Receptions of Henry Thoreau’s Imaginative Philosophy in Cinema

Abstract

The article refers to film interpretations that actualize the intellectual heritage of the American thinker Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), who highlighted the dehumanizing aspects of the technological progress and largely predicted the prevalent social moods and intentions of the next two centuries. Many Hollywood films about «runaways» from civilization, social outcasts, «inner emigrants» have been inspired by his observations and intuitions. The object of the analysis is the cinematic interpretation of Thoreau’s ideas, namely Douglas Sirk's “All that Heaven Allows” (1955) and Damian Szifron's “Misanthrope” (2023).
The article addresses the problem of the dependence of the emotional and semantic content on the visual structure. The analysis of the films demonstrates that image includes dramaturgy and ideas. For instance, the saturated color contrast in Douglas Sirk's film conveys mutual misunderstanding, while the rounded shapes of objects express a hermetic bourgeois way of life in an American provincial town. The deep space in Damian Szifron's film generates a sense of a meaningless rush of civilization, the rectangular shapes of skyscrapers and monitors create the image of a cobweb enslaving urban space, and the sharp tonal contrast serves both as a stylistic device and as a means of conveying the anxiety and tension of today's world.
The article argues that the determination of the emotional and semantic content by the visual structure is expressed by Aristotle's concept of "form" (morphe, logos). That’s how the Greek philosopher named a latent (alethic) image of a phenomenal object, a piece of art included. A form or an image is a demiurgeous idea, a goal (telos), a substance, that does not become and does not emerge. Moreover, form taken with no correspondence with matter can be looked upon in thought only, abstractedly. All substances perceived by human senses are of a material matter, so any formed up singular thing — a motionpicture in our case — is where the form reveals itself, finds its completeness.