FROM DARKNESS TO DAY LIGHT
The great illusion of moving, living picture is based on photogene effect (known
by early Greeks) = to the slowness of human eyes retina.
A single picture that has been reflected on human eyes retina stays there more
than the original sense of sight, about 1/16 part of a second.
When a little bit different pictures are moved in front of our eyes
as a serial fast enough (in cinema usually 24 pictures in one second)
they will integrate in the sense of sight. Our two sight centers send
information we just saw to our conception and it "tells"
to our ego (= knowledge) that what we are seeing looks like real.
This is one basic doctrine:
The impression of moving pictures, the image of living screen is a
physically based illusion.
In our mind we think that the illusion our
brain just delivered looks like real or looks like something we could experience in
our everyday life.
This experience is quite the same as when we are asleep and
dream or if / when we hallucinate. At the same time that experience is real and
unreal.
Real inside, real to our mind, to our inner world but unreal to the world outside, to other people.
Just like my dreams are real for me but unreal for you.
Yet you can imagine what those dreams may mean to me or at least you may
know what they can mean to you .
Note:
They use this kind of method in Montaque Ullman's dream therapy.
Click
here
to read more about dream therapy.
|
This is important too:
an emotion as an experience is always the same to our mind.
It doesn't matter where a certain emotion comes from or whether it's
based on "reality" or on "unreality". As an emotion it's the same. Fear is fear;
happiness is happiness and so on - no matter what causes it.
For example:
when we are happy it don't matter what is the "real" reason or where / how /
why / when it comes from - the emotion is the same and important on it's own way.
Or when we are afraid, the emotion is same as if we are facing a real threat
or if we are afraid of something what happens in a horror movie.
This is one reason why we can use movies in a safe way when we are trying to
understand our mind, our needs and emotions better. And when we are learning more of them.
In movie therapy we can practice to face our uncertain or even terrifying emotions (for example fear)
in the safe way and when we are secure enough with that emotion then it's easier to face
it outside cinema too.
This is one reason why young boys and men are watching so much horror, war, action and
adventure in cinema. They are learning for life. It's kind of an initiation rite. Just like
they use benji jump in some part of Africa for boys who are on the threshold of their
manhood.
Let's use our imagination.
If we think our life as a circle and in the center of it there's the white area what we know well
enough and where we can feel safe.
Around it there's this grey area we know a little bit but it's
uncertain and sometimes a bit frightening.
"Behind" that grey area there's this black,
unknown, uncertain, threatening area where we would be stepping on unknown.
Our life handling is increasing from our safe white area to the grey and black area. If we
want to have better
life handling skills and more independence and more freedom, more space to live
we must step on that grey area.
Sometimes it's very hard and frightening to do.
|
This is my wild guess:
I think that very deep down inside of our mind our emotions are totally
abstract, just like a "spirit" without no clear form of existence.
When those emotions rise up to our knowledge they must have some kind of
more understandable form so we can become better aware of them and "use" them.
Poetic metaphor: we can't catch the wind but we can catch a butterfly or a bee or a spider.
|
In a way I think that "meaning" (= emotion) must have a form of well
enough known mark or symbol to be understandable and useful. We can't "use" those
emotions that we don't understand well enough.
In communication we must know the meaning of those marks they are sending.
To make this more simple: our abstract emotions may operate like instincts, like our mind
showing red, yellow or green traffic light. They tell us when to react and how to react.
In life we usually "show" the red light too often and too easily
even when we should show the green light.
It takes time and practicing to know when to trust and when to hesitate.
It's hard to go on living if we are too unsure and too afraid all the time.
Note:
This is very difficult and complicated but interesting question:
what is really ego and how human ego is functioning?
And I don't mean now that psychoanalytic distribution:
superego - ego - it.
I'm asking: is ego one or amount of many different components that
together form our "real ego", that dimension we call our "self".
Are all or some of our emotions inside or outside of ego? It's like
the question about affective intelligence: does it exist?
If it does, is it one part of intelligence or something else?
|
In or with the movies emotions work often the symbolic way:
when in a war movie a little
boy cries because his father is going leave the family because he's going to war
that expression (= cry) of that feeling (= sadness) touches me
I (as a viewer) am crying my heart out and missing my darling little
baby boy who died only six days old many years ago.
Or when in a movie a farmer is happy because the corn is growing well
that expression (= smile) of that feeling (= happiness) touches me
I (as a viewer) am so happy at that time because I love my wife so much and
I think I want to spend the rest of my life with her.
And I am happy because next month we are going together to a holiday trip.
An emotion in a movie can help bringing out the same kind of an emotion in audience
or emotion that somehow is based on same elements in our mind.
Geographical or temporal distance makes it easier to process with important emotions.
Jacques Annaud's Bear (L'ours, 1989) is very good example on that.
In the beginning of the movie the mother bear dies in an accident in front of the baby bear.
Then we see that baby bear's deep sorrow and the growing struggle and while seeing it
we (can) work with those same kinds of emotions in our own life.
While watching the Bear we are practicing our emotional skills, empathy in this case.
Children are usually good doing that with animation films. We adults are often too pragmatic or
too dogmatic to let it all out with "childish" movies.
Adults prefer often more realistic films to be able to
say if this can or can't be true in real life.
All movies are more or less fiction and even all our human relationships are fictitious too.
In movies we can use pure fiction (sci-fi, horror,...) to work with our emotions easier.
They are not binding us in everyday reality and rationalization.
