity
Chaplin : Modern Times
Associated philosophical concept : human condition, modernity, alienation, class struggle
Jean Renoir: The Human Beast
Related questions: sex, woman, unconscious,
Fritz Lang: M
Related topics: Evil
Frank Capra: Mr Smith goes to Washington
Related philosophical questions: power, politics
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Films of the 20’s:
Murnau : The Last Laugh
Related questions: loneliness, human condition
Chaplin: The Kid
Related questions: fatherhood, human condition
Lang: Metropolis
Related questions: communism, consumer society, totalitarianism,
