Film theory might seem like an ivory tower concern, but the ideas shaping academic discourse today directly impact how stories are told, received, and remembered. This isn’t just about impressing festival juries. Understanding these currents can help you make more intentional, resonant work.
By Edic Burgomistrov
1. The Existentialist Revival: Freedom Isn’t Just a Theme
What’s happening: After decades of being sidelined by psychoanalysis and Marxism, existentialist philosophy is experiencing a significant revival in film theory. Scholars are rediscovering thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Iris Murdoch, and Frantz Fanon not as historical curiosities but as vital tools for understanding contemporary cinema.
Why it matters for you: Existentialism isn’t just about characters staring into the abyss. It’s about:
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Radical freedom: Your characters always have choices, even when they pretend they don’t. The most compelling dramatic moments occur when a character realises they could choose differently.
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Bad faith: When characters deny their freedom by claiming “this is just how things are,” they’re in bad faith and that’s a rich source of dramatic tension.
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The look of the other: Characters are shaped by how they believe others see them. Think about who is watching your characters and how that watching changes their behaviour.
Takeaway: Don’t just show characters reacting to circumstances. Show them choosing and show the anxiety that comes with that choice. The most powerful scenes often involve a character realising they can’t blame anyone else for their situation.
(Cléo de 5 à 7, 1962)
2. Beyond the Solitary Hero: Attention and Connection
What’s happening: Iris Murdoch’s critique of Sartre is gaining traction. While Sartre saw other people as potentially hellish (as in No Exit), Murdoch argued that we only become fully human through loving attention to others. This isn’t sentimental it’s about the difficult work of truly seeing another person as real.
Why it matters for you:
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The “just and loving gaze”: Murdoch argues that moral progress happens when we learn to look at others without our selfish filter. Cinematically, this often means showing the moment a character’s perception shifts through a shot-reverse-shot, a subtle performance change, or a shift in editing rhythm.
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Embedded lives: No one is truly alone. Your characters are shaped by their relationships, histories, and social contexts. Showing this embeddedness creates richer, more believable characters.
Takeaway: Consider whether your film treats other characters as obstacles to the protagonist’s journey or as fully realised individuals with their own inner lives. The richest dramas involve the struggle to truly see and be seen by others.
3. Decolonial and Anti-Racist Frameworks
What’s happening: Scholars are increasingly examining how existentialist thought intersects with race, colonialism, and resistance. Frantz Fanon’s work especially Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth is being read alongside Sartre and Beauvoir to understand how oppression shapes consciousness and how resistance can be an assertion of freedom.
Why it matters for you:
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Dehumanisation as theme: Films like Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki and Hyenas show how colonial and neocolonial structures attempt to reduce people to objects and how characters resist this reduction.
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The “fact of blackness”: How does anti-Black racism shape your characters’ sense of self and possibility? Even if your film isn’t explicitly about race, understanding these dynamics can deepen your portrayal of marginalised characters.
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Humanism as critique: Some theorists argue that “universal humanism” is often a mask for exclusion. Who gets to be “human” in your film’s world?
Takeaway: Pay attention to how power structures shape your characters’ horizons. Even subtle gestures who is listened to, who is seen, who is believed can reveal the hidden logic of oppression.
4. Gender, Freedom, and Independence
What’s happening: Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis of women’s situation remains crucial. Scholars are examining how women’s freedom is constrained by social structures, and how characters navigate the tension between independence and the desire for connection.
Why it matters for you:
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The independent woman: Beauvoir argues that women who achieve economic independence still face unique contradictions. They must balance professional work with the “double day” of domestic labour, navigate conflicting expectations, and deal with unwanted attention.
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Freedom vs. happiness: Beauvoir warns against taking happiness as the goal it can be a trap, a form of complicity in limiting women’s possibilities. Sometimes freedom means refusing easy contentment.
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The grandmother figure: Beauvoir’s analysis of ageing and motherhood is gaining attention. How do your female characters face the “threats of tomorrow” the loss of youth, children leaving, the end of romantic relationships?
