What would you say if you could meet Aristotle, Leonardo daVinci or Ludwig Wittgenstein? Wouldn’t you give anything for that? - Well, I had the chance to meet the one person I regard as a contemporary Aristotle, the distinguished philosopher Prof. Sir Roger Scruton, in private at his home at the Sunday Hill Farm. also attending lectures by him at Cirencester College over the course of ten days this summer.

I had a thousand questions with which to bug him, especially since he hardly ever makes any comments about movies in his books. There is one quite interesting analysis of Ingmar Bergman’s „Wild Strawberries“ in his book on beauty; he sometimes remarks on how much he dislikes violent movies like the ones by Tarantino.

But that’s it. So why would I even consider asking him about film art when it is not his chosen field of interest? - One of the reasons can be found in his criticism concerning Roland Barthes and his take on semiotics, which can be traced down to the writings of linguist Saussure and his idea of Semiology. Sometimes I think that attendants of academic media classes are brainwashed into thinking that there is only one just kind of attitude towards filmmaking - and that’s a modernist one like proposed by Adorno. But that’s not true, considering that despite the medium of film being a novelty in itself some of the greatest films have been made by filmmakers like Carl Theodor Dreyer, John Ford, Yasujiro Ozu - none of which subscribed to the modernist doctrines.

One thing is true: if you want to make unique movies you must not subscribe to your fellow artists’ default positions. You need to have your own point of view, that might sometimes bring you at odds with them. If you are not willing to pay that price, the outcome will most likely be mediocre.