I was educated in France, where studying Philosophy is mandatory in high school. In doing so, I learnt the basics (and minimum, to be clear, as I am not a philosophy major) about thinkers whose ideas have clearly impacted specific filmmakers. This was confirmed to me when I studied Film & Television at Warwick, as I saw familiar names pop up in film theory & criticism. One has to be careful as not to read too much into a filmmaker’s intentions, but certain frameworks can help identify one’s influences and understand what does (and doesn’t) work.

Plato: the Ancient Greek philosopher was a pupil of Socrates himself, and his path also connected with Aristotle (below) who was his student; in filmmaking terms, Plato’s idea of beauty being not only a pleasurable sensation, but an ideal in itself that embodies divinity, perfection, infinity and is therefore difficult to attain, but must be pursued, is probably the most fundamental artistic principle. Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty (DATE) is a great demonstration of this search for beauty and perfection.

Aristotle: three act structure, poetics of drama all screenwriters, theatre; greek tragedy, fate, fatalism, determinism, Shakespeare to

Carl Jung: Archetypes / Joseph Campbell, Vogler Sigmund Freud - Hitchcock, psychoanalysis Nolan - Henri Bergson, Deleuze, time and duration, subjectivity of time and organic nature; Haptic visuality Ferdinand de Saussure - semiotics, structuralism; Post modernism - woody Allen; then Derrida and post structuralism; Godard Laura Marks Hegel - dialectic, conflict, history - Robert McKee; German idealism = Hegel, reomanticis, - music, sense of history, Rousseau - Bergman: individual freedom, relationship to society, nature, death, morality and social responsibility Nietszche and Existentialism, Sartre - Kubrick; Nolan the dark knight, Leni Riefenstahl Karl Marx - Chaplin, Man with a movie Camera; also how cultural production is economic production; Comolli Narboni Panopticon Foucault - paranoid aesthetic, Jason Bourne films Terrence Malick -