| Fast forward. Thirty years later, the author attends a two-day graduation party for a friend. He is taking many photographs to build a souvenir album. He runs out of colour film, borrows some black-and-white film, and continues taking pictures with more abandon, since the film is cheaper. He runs out of black-and-white film, but continues with even more abandon with the empty camera. Since there is no record of the shots, he decides to abandon the camera and take shots simply by blinking, suddenly realizing there was little point in taking stills when he had a continuous movie going and - blinking no more - he sits back to enjoy the movie.
Rewind. In retrospect, running a one-man cinema is not so impressive. Every one of us is running a magnificent mobile movie studio of the mind, employing a wide-angle lens, stereophonic sound, technicolour, and cast of thousands (but only one hero/heroine), in which we are the script-writer, producer, director, cameraperson, sound engineer, stage manager and crew. This movie studio also doubles as a movie theatre, in which we can simultaneously watch the show. We are also the movie critic who reviews the performance next morning! Our only limitation, in the movie theatre of the mind, is that there exists only one seat. In order to show these home movies to other people, one must learn to write, speak, play music and make films.
The movie metaphor is apt because film is the medium which perhaps, of all the media, best captures the full quality of our personal maps of experience. Indeed, the history of film could be considered as a series of steps towards a closer approximation of the mind movie. Movies added movement to the still image of the photograph, the talkies added sound and colour was added to the black-and-white image. Really we create nothing, says Jean Baudrillard, author of the book Simulations, We merely plagiarize nature. |
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