{"product_id":"the-power-of-movies-isbn-9781400077205","title":"The Power of Movies","description":"How is watching a movie similar to dreaming? What goes on in our minds when we become absorbed in a movie? How does looking “into” a movie screen allow us to experience the thoughts and feelings of a movie’s characters? These and related questions are at the heart of \u003ci\u003eThe Power of Movies, \u003c\/i\u003ea thoughtful, invigorating, and remarkably accessible book about a phenomenon seemingly beyond reach of our understanding. Colin McGinn–“an ingenious philosopher who thinks like a laser and writes like a dream,” according to Steven Pinker–enhances our understanding of both movies and ourselves in this book of rare and refreshing insight.“Lively. . . . Illuminating. . . . McGinn has struck gold.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Wall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e“Enlightening. . . . Lucid, rewarding.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e“Persuasive. . . .Astute. . . . McGinn synthesizes ideas about seeing movies with the passion of a buff.” —\u003ci\u003eEntertainment Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eColin McGinn\u003c\/b\u003e is a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University. He is the author of sixteen previous books, including \u003ci\u003eThe Making of a Philosopher: My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy; Space Trap,\u003c\/i\u003e a novel; and, most recently, \u003ci\u003eMindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning. \u003c\/i\u003eMcGinn’s writing has appeared in such publications as \u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, The New Republic,\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review.\u003c\/i\u003eOne\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    THE POWER OF FILM\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Mind-Movie Problem\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The power of film is indisputable. Since the beginning of movies, a little  over a hundred years ago, they have captivated audiences. We want, badly,  to watch. And this power seems unique to film. As the philosopher Stanley  Cavell remarks, in The World Viewed, “the sheer power of film is unlike  the powers of the other arts.”1 There is something about movies  specifically—whether they emanate from America or France, Britain or  Sweden—which succeeds in connecting to the human psyche in a deep way.  Movies carry some sort of psychic charge that no other art form—perhaps no  other spectacle—can quite match.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Their power is manifested in two ways: demographically and individually.  Movies simply have a larger mass appeal than any other artistic medium.  Nothing draws crowds in the millions like a new movie—and this was so from  the very beginning. (It is this fact that explains the colossal investment  of money that goes into the movie business. What would the movie industry  be like today if movies had the demographics of, say, opera or stamp  collecting?) People read novels and go to the theatre, of course, but it  is the cinema that really packs them in. And this mass appeal is  remarkably cross-cultural. All across the world people flock to the  movies, and it is amazing how easy it is for a movie from one country to  cross boundaries into another, perhaps with suitable subtitles or  dubbing—I once watched a Clint Eastwood cowboy film in Paris in which the  tough gunslinger intoned the words “Fermez la porte” in an impeccable  French accent.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    There is also, at the individual level, the quality of the attraction—the  sheer intensity of the movie-watching experience. From childhood on, we  are all familiar with that sense of entrancement that accompanies sitting  quietly in the pierced darkness of the movie theatre. The mind seems to  step into another sphere of engagement as the images on the screen flood  into our receptive consciousness. We are gripped. The quality of this  mental engagement, the way the mind is invaded and commandeered, is  something that has been evident since the early days of the silent era,  when film was at its least technologically sophisticated. The moving image  itself seems an object of extraordinary potency. In the movie-watching  experience we enter an “altered state of consciousness,” enthralling and  irresistible.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    What is it about movies that explains their amazing hold over the human  mind? Why do we love movies (and we do love them—thrill to their presence,  romanticize them, suffer when they let us down)? Clearly, there must be  something about those light projections through celluloid, on the one  hand, and the nature of the human mind, on the other, that accounts for  the seemingly preordained match that exists between them. How do they  manage to mesh so naturally, smoothly, and overwhelmingly? I like to call  this the “mind-movie problem,” by analogy with the philosophical mind-body  problem.2 The mind-body problem is the problem   of explaining how conscious experience relates to the physical materials  of the body and brain; the mind-movie   problem is the problem of explaining how it is that the two-dimensional  moving image, as we experience it in a typical feature film, manages to  hook our consciousness in the way it does. How do these jumpy splashes of  light contrive to strike our mind with such force? Somehow movies and the  mind are suited to one another, mutually adapted—and I want to explain  what it is about both terms of this nexus that makes it as charged as it  is. What is it about the screen image and the mind that views it that  makes the marriage between them so successful—so passionate and  tempestuous, one might almost say? What is this love affair with the  screen?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Dubious Suggestions\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    What accounts for the power of film? An obvious first thought is that  movies are uniquely realistic—they recreate or reproduce the very events  that they record. The camera, in this view, is a device for making  available, for later consumption, the very same worldly events that took  place before it at some earlier time. Accordingly, what we see in the  movies is indistinguishable from what we would have seen had we been there  at the original shooting. Suppose you would like to see what some  historical battle actually looked like to a living onlooker; well, movies  enable you to have this experience without having to travel back in time  and witness the events themselves or have before you armies of real  actors. Movies literally recreate worldly events before our very eyes.  