Philosophy and cinema on the meaning of a “boundary situation”

The author examines the characteristics of the “boundary situation”. Its meaning is revealed by different means in the work of philosophers and filmmakers. The “boundary situation” that characterizes the event of a gap between the existence of a person and his essence, demonstrating the opened space of freedom, is analyzed by the philosophers of the 19th-20th centuries such as S. Kierkegaard, M. Heidegger, in the poetry of Novalis. If in the teachings of S. Kierkegaard the border area is expressed by a state of despair, M. Heidegger considers it as a place for the disclosure of freedom, which, as the content of the self of a person, rising above nature, reflects light from itself, projecting its essence onto the material world. For Novalis, the sphere of Light characterizes physical reality, while the Night defines the primary matter of being. Being at the top of the “border mountain range”, a person is able to illuminate with the light of his freedom his own past pressed into the Night - the content of the inner world. According to the works of I. Bergman, the “boundary situation”, which manifests itself most often in a state of sleep, is figuratively a mirror through the prism of which a person's consciousness illuminates the dark motives of actions with the light of rationality, making it possible to develop a moral assessment of life events.