"Cinema is not an art", my English teacher once said to me. And people still ask me why I am skeptical about the Indian education system. There is no way of understanding your reality better than art. After books, movies are the best way to learn about life without bearing the pain of it. I feel like I am on a psychedelic trip when I am experiencing a good story. I never had that experience but surely it will be very good storytelling.
Good storytelling will make you not question its authenticity. From love to gang rivalries, dragons to time travel, the 17th century to 2050. Good storytelling can give you an experience of all of that. It is very fascinating to me that it is nothing but stories that makes identity. No wonder why people can take lives if the story they were told was a lie or questioned. At the end of the day, humans make sense of reality in stories.
Yes, Homo Sapiens have evolved to make sense of reality in stories. To dive deep into the statement in the first paragraph, stories are the only way to learn about life without bearing the pain of it. You form your identity based on the story you tell yourself. That particular story is the articulation of your life to yourself. And you are the hero of that story. You are the protagonist. The whole story revolves around you, literally. Eventually, those stories start becoming your identity. Because facts and stories co-exist in our reality. All your great experiences are known to you by, stories you remember telling yourself. And sometimes told to you in form of art.
The intersection of art and tech is where the magic happens. Specifically, in filmmaking and gaming, technology plays a major role to put the imagination of the crew into reality. No doubt with the development of technology, both the quality and quality of them have increased exponentially. It is no less than a wonder that you can experience a story about the Korean socio-economic situation, by sitting in your room in a small city in India. And play a game with your favorite footballer in your control. But specifically, film-making is the more authentic and human form of storytelling. It will take years for the narration of stories to be mainstream in our country. The true essence of filmmaking as an art has been lost in the mainstream cinema of our country. In terms of business, this industry has been one of the most successful industries. So successful that few people who are not even in the political authority can directly influence the lives of millions.
I just love to watch the cinema. It is a wormhole to a parallel universe. If you have confusion about getting into film-making like I once had. In a course on film-making by Martin Scorsese, he says, "If you feel you can't rest until you have told this particular story, then I would be talking to you". I got my answer, maybe you too.
We all are born as storytellers, right. Now, it’s up to us that how curious we become to know about more and more stories every single day. Some stories you love, some you hate. Observe around yourself, the more interesting person you know is either the best storyteller or has a very interesting story, mostly it’s both. Because at the end of the day, you are quite literally a story. The mental construct, numbers, which were made to solve the complexity of the world, fails in front of stories.