Example: “The Stranger” by Albert Camus… The movie was directed by Luchino Visconti (great director) with a fine actor - Marcello Mastroianni.
“Superman” - Friedrich Nietzsche.
Head - Jeremy Bentham.
Shakespeare in Love by Roger Bacon.
More seriously, I don’t understand the OP. AFAIK Albert Camus, who died in 1960, did not write the screenplay for the 1967 movie. Are we just looking for movies adapted from books by philosophers?
Yes, adaptation is good enough, especially if the movie is good and as loyal as possible. A bad adaptation which lacks accuracy is what I’d consider antithetical to my initial post.
Camus is an exception among philosophers in that he was primarily a novelist and playwright. His philosophical works were mostly essays and constituted a small part of his output. It’s enormously easier to transfer novels and plays to the screen than nonfiction works of philosophy.
There aren’t many philosophers who were known for their fiction. One is Jean-Paul Sartre, from whose works dozens of adaptations were filmed, just like Camus.
However, back in 1947, he contributed the scenario and dialog for Les jeux sont faits.
dup
Well, arguably The Fountainhead, book and screenplay by Ayn Rand, who considered herself to be a philosopher, and at least covered a lot of philosophical ground in both her fiction and non-fiction writing.
OP didn’t say the philosopher had to be a good one, or to have their work studied in academia.
Right… I saw the movie “The Fountainhead” years ago, and I’ve always liked Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal. I never had the desire to read her book, though. I’m guessing the movie is a sterile version of libertarian ideology. To me, this was about individuality and ownership of ideas.
There have been a few filmed versions of The Death of Socrates, based on the work by Plato, to which he contributed (over 2000 years earlier) the dialogue
It’s not a film , but Soren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and the Sickness Unto Death was turned into a musical piece by Tomasz Sikorski (during which parts of the book are read) and into a manga by Asada Hikadi
There were also movies made of Rand’s We the Living and *Atlas Shrugged.
*
Certainly not what the OP means but here it is.
Josiah Thompson, a former member of Underwater Demolition Team 21, later taught Philosophy at Yale and Haverford College, becoming a professor. He quit his tenured position to become a private investigator. His account of his PI career in *Gumshoe: Reflections in a Private Eye * makes great reading.
Among the cases he discusses is his work in the successful re-trial of Chol Soo Lee on a bogus murder charge.
The James Woods, Robert Downey Jr movie True Believer uses fictionalised details of the case as the crux of the plot. When I saw the movie years later it wasn’t until later that I realised why the plot felt so familiar.
I was surprised how many credits Sartre has on IMDB. I suppose the best known movie was The Crucible (1957) based on Arthur Miller’s play. There are a bunch of versions of Sartre’s own No Exit.
I thought john Carpenter’s take on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was pretty compelling. Especially the bits with Kurt Russel as analytic reason and Kieth David as synthetic reason.
Destiny by Averroës.
True. I knew about the Atlas Shrugged movies but I decided not to mention them. I did not know about We The Living, which might be worth seeing, but I think relatively few actually have.
Since The Fountainhead was a major US studio movie with a name cast, it seemed to fit the OP better. Probably not “great” as the OP asked for, but better than average.
Steve Martin was a philosophy major and wrote THE JERK so there’s that.
“Marat/Sade” should fit the category
A lot of people consider Milan Kundera a philosopher – “Unbearable Lightness of Being”
I would consider Robert A. Heinlein (Starship Troopers) and John Boorman (Deliverance) philosophers. Not philosophers I agree with or share a worldview with, but their stories advance a specific vision of how the world operates or should operate.
How far are we stretching this thin thread?
The OP wrote “Yes, adaptation is good enough, especially if the movie is good and as loyal as possible. A bad adaptation which lacks accuracy is what I’d consider antithetical to my initial post.”
Almost everybody complained that Starship Troopers was in no way faithful to Heinlein.
And John Boorman was the director of Deliverance, not the writer. The actual writer was James Dickey, the same person who wrote the novel. Shouldn’t he be getting the credit?
As for “their stories advance a specific vision of how the world operates or should operate,” don’t most movies ever made fall into that category? That definition would make Quentin Tarantino the world’s foremost philosopher.