Jacob Ruby, Author at Deep Focus Philosophy

The Fountain + Perennialism

Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain is not a film about death. It is a film about what lies beyond it. Across three interwoven timelines, the film traces the journey of Tomas and Isabel through different incarnations, each struggling against mortality, against loss, and against the limitations of the flesh. But The Fountain is not a typical grounded meditation on grief; it is a cinematic journey to transcendence.

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Existentialism

Woman in the Dunes + The Absurd

Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes is a suffocating, hypnotic film about entrapment, survival, and, ultimately, Pushing on no matter the circumstance. It’s a story that unfolds like a fever dream, trapping both its protagonist and its audience in an existential paradox—one that mirrors Albert Camus’ vision of the absurd.

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The Tree of Life + Nature vs Grace

Terrence Malick’s magnum opus The Tree of Life is striving to be more than a film; it is a philosophical meditation. One which doesn’t unfold in the traditional sense but drifts like memory, weaving between cosmic grandeur and childhood recollection, between whispered prayers and the silent weight of suffering. It’s a film that asks the biggest questions—why are we here, why do we suffer, and where do we find grace?

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Existentialism

Predator + the Übermensch

If you strip Predator down to its core, beneath the layers of mud, blood, and 80s action bravado, what emerges is a tale as old as time—survival, a story of predator versus prey, the hunter and the hunted. However, each blow for blow, trap, and kill actually ends up revealing a cinematic arena where primal instincts clash with existential philosophy.

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Stalker + Art

Andrei Tarkovski's Stalker is a profound journey through existential, metaphysical, and epistemological themes which, compelled by its transcendental style, implores its audience to meditate, look within, and therefore becomes something more than mere philosophy, doctrine, idea, ideology, logic, outlook, reasoning, theory, thought, truth, wisdom, ectara. It becomes a living thing. A conscious art.

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Aesthetics

Bram Stoker’s Dracula + The Sublime

The sublime is summarized by Simon Morley in his article A Short History of the Sublime (as that which) underlies the nobility of Classicism, the awe of Romantic nature, and the terror of the Gothic. When I first read this summary, I was struck by how similar this description is to the spirit of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula and in turn Francis Ford Coppola’s adaption.

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Epistemology

Embrace of the Serpent + Knowledge

There’s a moment in Ciro Guerra’s masterpiece, Embrace of the Serpent, where silence becomes the most profound source of knowledge. Silence uninterrupted by the cranking of a gramophone. The noise of a scratchy travel-worn record playing Joseph Haydn's The Creation. It’s this silence that gives way to the sounds of the jungle, of Karamakate’s memories, of a people and their wisdom slipping into oblivion. At its heart, this film is a meditation on knowledge—what it means to know, who gets to define it, having the humility to try to understand it, and what is lost when one way of knowing supersedes another.

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Existentialism

Lady Bird + Attention

In the 2017 film Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig offers a heartfelt portrait of a young woman. A coming-of-age semi-autobiographical tale set in Sacramento. The film has been celebrated for its authenticity, humor, and emotional depth. But beneath its carefully observed story of teenage rebellion and maternal aggravations lies a profound meditation on a theme central to the works of philosophers Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch: the inseparable link between love and attention.

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Metaphysics

Ordet + Faith

Carl Theodor Dreyer's film Ordet released in 1955 as The Word stands out as a powerful portrayal of faith and doubt in the annals of cinema's history. One in which Dreyer explores the spaces that exist between these two enduring concepts and sets it all within a quaint Danish village where these contrasting beliefs clash head on.

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Metaphysics

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring + Karma

In the film Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring director Kim Ki Duk creates a story set around a floating monastery that serves as a backdrop for the cycles of life. We, the audience, see these cycles both through the changing of the seasons as well as through the different stages of life the characters experience. The film meditates on the essence of life, how nature changes through different seasons, and how this mirrors our own journey of desires and attachments leading towards

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