Takeaway: Avoid easy narratives of “she had it all” or “she sacrificed everything.” Real lives involve negotiation, contradiction, and the ongoing struggle to define freedom on one’s own terms.
5. Chance, Faith, and the Meaning of Everyday Life
What’s happening: Eric Rohmer’s cinema is being read through Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to explore how characters navigate chance, choice, and the search for meaning without religious certainty.
Why it matters for you:
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The leap of faith: Characters often make decisions without rational proof—choosing to believe something, to trust someone, to hope. This isn’t weakness; it’s the human condition.
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Chance as existential challenge: Accidents and coincidences can be more than plot devices. They can be moments when characters are forced to confront the contingency of their lives.
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Games of chance: How characters play games whether literal games or social ones reveals their relationship to freedom and fate.
Takeaway: Give your characters moments where they must act without certainty. The tension between calculation and embrace, between planning and surrender, is rich with dramatic possibility.
6. The Political Economy of the Everyday
What’s happening: Scholars are reading films like Weekend at Bernie’s as critiques of neoliberalism and “bad faith” in late capitalism. The way characters deny their freedom, pretend that corporate advancement equals liberation, and displace their finitude onto death, reveals how ideology operates at the level of everyday experience.
Why it matters for you:
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The death of the social: Neoliberalism creates “achievement-subjects” who believe they can achieve anything through hard work—and blame themselves when they fail.
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Self-exploitation: Characters often work without being forced to, internalising the logic of productivity until it becomes second nature.
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The corpse that refuses to die: The undead figure of capital always extracting value, never satisfied can be a powerful metaphor.
Takeaway: Consider how economic structures shape your characters’ choices and self-understanding. Even if your film isn’t “about” capitalism, the pressures of productivity, debt, and aspiration are part of contemporary life.
7. The Power of Form: Cinema as Philosophy
What’s happening: A key insight of the existentialist revival is that cinema doesn’t just illustrate philosophy it thinks. Films can embody philosophical ideas through their formal choices: editing, cinematography, sound design, performance.
Why it matters for you:
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Temporal structures: Non-linear narratives, forking paths, and time-shifting can embody ideas about freedom, choice, and possibility.
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The close-up: Extreme close-ups on faces, hands, eyes can reveal interiority in ways that dialogue can’t.
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Sound and silence: Music, ambient sound, and silence can create emotional and philosophical resonance.
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The mirror shot: Characters looking at themselves can reveal the tension between who they are and who they want to be.
Takeaway: Your formal choices aren’t just about style they’re about meaning. Consider what your editing, camera work, and sound design are saying.
8. Tragedy, Education, and Self-Knowledge
What’s happening: Scholars are reading films like Kore-eda’s Nobody Knows through Kierkegaard to explore how characters come to self-knowledge through suffering. This isn’t about redemption or easy answers it’s about the difficult work of becoming human.
Why it matters for you:
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Despair as condition: Kierkegaard argues that despair is universal we all avoid the difficult task of becoming ourselves. Characters in despair often seem “happy” or “fine.”
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The mirror of possibility: Self-knowledge involves seeing both what we could become and what we are.
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Education through suffering: Sometimes characters learn not through instruction but through the hard necessity of survival.
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The tragic wisdom: The most profound moments often involve a character who has learned something that can’t be put into words.
Takeaway: Avoid easy redemption arcs. Real growth involves struggle, failure, and the painful recognition of one’s own limitations.
Final Thought
Film theory isn’t about following rules—it’s about seeing possibilities. The existentialist revival offers a rich vocabulary for thinking about choice, freedom, attention, and responsibility. But the best films don’t illustrate theories; they embody them.
The question isn’t “What does this theory say?” but “How can this idea help me make my film more truthful, more compelling, more human?”
Your next film doesn’t need to be a philosophy lecture. But understanding these currents might help you see your characters, your scenes, and your choices more clearly.
And that’s what good filmmaking is all about.
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