What Is Cinema?

(*Cinema is the highest art form. It encompasses all artistic disciplines & uses them in collaboration in order to conjure up a representation of the human condition.)

(*Cinema is a universal form of communication.)

Never before in history have we been able to globally have the access to capture our world cinematically on the mass scale in which 21st Century Technology has allowed us. Because of the globalization of cinematic technology, the possibilities of what can be captured through a camera seem to be endless. Time itself has been concurred & toyed with. This power now lies within the hands of almost every human being on the planet. The act of capturing the world through a camera lens is similar to the act of a painter wishing to paint his surroundings. A painter looks at the world empirically and realizes the world can be captured using color & texture. They then realize the act of painting is not only capturing the physical realm, but time itself. It starts with the empirical perception through one’s sensory mechanisms, & lends to an artistic & dramatic representation of that empirical analysis. But there is a difference between the process of painting & the process of cinema. Cinema has allowed us to capture the empirical & corporal realm first hand by exposing light to a chemically malleable surface, and now onto a digital sensor. The empirical is now longer subject to subjective representation, but is now subject to both the objective and subjective. Ones perception of time & the world is valid and invalid at the exact same time. An individual’s personal space in time, & the the sight & sound around them, is able to be captured, & shown to others almost instantaneously, & in some cases live streamed. Everyone knows the implications of this action intuitively, yet not all are aware of it conceptually, & how it relates to the distant past.

We now live in a world where this mechanism of capturing time & space is happening on an unprecedented scale. We live in a multilayered cinematic environment via the Internet & 21st Century Technology.

We as a species are archiving our space in time every second of the day. What are the implications of this? Why has this desire become a universal, humanitarian desire?

The desire to captfure time & space via painting, sketch, & sculpture is not the same as the desire to capture time & space cinematically. The difference lies in the fact that not all human beings posses the desire to paint, sketch, or sculpt, yet all human beings posses the desire to use cinema in order to archive their place in time & reality itself. Given this to be the case, we must not over look the separation of value between a specific cinematic encapsulation of time. There are those who wish only to capture the banal & mundane aspects of time, & then there are those who wish to capture the spontaneous, historic, complex, and beautiful aspects of time. These are individuals who tend to have the perception of an artist. A cinematic artist captures time in order to represent what Plato defines as the Good, the True, & the Beautiful. This means that there is an individual cinematic responsibility within us all, wether you see yourself as an artist or not. We all have the right to capture time itself, but we are not all worthy to represent it properly. Those who are worthy, go into the act with good intentions, intentions of representing reality in an honest, bold, and moral way. One’s personal morals are another argument to be had, yet the intention of honesty & ones personal truth is the prerequisite towards powerful cinema. One must try & capture, as broad as then may seem, the good & the bad aspects of human nature.

To find out the best & most responsible way in which to capture time cinematically, we must first categorize the different mediums in doing so. I have listed and defied three cinematic mediums.

• THE CASUAL & SOCIAL
• THE ARTISTIC
• THE DOCUMENTARY

THE CASUAL & SOCIAL

1.) using cinema in order to capture one’s self & others surroundings in a casual manner via snapchat, instagram story, or any of the various social media platforms.

THE ARTISTIC

1.) using cinema in order to capture human beings or society in an experimental, fictitious, or mythological manner with the intention of presenting the film to a small or large audience.

THE DOCUMENTARY

1.) using cinema in order to capture human beings or society, through a practical & unfitted perspective, with the intent using the film for educational, political or religious purposes.

I recognize the fact that there are other various cinematic mediums, like the pornographic, or the commercial, but for the sake of the continuity & clarity of this treatise I have only defined & referenced the ones I deem to be the most prominent & important. To be even more specific; going forward I will elaborate specifically on the artistic, mainly because I am most familiar with it & I believe it to be the most profound & the most truthful, not in a reductionistic & empirical way, but in a dramatic & mythological way. The truth behind drama is different than the truth behind empirical science, they are not the same yet equally hold their own inherent value.

Using cinema to create a fictitious world in which to showcase, is an act composed of profound, cultural, mythological, and spiritual implications. To begin, it is fundamentally rooted in the dramatic arts, which is an archaic practice. The difference is that, artistic cinema uses 20th & 21st century technology to permanently capture the dramatic act on film, & by doing so, the act is embedded within time itself, especially when the film is digitally archived. The dramatic arts have always used mimesis in order to reflect & represent a specific societies’s attributes & its place in time but, now given the fact that the art form is archived cinematically, it accentuates the value & truth behind such an achievement. This process of trying to reflect & represent human nature has now been heightened to a level unlike we have never seen before. Before, the distribution of the cinematic arts was limited to 20th century mediums of broadcasting, such as television, & the theater. But now because of the rise of the internet, we have access to a virtually unconsumable amount of cinema via Netflix, iTunes, & streaming services in general. We are, everyday, consuming the reflective nature of humanity through cinema at a rate one can not even catch up to or comprehend. Not only do we posses a full archive of cinema at our fingertips, but we also posses the potential & unrealized cinematic representation of the future waiting for it to be absorbed & understood. We have even come to a point, where we as a society, are demanding more & more & more. We desire this human artistic reflection deeply. We ache & always have ached for a pure & divine representation of the human condition in order to understand ourselves, & our place in this world.

