THINGS I’VE LEARNED FROM WATCHING MOVIES #1

TURN IT ON / 2016 / COLLAGE ON PAPER / RUSSELL C. SMITH

Movies are time machines. Whether you want to watch contemporary life, historical settings, the far future, or prehistory – movies will take you there.

Some movies you can watch over and over, and other ones you’re never going to watch again.

The best movies are like a masterpiece painting – you can always see something new.

Movies immerse you into a living and breathing story, creating a physical and emotional experience in the way no other art form can give you – movies are dreams, visions, alternate realities brought to life and capable of taking you to other lands, worlds, and universes peopled by whoever and whatever the director can imagine and bring forth on the screen.

If a movie makes you laugh and cry at the same time, the director has learned a thing or two about life.

Many movies that are called comedies just aren’t funny. Are these movies mislabeled or just misunderstood?

It’s rare when a movie is better than the book.

You’re lucky if you’ve been exposed to the black and white Film Noir masterpieces – movies that’ll pull you into a brooding, dangerous, dark world. Even luckier, if you’ve seen some of these movies on the big screen in a movie theater. Film Noir movies were created in the 1940s and 1950s, in a stylistic manner (heavy on the shadows), a highly personalized sense of setting, and especially the wisecracking dialogue, unique in the history of cinema. Some, but not all of these movies are adaptations of Noir hard-boiled novels written in the 1930s and 1940s. The best Noir movies have a voiceover telling the story as it happens. Sometimes the voiceover narrator is speaking from the afterlife.

Movie memories involve much more than the movie itself – especially true when thinking of the decades when movies were experienced in a collective audience, sitting in a darkened movie theater. There was a closeness shared with the person or group you were with, as well as the moviegoing experience everyone around you felt. Memories of opening cartoons, and previews of coming attractions, and the smell of popcorn lingering in the air. How the big screen felt new, shiny, and sometimes dizzying when you first started going to movie theaters by yourself and your young friends.

The right movie at the right time will open your mind and maybe even save your life.

Much like life, the best characters in a movie are never one-dimensional.

Movies can be soothing, and movies can be enraging.

Every movie reflects the culture and time period it was made in.

If a movie, noir or not, has a voiceover, I’m in.

Every movie possesses a story, and the deeper we’re transported into the story depends upon every part of moviemaking coming together – the script, the actors input, a director’s vision, each person who views the completed film, the attention span of everyone inhabiting the cultural moment the movie entered the world, the level of emotional intelligence of each viewer, the collective joy or sadness the movie opens up in each viewers physiology and psychology.

Some movies are called arthouse, cult movies, or independent films. These movies are often made by an independent director with a powerful, personal vision.

Watching a movie is about dissolving into a story, losing track of time, falling into an alternate timeline and timeless dimension you’ll never experience for the first time ever again.