Philosophy and Cinema: The Study of Cinematic Instances of Plato’s Cave Allegory Adaptation

Cinema always seeking and exploring new and various sources to adapt and creation of films as its final product.  On the other hand, philosophy is more applied as a framework for expression, critic, description, and explanation or value-judgment of cinematic movies. A field on the upstream of cinema allows the researchers to think and philosophizing by a medium or interface named film. Reversely, this paper’s main purpose is to illustrate a path in which cinematographers and particularly scriptwriters used one of the most famous and history-making allegories and anecdotes of philosophy as a theme or motif to plot-creation. The discussion is not related to the prediction of the future by Plato and depicting the cinema in past millenniums. The main issue and question are how philosophy can provide the raw material for cinematic creation? The aim is to show that it is not necessary to make a philosophical film based on the biography of a philosopher or accumulating the dialogs and narrations of the film with philosophical debates and concepts. This paper applies an analytic-comparative method by studying script’s texts through the intermediation of tips and allusions which exist in dialogs and plot to illuminate the manner or quality of adaptation from one of the most famous philosophical allegories. The essay investigates instances from the different cinematic streams, a spectrum from Hollywood mainstream and directors like Peter Weir toward European independent cinema and author film-makers like Bernardo Bertolucci by content interpretation of scripts and introducing this method as a way of adaptation in Iranian experimentalist and independent cinema.