With a long telephoto-lens pan shot for the one and an endlessly gliding tracking shot for the other, Soderbergh (doing his own cinematography under his usual pseudonym, Peter Andrews) turns long dialogues into memorable varieties of action.
Early in their relationship the two developed a special coded language to discuss themselves through notes and cartoon drawings in which Mr. Bachardy was a cat and Isherwood an old horse, and the movie develops these dialogues into short animated sequences.
This enables them to connect different Platonic dialogues into one system and to see numerous cross-references within the Platonic oeuvre.
Origen may also have been aware that certain teachers had sorted Plato's dialogues into different categories, each suited to a different level of aptitude in the pupil (Edwards 1997).
Thus Plutarch objects to the distinction that Antiochus suggested between Socratic and Platonic philosophy and the corresponding division of Plato's dialogues into Socratic/aporetic and Platonic/doctrinal (Cicero, Academica I.15 17).
While Socrates argued against writing in the Phaedrus and other works, Plato's working of Socratic dialogues into a further dialogized framework provided a testament to the survival through novel forms of the "living word" (a construct used both by Socrates and Bakhtin).
