Image by asi24 from Pixabay.


“Life is a movie,” is a familiar aphorism.  But what is a movie for?

Upon reflection, the above phrase hints at the comparable nature of the apparent divorce between ourselves and a fabled on-screen narrative. But this duality may not be all it seems. 

Contemporary cinema often affords us the sense that marking a film's status as “good” or “bad” is somewhat down to luck.  Admittedly, most of us don't know precisely why a film either does or doesn't captivate us.

So, when creating a film, what are we trying to get it to do to the viewer?

After all, the great ages of cinema were those in which the true possibilities of cinema were foremost in director's minds.  

As with any other art form, maybe a golden age doesn't transpire from an anomalous purple patch of technical geniuses.  Instead, a more plausible reason for a renaissance is likely down to the collective knowledge of what a medium is for.

This might sound odd. But since France hasn't produced a single painter of note in the past century-and-a-half, and hitherto produced around 300 in the same time-span, a contemporary drought in technical skill surely isn't the issue.

Thankfully, this conundrum was, in fact, emphatically addressed in 1970, when in his book Expanded Cinema, arts commentator Gene Youngblood wrote what should be brandished over the Hollywood Hills: 

“Expanded cinema isn’t a movie at all: like life it’s a process of becoming, mankind’s ongoing historical drive to manifest his consciousness outside of his mind, in front of his eyes.”

The concept of ‘expanded’ cinema, then, characterises film as the incarnation of a mirror we hold up to ourselves in which our consciousness looks back at its own process. It is a paradoxical narrative dimension where we lose ourselves, while being simultaneously offered complete self-revelation.

Comparisons can be drawn here with the Zen notion of “no-mindedness” (mushin 無心) which appositely conceives of the mind as a mirror, rather like the aforementioned cinema screen.

This notion was endorsed by media theorist Lev Manovich, who proposed that cinema principally became the modern artefact of painting-in-time. Or as French New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard put it, “Photography is truth.  Cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.”

Put discursively, while either a painting or photograph is a momentary abstraction that distills the temporality of things; cinema, on the other hand, endures as a seamless succession of such moments – something more like the immediate experience of our waking lives. 

We might note that cinematic editorial techniques mimic our cognitive experience of the world: the close-ups represent attention, flash-backs connote memory, and foreshadowing shots signify our conception of the future.

Correspondingly, the self-referential idea behind Christopher Nolan’s Inception evokes a film director’s ability to architect a dream space which can thus be met by the audience’s subconscious. 

And in Waking Life, Richard Linklater contends that the intrinsic human desire to consume film is due to our innate capacity to dream - the origins of such desire harking back to the immemorial dawn of human consciousness. 

Through cinema, then, we witnessed the fusion of technological advancements and consciousness inside a new art form, permitting us access not to mere virtual reality, but a real virtuality – a simulated catharsis.

So, from the humble viewer's perspective, what’s at the core of the traditional cinematic experience? 

Upon entry into the theatre, you, the film-goer, are all too privy to the dimmed lighting, the imperious high-fidelity screen and amplified surround sound, each the curator of a theatrical atmosphere ready to disarm your sense of self. 

If you’re captivated by a not-so-formulaic, unpredictable plot, you might, when eventually leaving the cinema, find yourself having to re-adjust to the so-called real world. 

This is the corollary of a phenomenon formally known as the “deictic shift,” whereby you, the viewer, project a hypothetical deictic centre (the locus you sense as “I” or “me”) onto experiential loci (characters) within the story. 

In other words, to be immersed in a film and to assume the perspective of a character is effectively to step outside yourself. That is, you undertake a somewhat supernatural journey within - you are the characters and they in turn, are you. 

Neurologically speaking, this shift is simultaneous with diminished receptivity in the lateral prefrontal cortex of the brain, associated with your sense of bodily awareness or ‘proprioception.’

You begin living vicariously through the said character and therefore forget your body. It’s an instance in which you trade in subjectivity – you become someone else.

Youngblood adds that Sigmund Freud’s concept of “oceanic consciousness” applies here, whereby one’s ego-centric feeling of individual existence is lost in mystic union with everything else. 

He goes on to say the oceanic feature of cinema bares similarity to the mystical allure of nature: we are collectively entranced by the mesmeric continuity of a campfire; we marvel at the waving sea, a river, or a lake.

In fact, it’s only in the more mundane moments of movies that you snap out of this deictic intoxication, without knowing precisely how long you were submerged. 

Regarding public time, a film may only last around two hours. But when you stare not at the screen but into it, to you, time no longer exists – one is in a meditative trance. 

In what futurist philosopher Jason Silva seductively titles a “cosmic baptism,” during such moments of envelopment, our absolute attention even becomes a form of prayer. We submit, surrender and heed to it. We have endured Joseph Campbell’s mythological motif - the hero’s journey - and burst out the other side, subsequently purged.

This notion is supplemented by Alison Griffiths, who equates the contemporary 3D component of the IMAX theatre to what was once a gothic cathedral. 

In expounding the “revered gaze” theory, she notes the instance at which we feel the celestial awe of science fiction in comparison to sun-filled stain glass windows beset with, say, the sound of the pipe organ. Both places, it would seem, constitute spaces of ecstatic illumination.

Perhaps then, Griffiths points to a pinnacle we seek in aesthetic (and thus transcendent) experiences in order to abolish the feeling of our selfhood as fragmented and individuated point of location. 

The medieval context says something of our impulse to construct these encounters through instructive mediums. In a religious context, cinema stands as a proverbial alter.

It’s this symbolic, allegorical journey we undertake that becomes literalised in us well after the end credits cease and the spotlights fade up. 

Moreover, history demonstrates humankind’s burgeoning use of instructive media – like the immersive technology of cinema – transpires as an attempt to mediate our encounters with transcendence.

Since the advent of the Lumière brothers’ public screening in Paris 1895, we possessed a technologically mediated dream realm, a portal to imagined worlds, a waking reverie enabling us to traverse space, time and mind.

Resultantly, pushing the limits of theatrical mediums teaches us something about what it means to be human: our intrinsic desire to experience inter-subjectivity, that is, to see the world through the eyes of another. Or, more deeply: to sense ourselves as another, and so transcending our isolated sense of self.

Ultimately, therefore, we might ask ourselves whether our rudimentary idea of self, as an entirely distinct, independent centre of consciousness, is an assumption to be questioned.