And when I speak of a pure & divine representation, I do not mean a filtered, infallible, display of the world, but a representation of the world that also shows the dark & destructive side of the human psyche. This is the reason behind our fascination with horror, gore, & death in cinema. We must examine & confront this side of ourselves in order to understand it & over come it. Those dark aspects are also apart of the divine expression of human nature.

Mimesis is a powerful desire. One that begins in adolescences. But what is this desire & how can artistic cinema help us realize its potential? To answer this question we must examine some of the great cinematic stories of our time, & see how story & time itself has shaped us & molded us into who we are today.

To elaborate further on mimesis & why I believe that the darker aspects of human nature are divine & must be represented through artistic cinema, I want to reference the work of David Lynch. In Blue Velvet, Lynch’s fourth feature, there is a message & a form of artistic representation that is so surreal & beautiful that it challenges one's moral intellect. In the beginning sequence we are show the vernal aspects of a small American town, the beautiful and pleasant surface image of suburban life. The colorful flowers, the green grass, the noble fireman patrolling the streets, and the father of Jeffrey Beaumont watering the grass. The father gets a knick in the water hose & suddenly drops over from a poisonous insect bite of some sort that bites his neck. After this sudden incident of chaos and disruption Lynch gradually changes our perception by beginning to show us a more darker perspective, the camera pans slowly & ominously into the grass below, revealing the world of insects & parasites that live underneath the town. This shows how insects & parasites, literally & metaphorically, influence & corrupt us. Nature itself has within it mechanisms at the parasitic & microbiological level that effect us in ways we can not always predict. This fasciation & desire to represent the parasitic aspects of the world that Lynch famously possess, is one that is needed in artistic cinema. Seeing beauty within unsettling natural phenomenon is a mechanism of understanding what lies in the dark and unexplored areas of nature & reality itself, & this is precisely the journey the main character Jeffrey Beaumont goes through. Because of his untamed curiosity, he gets involved into a murder mystery. The fascination with sex, perversion, & the unseen drives Jeffery to sneak into Dorthy’s apartment, a woman who is victim to a man named Frank. Frank has kidnapped Dorthy’s husband & child & uses this against her to claim her & rape her. Jeffery observes this incident of rape & we as an audience see it as well. We are forced to see a broken woman & a psychotic man display a representation of sexual desire corrupted by an unhealthy love for sexual violence and the erotic. This is the most uncomfortable scene in the film & it is here not only because Jeffrey has to experience this dark aspect of the world, but we ourselves have to experience these aspects in order to understand & gain knowledge of the mystery of evil itself. Evil encounters are an intrinsic element in the human condition & this is why ultimately it is must be apart of the divine cinematic representation of human nature. This is a fundamental stage in human development & has been represented across time though mythology & storytelling. Every era has its stories of evil, sexual desire, & the confrontation of the shadow. Carl Jung speaks of this in great detail & claims that everyone has their own personal shadow. This shadow is within us all & the only way for us to overcome it is to see it represented in artistic cinema. We live in a modern world & in this world we must look to artistic cinematic masterpieces like Lynch’s Blue Velvet in order to see our collective shadow. This piece has become a mythological representation of 20th century American life & it is here embedded within time & reality itself. It has become more than real, it has become surreal & hyper true even if it is fictional & cinematic. Artistic cinema is the hall mark & holly grail of 20th & 21st century society. The value in these cinematic encapsulations is divine in nature, & must be seen as divine expressions & not merely as fictitious narratives only with the intent for perversion. There is a line in the film when Sandy, Jeffry’s love interest, sates to Jeffrey before he sneaks into Dorthy’s apartment, “I don't know if you're a detective or a pervert.” & Jeffrey response, “I guess that’s for me to know & you to find out.”

This dialogue speaks so much truth because it speaks to the voyeuristic aspects of ourselves that act upon us rather than it being under our control. We can not help but to look. We can not help but to have desire for what lies behind the door of darkness. This door will forever hunt us, as well as help us in our detective journey towards divine self realization. This is the power of artistic cinema, this is the power of mythology.