I’ve been having a correspondence with a friend about media. In particular, we’ve been discussing cinema as a medium.
Everyone who is alive today has grown up with movies. So it’s very likely that you don’t know anybody who first encountered a movie when they were already an adult.
Which means that we take the language of cinema for granted. We talk about movies being “realistic” as though we are discussing something that happened out here in the real world.
But out here in the real world, we are stuck in our physical bodies. The language of montage — constructing visual narratives via the instantaneous juxtaposition of different viewpoints — isn’t something we could ever experience in reality.
Yet we generally don’t think about the extreme artificiality of the visual language of movies because we grew up with it. We all know the language intimately, and we’ve known it since we were little kids.
More tomorrow.