I have been thinking about what makes cinema different from every other medium and I keep coming back to this idea from a book called Expanded Cinema by Jean Youngblood from the 1970s where she says that cinema is a reflection of humanity’s drive to externalise consciousness and project the inner realm onto the canvas in front of us. Think about it because we have reality and then we have our subjective vantage point and even documentaries have inherent biases and news tries to show the objective world but cinema is the only thing that opens a portal to our subjective world and it is unlike anything else.

Hugo Münsterberg who was a cinematic trailblazer around 1912 said that the photo play aligns more with the intricate dance of the mind than with reality itself and the cinematic close-up echoes the essence of focused attention and the flashback mimics the corridors of memory and foreshadowing mirrors the act of peering into the future and cinematic cuts between disparate scenes do not jolt us because the persistence of vision binds them together just as we weave together fragments of reality to shape our coherent perception. There is a thinker named Georg Schmid who wrote about the mind screen and proposed that cinema embodies consciousness externalised so you are in a dimly lit room with a giant screen and your body fades into the background and the objective world retreats and you are thrust into a subjective dominion unbounded by time and space and your consciousness commingles with an external embodiment of itself.

Stanley Kubrick’s films like 2001 and A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket dig deep into our minds and get under our skin and when we watch them it is like we are journeying into these mind-bending places together and our minds get wrapped up in his crafted worlds and suddenly we are exploring realms he conjured up. Watching a movie is like looking into a mirror for our thoughts and filmmakers are conductors of this intricate experience guiding us on mental adventures and when we surrender to these films it is like a ticket to a different plane of existence where we tap into something archetypal and shared.

Terence McKenna said find the others and it is true that when you meet someone who loves the same movies there is an instant connection and it is like a secret club and a wink of recognition and that is why events like Comic Con have such passionate followings because they are fully realized alternate worlds we can step into together. The Greeks had this dichotomy of Chronos and Kairos where Chronos is the structured progression of time measured in hours and minutes that forms the foundation of cinematic chronology but inside a movie theater we transition into Kairos which is an experience not governed by the rigidity of time but a lived myth where moments linger and bend and expand and our consciousness intersects with the ethereal substance of the narrative.

This act of assuming another viewpoint and embracing an alternate existence is a psychedelic journey and an expedition into the kaleidoscope of consciousness and for those trapped by an overly assertive ego a cinematic experience can offer potent medicine because losing yourself in a film and relinquishing the clutches of autobiographical selfhood is a liberating venture and that is the transformative power of cinema which is an elixir that extends beyond the self and channels catharsis and enrichment.

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