How does film change the way we see the world?

How does film change how we view the world?

To me, the most obvious answer is that film convinces us that all the world is ours for the seeing. The camera has the ability to open up realms to which, according to everything from societal norms to the laws of physics, we would ordinarily be denied access. Given the right protagonist, viewers can go anywhere or do anything.

Movies allow for the willing and effortless suspension of reality, and both films we watched for this assignment--Amelie and Fight Club—seem to test the limits of this privilege. Thanks to modern camera tricks, the images that appear on screen appear real enough but are often undeniably absurd, as when Amelie interacts with an imaginary friend or Tyler Durden appears as a splice in the film for a millisecond.

These works, however, are rarely classified as part of the Science Fiction or Fantasy genres, and I might say this is because they are not meant to serve as documentation of a particular series of events, but rather to convey the inner workings of a specific individual’s mindset.

This we see in the personification of Tyler Durden, who is only a real being in the mind of Fight Club’s narrator. The world as seen through the eyes of this narrator is truly a manifestation of inward insanity, but it is the only version of the story we are told, and we accept it as truth.

Similarly, Amelie’s universe is a fantastical one, the result of an overactive imagination developed over the course of a lonely youth. The film introduces us to and submerges us in her world of dreams. Set in Paris, the landscape itself is a bit magical, and it along with a fairy tale soundtrack and computer graphics make imaginary friends and inanimate objects come to life in a way that is almost believable.

In this film, the camera and the narrator take on an impossible perspective, traveling in and out of many private spaces as well as across time. For instance, in the opening scene the narrator catalogs a number of seemingly unrelated happenings that occurred the moment the heroine was conceived. Later, the narrator follows various Parisians and lists off their likes and dislikes, demonstrating its ability to not only inhabit multiple perspectives but also to inhabit the psyche of multiple persons.

Later, Amelie herself seems to possess omniscient powers when she speculates about how many couples in the city below are having orgasms and comes up with what we are shown is the accurate answer. Thanks to the indoctrination of cinema, we accept that it is possible to be a billion places, or in this case fifteen, simultaneously.

This film is also self-referential in that it places heavy emphasis on spectatorship. Amelie is obsessed with watching other people. She observes their lives and yearns to fix their problems the same way filmgoers do. A specific nod to this concept is the relationship Amelie has with her camera, which she uses to create images of imaginary happenings. Upon receiving it, she uses it to capture a bunny rabbit she see in the clouds. Throughout the film she uses cameras to capture the poses of her father’s lawn gnome with the aim of making it seem that the gnome is traveling the world on his own. Her father is willing to suspend his own understanding of reality to believe this. The camera is thus established as a tool used to capture the world in a unique way that suits the whims of the beholder. Amelie, the beholder in this case, sees the world as moviemakers do and as moviegoers want to.

When Walter Benjamin posits in his “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” that “all film is political,” I am not sure that I agree completely, but I do see his point. Film as a medium has the capacity for enormous political influence by merit of the fact that it is so universally accessible, but also because it is overtly persuasive. If I learned anything from Fight Club or Amelie it is that the minute viewers submit themselves to watching of a film, they willingly sympathize with the protagonists and narrators and to some degree accept the stories they present, whether they involve the hallucinations of an insomniac or the caprices of a Parisian loner.