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

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).