As you might gather from the photograph on the front page of the Daily Improviser blog, I’m a movie fan from way back. Today I thought I’d relate a (very) brief history of the movies – and show how that history tracks with my recent theme of stepping back and seeing the bigger picture of life.
The first commercial movie exhibition device was Thomas Edison’s kinetoscope, a large cabinet into which a patron peered through an eyepiece in order to view a 60-second film reel. A patron literally had to use tunnel vision to watch the show. Going to the movies thus began as a very insular affair - a brief, narrow view of a limited number of events, involving no narrative elaboration and no sense of a shared experience with other moviegoers.
Do you view your own life’s story via tunnel vision - hunched over, head down, peering through a narrow lens, taking in only a restricted slice of the whole, mostly oblivious to the experiences of others around you?
It soon became apparent, though, that projecting the movie onto a screen was a better method of exhibition. As film technology advanced, cinema pioneers such as the director D.W. Griffith began expanding the film-maker’s palette and syntax. Griffith and others began creating longer films that used visual narrative techniques such as flashbacks in time and intercutting of simultaneous stories (shades of the Harold!), which allowed richer avenues for creative expression.
Are you stuck in kinetoscope days? Do you restrict your view of life to a series of short film loops? Or do you use flashbacks (reflecting on your past), flashforwards (visualizing your possible future), and intercutting (making connections among the different threads of your experience) to put your present in context?
Originally, films were projected onto a screen that was nearly square. Since the 1950s, however, film technology has focused on expanding the audience’s physical field of view - sideways (using widescreen techniques such as Cinemascope and Cinerama), upward (using the IMAX technique, with screens reaching eight stories in height), and outward (using 3D techniques). The goal of these and other sensory enhancements is to “bring the audience into the picture” and provide a feeling of total immersion in the onscreen action.
Do you view life as though it were a movie – as a spectator in the back row of a small theater with a cramped screen? Or do you take a widescreen view of life, immersing yourself in your story, bringing yourself wholly into the picture?
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