Visiting scholar Jan Kozak from Charles University in Prague gives a lecture on escaping false realities in film.
In the decade 1995-2005 Hollywood produced a series of films about the escape from false reality (The Matrix, Truman Show, Dark City etc.), explicitly or implicitly exploring philosophical or religious themes. In this lecture we will have a closer look at the common features and themes of these movies, analyze their cosmology and compare these with analogous cosmologies known from historical religions.
Relevant reading: Kwiatkowski, Fryderyk, “How To Attain Liberation From a False World? The Gnostic Myth of Sophia in Dark City (1998)”, Journal of Religion and Film 21 (1,2017): p. 1-33
Jan Kozak's lecture is organized by the ENCODE research group UiT/HSL.