AM Inspiration: The Cinema...Minds Transfigured So Together

by Kim, August 4, 2009 at 6:00am

This weekend I went to go see a movie.  The picture itself was okay, but what was most interesting happened when I stepped out into the late afternoon sun. There ought to be a word for how one feels at that moment, stepping from the world of fantasy to reality.  While in the movie theater I am accustomed to looking at everything on the screen as intentional, carrying a message from someone, be it the director, the actor, or the film editor. Movies are these vast instances of orchestrated spontaneity. Walking out of a darkened theater into the unorchestrated world always feels a bit chaotic.

This time I found myself looking at the clouds that were rolling gently on the horizon. While normally I would either not notice the clouds or would only glance at them, I was content to watch them slowly change shape. They seemed...grand...cinematic. With the extra level of meaning that looking through a camera lens tends to give basically anything.

It made me wonder exactly what the moviegoing experience does to a person, and why we need to look away from the natural world in order to look back at it and find it full of meaning. Don't get me wrong--I love movies, and films like Cinema Paradiso aptly express the wonder that many of us feel, rapt before flickering images. Shouldn't it be possible, though, to see the natural world as intended by some kind of order, however one's philosophical or spiritual background may construe that order? In an age when people flock to theaters to view footage and cartoons of a vanishing wild world, it seems that we feel increasingly dependent upon someone else's artistic vision of how the world works, as what is natural becomes increasingly rare. For a limited time, on select screens in your area, in 3-D... the world.

The need to understand the human desire for "virtual" worlds goes back as far as theater does. Shakespeare was always preoccupied by the interplay between the play and reality. In Midsummer Night's Dream, that quintessential exploration of illusion, he wrote:

Act V, scene I

That's one of the things that's so miraculous about movies: minds transfigured together, a fantasy of great constancy.  It is an almost tangible light, what poet A. S. J. Tessimond called in Cinema Screen:

If Proust called books "that fertile miracle of communication effected in solitude", then movies are the opposite, a public yet personal experience. Irina Shostakovskaya's poem In the Movie Theater reads:

Of course we will always need art to reintroduce us to the world that has always been there, right in front of us. It just seems that our ever-more-virtual world, we sometimes miss that point in the circuit between images and artistic creations, that arrow that most reflections on life contain, pointing us back towards life. My quibble with television is that it tends to make me feel as though my life is not dramatic enough on its own. The world is enough; it is as full of intentions as if it were supervised by an Oscar-winning director. No price of admission necessary.