The Meaning of Life through Film

Through out the history of man, man has tried to convey their thoughts and ideas through art, whether that is music or art. But it was, with the invention of film that man could accurately depict their ideas, their ideas were no longer still images or something that had to be imagined but a visual image. Man’s quest to understand life and death or their attempt to make such an issue relevant to the living person, has often had very interesting results when it comes to film.

What is the meaning of life? Since the beginning of time this has been asked and since the beginning of film this has been reiterated to express the filmmakers thought and beliefs on the subject. Modern films still try to answer this ageless question with films such as Fight Club and American Beauty but some of the most influential and important pieces of film that deal with the meaning of life are the older films such as Wild Strawberries and the Graduate.

Fight club although a modern film contains themes of finding one’s self in order to truly enjoy life. The whole film centers on “fight clubs’ were grown men go to fight, it’s used in the film as a sort of therapy to help them release stress. But it can also be interpreted as a way to feel, most of the characters in the film have been numb by their contemporary job and life, so they use fight clubs to fell alive. American Beauty is a film in the same vain as fight club but is up to more interpretations. The film is about living life the way you want to, to make your life have some meaning and to be grateful for what you have. The film centers on a man find out that he is not happy with his life or family, what he wants like quitting his high paying job and getting a job at a fast food restaurant. The focus of the film is of him having a fixation for his teenage daughter’s friend. At the end of the film he finds out what he wanted he already had he had just drifted away from it.

The Graduate is one of the 60s staples because it represented everything that most youths of that era felt. It was a counter culture film that firmly asserts the belief that people didn’t need materials to make them happy. The film is about a young man that has gone back home after graduating from college and earning a prestigious scholarship. He decides not to take the scholarship and stay home with his parents, where he begins an affair with his father business partner’s wife, soon after he meets her daughter who he falls in love with and tries to win her over with the resistance of all most everyone. The film is an allegory about finding the things you really want and that make you happy no matter what other people think. Wild Strawberries is a film by Swedish director Ingmar Bergman who has made a number of movies about film including Persona, Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Lights. The film centers on an old man who while traveling to receive a prestigious award for his work as a doctor, finds himself having nightmares, daydreams and thoughts about his death. By the end of the film the old man comes to accept his life and asked his son who has followed in his footsteps to do what really makes him happy. He realizes that he has had an unhappy marriage and is lonesome and does not want that for his son.

The meaning of death and what comes after has also been one of those questions that have long been asked and many films try to answer or share their opinion on the subject matter. One of these films is Dead Poet Society a film about a teenager’s suicide. The film examines why people, in this instance teenagers, kill themselves. The film focuses on the fact that the boy could not achieve his goal and because he couldn’t do what he always wanted he decided to die. It also asked the question of who should be a fault for such an act the child, the parents, or maybe his friends. Wings of Desire is a film about angels over Berlin and center on the afterlife and how one might spend their time observing the world. It’s a fascinating film that examines ones belief in the afterlife and not necessarily one of Christian’s beliefs. Hour of the Wolf is yet another film that dells with death but in a different way. Death forces a man to die by showing him demons that torment him. The demons are meant to force the man to consider his life as a whole and make him choose between life as a sinner or death as reconciliation.

Whatever your belief might be about religion, you cannot talk about life or death without talking about religion. Religion has always brought people peace and suffering and those are the aspects that filmmakers try to articulate into their films. The Seventh Seal is another film by Ingmar Bergman and is one of his finest. The film is about a man that has comeback from the crusades and has doubts about what he has done and of the existents of god. Shortly after landing on the plague filled European landscape he meets death who tells him that it is his time to die. In order to buy some time he challenges death to a chess match for his life which he agrees to. The seventh seal is a groundbreaking film because of its subject matter, cinematography and lighting. The film portrait of death, a bald pale man in a black cape has now become the primary image used to portrait death. The main theme of this film is the “silence of God”, no matter how much the crusader prays to get a sign any sign of god’s existent it never comes. And because of this, this turns out to be one of Bergman’s bleakest films. At the very end of the movie death comes and takes the crusader and some of his friends that he meets and they walk away in what turned out to called the dance of death.

Films have always given us the satisfaction of watching others express their ideas onto a screen, it has given us the pleasure of experiencing something we might have otherwise not experience. No matter what the filmmaker had in mind when making the movie the film should stand on its own as a pieces of work that defined an idea or belief of the time.