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Cheers to Mike Frank for kicking off this thread, which I knew would be interesting when it began...I tend to think that directors are profound...at least most of the time. As I reflected on this question, and which films I consider to be profound, they mostly turned out to be the works of certain auteurs...Kubrick, Bergman, Wertmuller, Bertolucci, Kieslowski, Welles, Fellini...and certain screenwriters (like Charlie Kaufman, who I'd like to get drunk with in an Irish bar sometime, maybe McSorley's). While the codification of profundity may be a difficult and ultimately impossible task (I don't believe in "real" definitions of any of the key aesthetic or genre concepts), attempts to do so can be of a certain value in helping us understand what we are talking about. I think many of us film-philosophers share a certain anxiety that we have abandoned "serious" thinking about the fine arts for frivolous reflections on the Hollywood glamour mill, and I think its time to get over it. I have no doubt that the students in my intro to philosophy course are having a more profound experience by covering a little less philosophy in class and watching such films as Crimes and Misdemeanors, The Rapture, Lord of the Flies (the original Peter Brook version), and Being John Malkovich. These are profound, respectively, because they depict the possibility of getting away with murder with a clear conscience (which Woody's mentor Dostoevsky didn't have the guts to deal with), the most blatant example of a character refusing salvation from an unjust and imperfect God in all of narrative art, the most convincing picture of the Hobbesian view of human nature as yet crafted, and the most puzzling depiction of the nature of personal identity ever seen. Surely this is profundity. "For beauty is the beginning of terror we are still able to bear, and why we love it so is because it so serenely disdains to destroy us" Rilke's First Duino Elegy Daniel Shaw Professor of Philosophy and Film Lock Haven University Managing Editor, Film and Philosophy website: www.lhup.edu/dshaw ________________________________ * * Film-Philosophy salon After hitting 'reply' please always delete the text of the message you are replying to. To leave, send the message: leave film-philosophy to: [log in to unmask] Or visit: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/film-philosophy.html For help email: [log in to unmask], not the salon. * Film-Philosophy journal: http://www.film-philosophy.com Contact: [log in to unmask] **