They duplicate reality. Seeing film is just like seeing the reality  filmed. And reality certainly has the power to hold our attention.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    This view is inadequate for a couple of reasons. It is simply not true  that the movie image literally reproduces real events. We are never fooled  by a movie depiction of a battle into thinking that we are really there—or  else we might head smartly for the exit. A movie is not some kind of  illusion of reality, if that means something that appears just like  reality itself but isn’t. We never really mistake a movie image for a real  object, as if thinking that Harrison Ford, say, is in the theatre with us,  feet away. The power of movies cannot be identical to the power of seeing  the real events; the movie’s power must lie in what distinguishes it from  seeing real events. The power of seeing a real battle is just a different  kind of power from that of seeing a movie of a battle (though that is not  to say that the first kind of power is totally irrelevant to the second).  Similarly, we can readily distinguish the stage in the performance of a  play from the real world, not somehow confusing the events of the play  with real events. We can likewise distinguish the screen in   a movie theatre from a chunk of real reality (so to speak), not taking the  images before us literally to be real objects and situations. The power of  cinema does not derive from   its giving us the full-blown illusion of reality—as when I might actually  hallucinate the presence of a monster and be genuinely afraid, having  taken the illusion to be reality. It is not that in a horror film, say, I  am under the impression that a living (or unliving) vampire is literally  standing not ten feet in front of me, and find myself understandably  riveted; I know very well that it’s just a picture of a vampire. And yet I  am still riveted (though in a different way).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Nor do we find movies fascinating precisely in proportion to how  fascinating we find reality. Reality itself might leave us bored and  indifferent, but when it comes to us in the form of a movie image it can  take on life and meaning. Watching someone light a cigarette in real life  can be pretty dull, but in the context of a story projected onto the movie  screen our eyes and mind will be drawn in. The movie adds something to  reality, and this is part of its power (later we will explore in detail  what exactly it adds). It is the same with painting: the interest of a  portrait is very different from the interest we take in its sitter, who  may be quite uninteresting to look at. The visual arts are not in general  attempts to produce twins of real people. It is not the alleged  lifelikeness of cinema that determines its interest for us, since (a) it  is not lifelike in any literal sense, and (b) being lifelike is not enough  to confer fascination on something. In short, the psychological power of a  representation of something is not the same as the psychological power of  that thing. Art, in other words, is transformative.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A different suggestion might be that movies engage our mind, not by  simulating reality, but by offering us fiction. We love stories in  general, and movies tell us stories in visual images instead of words on  the page. Does our taste for fictional narratives explain our liking for  movie narratives? We are quite aware that it is all just fiction; but  fiction is what we crave, not quotidian reality. What moves us at the  movie theatre is the power of the imagination.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Now it is certainly true that the fictional content of films must be part  of their appeal—we like to get caught up in a good yarn—but this  suggestion suffers from not specifying what it is about movies in  particular that grips us so. What is it about films, as opposed to novels,  that gives rise to our special engagement with them? It isn’t just the  story being told—indeed, we might find the story banal if it came to us in  merely verbal form—it is the form in which the story comes to us that  enthralls us. It is the fact that it is a story on film that creates the  special power of cinema, not simply being a story told in some medium or  other. If it were just the latter, then we might well prefer to stay home  and read   a book—which would be easier and cheaper. But what   we crave when we itch to see a film is the particular nature of the  cinematic experience—which includes, but is not exhausted by, the embedded  narrative itself. Clearly, the experience of seeing photographic images on  a screen is very different from seeing or hearing words that describe the  selfsame events. We need to identify what specific properties of film  contribute to the movie-watching experience. Obviously, seeing a film is  not the same as hearing someone tell you the story of it!\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It might be maintained that it is the ideological content of cinema that  explains its sway over the minds of the audience. The movies, it is said,  support and reinforce the prevailing ideology of the society within which  they are made and viewed, and the population has already been brainwashed  by this ideology into being mesmerized by the cinema’s own version of it.  The movies thus collude with the prevailing ideology, which has already  wormed its way into the deeper layers of the audience’s psyche. For  example, a romantic comedy might reinforce sexual stereotypes, connecting  with the attitudes already present in the audience. The power of cinema is  thus the power of ideology.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301620371685,"sku":"NP9781400077205","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400077205.jpg?v=1767741031","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-power-of-movies-isbn-9781400077205","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}