Abstract

In Book VII of the Republic, Plato set out to distinguish between the real and the phoney simulacrum. This paper is aimed at examining today’s cinematography from the lens of Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave.’ It thus argues that in our film theatres today, films have been inundated with illusions and realism that it is becoming very difficult to distinguish between appearance and reality. In essence, it claims that what the viewers see in cinemas are, in the Deleuzean phrase the directors’ ‘delirious visions of aestheticism’ which more or less confound their binocular visions. What they see are the things the film directors had framed. To put this paper into perspective, while analyzing the film ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ through Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave,’ it argues from the framework of Deleuzean ‘Cinematographic Concepts;’ where, he argues that ‘the image of the cinema’ is ‘automatic’ and is ‘presented as movement-image’ and variously defined into types: ‘the perception-image’, ‘the affection-image’ and ‘the action-image.’ Therefore, this paper adduces as it were, the critique of cinematographic illusions and realism and then it cuts across, at the same time, the concept of the ‘code’ in semiotics. However, this paper acknowledges the fact that in its analysis it does follow a multidisciplinary approach.