Cilogy wrote:Wow, I've been craving a thread like this.

Film is my favorite artform, maybe because I am personally all about visuals. It is mostly because watching film is an encompassing experience, it appeals through sight, sound, emotion, and intellect. I watch films to feel emotion, to reflect on real life, and to learn about life. Yes, I don't care if that sounds pathetic, I know films are not exactly the best portrayal of real life, but I do often learn morals from films.

Inception was a great example of one of these "learned qualities" in film. Recently, I saw that I was not on the best path in my life and I was getting easily distracted by meaningless ventures. I realized I needed some king of "totem," something to remind me of the reality that I need to go to college, I need to work hard in life, that I want to have my own family one day, I want true happiness. That totem was a picture of someone I care about very much. I look at that picture every time I need a reminder of what I should be focusing on. This totem of mine reminds me of all those things and essentially gives me a "kick" back to reality.

The idea of "inception" itself is such a brilliantly simple yet mind-crushingly complex philosophical idea. Giving someone an idea and allowing it to reverberate throughout their mind and their life ... damn, that really resonates with me. "Incepting" is something we have all been doing through our entire lives, it's such a simple real-life idea which this film is based on, and that is amazing to me.

It's things like a "totem" and "planting an idea" that I really take away from films. There are countless times when I remember I have learned something from films that people, not even my parents could teach me. Don't get me wrong, I have the best parents ever, but there are just epiphanies that will only come to me through film.

The scene in Inception where Cobb talks about the perception/creation feedback loop that we go through while dreaming is true even while watching films.



When we watch a film, we observe it and create our own interpretation of it simultaneously, we then use that interpretation to enhance the way we observe, then we interpret our new observation. This loop keeps going on and on, and (stick with me on this one) our mind does this so well that we don't even realize it's happening until the film is over and you analyze everything you saw in a summary.The same logic can be applied when I look at paintings, listen to music, read literature, watch people dance, and a thousand other things. Hell, the same logic can be applied to everything, but I really noticed it first when watching Inception. See it's things like this that really make me realize the beauty, not only in films, but in life itself.

Class dismissed, we'll have a pop quiz on Monday.