There's a great line by Lev Manovich that
says that cinema essentially became
a new branch of painting, painting in time.
Think about it.
No other technology that preceded it
for capturing the numinis for clothing the numinis,
unfolded in the dimension, the fourth dimension of time.
So photography, we were able to take a picture of a moment.
Ecstatic painting, again, creating a portrait,
a snapshot of an ephemeral experience.
Whereas, cinema became this branch of painting
that unfolds in time.
And so, consider that notion.
All of a sudden, we had a technologically mediated dream
space, a way to access a portal to the numinis that
unfolded in the fourth dimension.
So cinema became a kind of waking dream
where we could travel in space and time,
where we could travel in mind.
This became more than virtual reality.
This became a real virtuality, the simulated catharsis,
the symbolic, allegorical hero's journey
we got to take every time we watched a movie.
It became real, right?
It was literalized in our psyche.
We became literally soul surfers when we watch movies.
And like the film, "Inception" says,
the director is able to architect what is essentially
a dreamspace that the audience can then
fill with their subconscious.
Linkletter goes even farther.
He says that human beings knew how to watch movies
because we've been doing it for hundreds of thousands of years
already in the dreamspace.
And so the reason that it was so natural, so intuitive,
so innate for us to know exactly how to watch movies
when these came online, was because we've
been doing it every night forever.
So what we see with cinema is that technological advancements
met consciousness in a new art form,
giving us access to new numinis realms.
And I love this notion because I love
the transformative capacity of cinema
as a maximum, ultimate expression
of inner, subjective explorations,
transpersonal spaces, the spaces of dreams, the spaces of mine,
the liminal zones.
It's pushing the limits of theatrical illusion
to see what we can learn about ourselves.