How to Watch a Movie -- Lesson #1

On the essential nature of film, and how it captivates you

The great movie critic Roger Ebert famously called movies “empathy machines.” Why?

He believed that film was a great medium, maybe the greatest medium, for putting you into any other human’s shoes. By watching a powerful film, you could *feel* what it’s like to be another person, any person, especially those considerably unlike you.

If this is true, how do movies do this? How in fact do they generate feelings in viewers at all?

And note that we could call these *simulated* feelings, because nothing ever on the screen is truly real, in the physical, organic sense. No character is truly alive like you are. What you and I feel for a movie is towards work of art.

Yet somehow, the great trick of the medium is to get us to feel for two-dimensional, fictional beings. Call them shadow puppets on the wall if you like, as Woody Allen did in his greatest movie “The Purple Rose of Cairo.”

What we are going to discuss in this opening series of lessons on film, which are based on my gen-ed movie class that lasts half a semester, is how movies get us to feel — often very strongly.

Because if you can get someone to feel very strongly, that person is both vulnerable and suggestible, as the hypnotists put it.

Film therefore can be very influential, perhaps even a tool of manipulation, perhaps a tool of propaganda. We should therefore want to know how such an awesome artform works.

I’ll tell you the first lesson of watching film below, something that most people don’t even really comprehend consciously. It’ll get us started down the long, exciting road of being more knowledgeable and thoughtful movie watchers.