There is such a strong relationship between film and life ,ther is a relationship our everyday experiances and how we make sense of the world and the way we engage with cinema,cinema brongs people together .
Douglas Sirk observes that the cinema ''is blood,is tears,violence,hate death and love ,it is the stuff of our lives and in that sense it will always be of importance another point of interest is the fact that cinema can offer us simulateously ,'grounds for desperation'and also grounds for hope,even when a narrative of a film appears 'hopeless',our experiance can still be joyous and engaing (McDowell, 15). "Balaz saw in the cinema a pictorial language that would unite humanity" .(Mc Dowell) .In the moving pictures he believed he has found a kind of language that would return to us universality that the invention of the printing press and loss of oral culture had helped to destroy, apparently forever."The cinema would return to us vitality ,emotions and intensity because it would again allow us to engage with the expressiveness of human beings" (Mc Dowell,11) .We identify ,respond and emphatise and even relate with the faces of human beings -with expressions of laughter and tears ,cinema is a form of participation ."Mortimer notes that in the cinema we ''live in a state of double consciousness,participating and sceptical'',we participate in it's drama,we experiance it as genuine , in a sense we feel that it is real even though we know at the back of our heads that it is not" .(Mc Dowell,12)'The never ending story"', As it is in heaven,Mermiads, so many of these writtings suggest that the nature of cinema is mythic,magical and archaic.I believe that more than any other medium ,film is an art of connection ,and this connection happens in a number of ways ,there is a connection between the audience and the artwork,which is the aim of most artworks .The incredible feeling of relating intensely to a song ,a book,is one of the main things that keeps us watchng or listening -searching for the next experiance that speaks to us in an indescribable way .A film is not made by one person ,such as a poem ,a guitar or other artworks but cinema audiece want so desperately to believe in the myth of the one creator of a film .If one feels a special relationship with a film ,the cinema lets you feel connected to a director ,a writer , the misenscene and the cinematographor all at once ."There is also a connection between you and all the other people who have been affected in a similar way by the work of art, just knowing that the film has touched or spoken to a number of viewers perhaps not in an identical way or for identical reasons ,but none the less as personally ,and by the very fact that there are a number of us who have thought and felt similarly while experiancing the piece ,the reactions stop being merely personal ,becomming instead -not exactly universal ,but something bigger and more inclusive" (McDowell,13) .Film is a mass medium no other medium touches so many people ."Millions of people around the world will see the same film -the same images ,sounds ,movements ,words,feelings ;they will be moved to react ,think ,communicate with and about the same object" .(Mc Dowell,14)
The sadness,happiness ,the stories ,tales of goodness-overcoming-badness-defeating -goodness,the vibrant and alive characters ,the stupidity and intelligence ,the shared glances ,the striving ,the failing ,the pain and the beauty we know that it will all be experianced by countless others just as it is being ecperianced by us .(McDowell, 2) "To buy a ticket for a film is thus to become part of a community;it connects us to everyone else who sees the same film and connects them to us."MC Dowell,4)
"There is the scale of the potentially world -wide audience ,and than there is the scale of the physical act of watching a film in a cinema :a large room filled with ten thousands of people laughing ,pondering the same images ,movements and sounds"(McDowell,7) .Film is not like other art forms which are all largely solitary or smaller social experiances eg: poetry,or viewing a painting or television ,a cinema screening brings together disparate people in a simultaneous moment and requires that we stay side by side with these strangers from beginnining till the end (McDowell,11 ).You will probably never see them again ,but you will nevertheless have shared something with all these people . "Cinema almost idolises the humans it portrays ,making them literally larger- than -life ,and literally timeless"(McDowell 16) ."Cinema shows us people moving and speaking exactlyt as they do in real life ,however layered on top of this realistic world is all the ''unrealistic'' cinematic apparatus :closeup,zooms ,slow motion ,the manipulation of sound and lighting ,musical accompaniment -all designed ,not to make us believe that we are looking at an image of reality ,but simply to make us more fully experiance and feel the worlds and lives shown to us on screen "(McDowell,18) .
Cinema communicates immediately ,viscerally and is geared towards making us emote .Dowell thinks that think that cinema is structured around human connection because it is the very essence of what a story is.'Boy meets girl,boy losses girl,boy gets girl '-that most basic structuring concept of fiction -is itself a story of connection made ,connection lost,connection found (McDowell,19) .Regardless of how indirect the connection the connection between us and others who watch the film is it is still there and it is real .If you have ever just got talking to a friend about a film that you have both seen,you will hardly be able to deny the joy people show when discovering others who are just as fascinated about cinema ,and art as they are . It is at this point that art stops being art for it's own selfish reasons and becomes part of human relations and community .An art form like cinema is the perfect instrument with which to connect the millions of people in this world who can never physically meet ,but long to be bonded emotionally ,spiritually to one another .
retrieved from: http://www.alternatakes.co.uk/by: James McDowell
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