Those so-called b-class movies do the same thing in more simple way. They make it more
simplified to follow
the main story: good is nothing but good and bad is nothing but bad and that leads more room
to a viewer just to relax and follow the story.
Other kind of example:
Bille August movie The House of the Spirit (1993) is very good example of a deep and
multidimensional diving in humanity.
|
There's a typical minor problem with our emotions:
when we are too close we are not able to see clearly and far enough. Long enough
distance gives us more space to see things and all the connections better.
When we have enough empathy in our heart (or brain) we can feel one meaning
(on silver screen) touching gently the other meaning inside our mind and feel
how it recreates something new, something more than before.
What means to a viewer are those touching big emotions and our important need to
use and feel them in our own life at that moment?
Usually we go to see a movie that we think is filling our needs at that time
the best possible way. The full content of that need is not so often obviously
clear to us.
This is what really happens in the movies:
transitional objects are transferring our transferences.
It gives all those emotions and meanings and values and morality (= right versus wrong,
good versus bad) to the silver screen. It makes those dead frames alive.
We viewers have a need to transfer our emotions.
This transference needs targets. Let's call them here
transitional objects.
There must be male and female on the silver screen
because there are male and female inside the cinema.
There must be good and evil on the silver screen
because there is good and evil in our mind.
|
In movies we can face our emotions safely and privately. What we see in
cinema is our own mind. While watching a movie we are willing to satisfy our
own conscious and subconscious needs.
This is important physical fact:
a human being sees and hears with the brain, not with the eyes or with the ears.
In cinema those dead and lifeless
pictures on the screen start to live their "own" life inside our brain
and stimulate the emotions and the meanings that are
already in our mind. On emotional level they are doing just the same as our
real dreams and daydreams are doing to us.
In this process we do just like if we are cooking: we can only use all the
raw material and spices we have in the kitchen.
Inside our mind we are using all those emotions and thoughts there are already.
Maybe just fixing them in new order or in different scale. Having more meaning here and
less meaning there.
After hard practicing maybe we can learn something new too because movie experience is
communication and we are learning through all our communication.
|
We have two sight centers and two hearing centers in the back and side of our brain.
Modern brain research has proved that those centers chance different information between
them and - this is very interesting - hearing centers can also stimulate sight
centers and move,
change acoustic irritants to senses of sight.
That can be one reason why
they use so often loud volume and especially strong low voices in cinema.
One reason is the skin vibration = loud sound touches the skin
like a warm hand.
Live (heavy or hard) rock music is based on that skin vibration effect quite often when
they want to have more powerful emotions in the audience. Strong low voices does it best.
|
Let's go back to our emotions.
We carry all possible emotions all the time in our subconscious mind, but in normal
life we are able to use only a small part of them. We conceal especially
those forbidden emotions. In cinema we can let our emotions to come out and learn
to live with them. And because of them.
Usually in the beginning of movie therapy it's much better and much easier
to face (too) strong emotions like fear or
fright or agony in safe way than to face those in "real life".
In many cases it is better to face them safely and become little by little
acquainted with them. It's much the same thing as when children are learning for
the first
time how to ride a bicycle and adult is holding the bike behind. When you know that
child can handle the bike you can loose your hands.
Mostly what we fear is the strong emotion we call with the name "fear" -
not the "true" threat behind it.
When our mental condition is not so good we usually loose the game before it
begins. Sometimes our ("bad") emotions are controlling us too much, although
it would be better if we could control those emotions.
This is one basic thought:
when we are watching movies we are watching our selves, our own mind.
We are watching our own emotions and our subconscious needs.
All that we feel in the movies are those emotions we already have deep
down inside. Those dead pictures on silver screen can't give anything new but they
can stimulate very effectively our existing emotions. Good filmmakers are like magicians:
they know how to do it well.
Our conscious or subconscious mind makes the story, personifies characters and
causal connection, just the same way as in our dreams.
The screen shows only lifeless pictures and those about 200.000 different frames
we see during a normal length movie are lifeless too.
They don't have any emotions or moral or
sense of justice or right or wrong or what ever in themselves.
The only emotions and moral and thoughts for example about
what's / who's right or wrong comes from our own conception - from deep darkness to
daylight.
The experience of watching movies is kind of a two-way street, a two-way
emotional relationship between the screen and our mind. We project our own
feelings, emotions and needs to that expected reality that seems to be happening
on the screen and on the other hand those happenings on the screen
are helping us to stimulate our emotions, to let them come out so we can feel
those feelings we need to feel. And see what we need to see.
One reason why we are doing this is that
we have so enormous need to do so; we have so big need to feel different kind
of feelings at different time and different periods of our lives.
Earlier fairy tales or sagas did that kind of imaginary exercise or were
just harmless entertainment.
SHORT HISTORY OF MOVING PICTURES
The history of moving pictures is very short compared to the other forms
of art: a little bit more than one hundred years.
In the end of 19th century the development of photography and projection
techniques made it possible for moving pictures to be born, which happened in
publicly 28.12.1895.
The birth of moving pictures and it's early years happened at the early
industrialization epoch when people moved from countryside to cities,
worked in factories and started to spend more time outdoors.
People started to have more spare time and more money.
At that time there was a need for entertainment.
One reason why we are using movies is that earlier when people were living
in the country families was big and many generations lived in the same house.
Everything what is normal in life (birth, life, illness, indisposition, welfare,
death, ...) happened at home. Now when people are more isolated while living
in big cities we satisfy some of our basic needs through movies.
- The End of Chapter One -
home
english index
prologue
chapter 02
