A Study Of Existentialism In Contemporary Western Drama And Film

Existentialism is one of contemporary western philosophical schools with huge and deep influence. Standing against the rationalist tradition of western classical philosophy, it focuses on individual existence, holds that existence precedes essence, and accordingly brings human thought further into the irrational field. It orients itself in the situation of real life, guiding people to face their own real existence, such as death, fear, anguish and anxiety. Shown by drama and film, two interrelated modern art forms of massive dissemination, existentialist aesthetics develops in the direction of the non-aesthetic and the super-aesthetic, laying stress on the mastering of the truth of existence, and urging the involvement into life in an artistic way.Among the existentialist themes expressed in contemporary western drama and film are mainly the following:decline and alienation in terms of life situation, sketching the general picture of individual existence in the common world; desperation and absurdity in terms of fundamental life moods, describing the true experience in clear-headed and cool-hearted life; loneliness and isolation in terms of interpersonal relationship, exposing the variety of obstacles against interpersonal communication and understanding in contemporary societies; freedom and resistance in terms of life style, advocating the activity of life which makes full use of human essential potentiality to pursue the possibility of known impossibility.As to formal characteristics and expressive artifices in contemporary western drama and film with existentialist themes, drama is different from film. Drama works, basically characterized by absurdised plots, create some life situation to show individual choices, while film works, some of them take personal styles of the kind of’author film’, using usually jump-cut, to show existentialist ideas, and some of them adopt distinctive camera language and allover hue to express existentialist emotions.As a thought trend, existentialism has gradually lined out of the mainstream of philosophy since1960s, however, it has hitherto been influencing in width and in depth the creation of drama and film in western countries and further in other countries. The cool sincerity and the seriousness to explore life truth in the drama and film works with existentialist themes are worthy of high compliment, but they are all confronted with such an urgent problem as how they lead people to find love and happiness after showing the cruelty of life truth.