![]() 'If you put three thoughts into a movie you've broken the law and no one will come,' Sean Penn told an audience at the Edinburgh Festival in 2001. In these days of the marketing-driven Hollywood, and a world cinema dominated by the Hollywood machine, films aim coarsely at low tastes. We hope for diversion, and usually get it, but we so rarely get anything more. Yes, there are the passable Friday night specials, measured by critics including myself in terms of their value in entertaining us for two hours. Of all the arts, movies are the most powerful aid to empathy, and good ones make us into better people. If the film is any good, those faces reflect an out-of-the-body experience: the audience for a brief time is somewhere else, sometime else, concerned with lives that are not its own. François Truffaut said that for a director it was an inspiring sight to walk to the front of a movie theatre, turn around, and look back at the faces of the audience turned up to the light from the screen. ![]() They allow us to enter other minds, not simply in the sense of identifying with the characters, although that is an important part of it, but by seeing the world as another person sees it. ![]()
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May 2023
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