| 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 not only the principal star but the script-writer, producer, director, cameraperson, sound engineer, stage manager, crew, and the critic who reviews our performance next morning. This movie studio also doubles as a movie theatre, in which we can simultaneously watch the show. The only limitation is that, in the movie theatre of the mind, there is only one seat. In order to show these home movies to other people, we 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 subjective maps of the objective world. 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, in his book Simulations and Simulacra, "We merely plagiarise nature." 1
There are a number of ways of adding to the accuracy of our movie of the mind. One technology is high-definition television (HDTV), which provides improved picture resolution. With HDTV the aspect ratio of the TV screen is closer to that of the eye than with conventional television. The IMAX film format comes even closer to our mind movie by removing the artificial frame around the image. The IMAX screen is so large that it fills most of our visual field. The OMNIMAX screen, even bigger and curved at the edges, does this even more effectively. Though it does not remove the border, the IMAX/OMNIMAX format allows it to be replaced by the more natural oval border of the eye as it takes a snapshot of the world.
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