Films and Feelings

  So here’s some light table talk … what is cinema? What is it for ?       On the one hand, film is the perfect medium to capture life as it really is. With the roll of the camera, you can do what painters and sculptors had been trying to do for centuries and record the sights and sounds of a place exactly as they are. On the other hand, film is the perfect medium for dreaming. Is there any other place besides the movies where the human heart is so unfettered, so open to fantasy? If you’ve studied film formally, this is probably one of the first discussions you had in your Intro to Film theory course, in a class that may have forced you to read about Dziga Vertov and his theory about film and the Kino-eye (another day, another day …)      In some ways, we could use basically any of thousands of cinematic works to jumpstart this discussion, but I have a particular film in mind. The lens I want to explore this idea through today is not only a...