Why Do People Watch Movies?

‘Then came the films’; writes the German cultural theorist Walter Benjamin, evoking the arrival of a powerful new art form at the end of 19th century. By this statement, he tried to explain that films were not just another visual medium, but it has a clear differentiation from all previous mediums of visual culture.

However, the mystical question is, “Why do people watch films?” What is that magic potion, which keeps people’s eyes glued to habit of watching movies, even after more than 100 years after its arrival? And more importantly, why people love to watch the same movie time and again?

The answer is beautifully summarized by Academy Award winner actor Jack Nicholsen, in one of his speech during Oscar award ceremony, “… they entertain us; they offer hopes (and) give traumas; they take us places, we never been, just even for few moments; they can take us away, when we want to get away; Movies inspire us; they challenge us and despite our differences, they are (the) common link to humanity, in all of us.” In my opinion, this statement is the true reflection of the reason, why people love to watch movies. Movies allow us to escape. But there is a value in this escapism, its more than simple eluding.

Movies take us inside the skin of people quite different from ourselves and to places different from our routine surroundings. As humans, we always seek enlargement of our being and wanted to be more than ourselves. Each one of us, by nature, sees the world with a perspective and selectivity different from others. But, we want to see the world through other’s eyes; imagine with other’s imaginations; feel with other’s hearts, at a same time as with our own. Movies offer us a window onto the wider world, broadening our perspective and opening our eyes to new wonders.

The concept of “window” is figured into the very form of cinema. Every ‘shot’ is a framed window that hints the vast reality just outside of our view. People viewing this “window” get connected to this reality, experience the happenings, feel the emotions and engrossed into a life whatever they have wished. This is the magic of cinema.

If we go back beyond Lumière Brothers’ projection of their cinematography in Paris over Christmas 1895, which is too straightforward birth narration of cinema; ancient visual forms like Egyptian hieroglyphics or pre-cinematic technologies of image capture and projection, known as magic lanterns, employing a series of lenses and light sources, were early proof of humanity mesmerised by the play and tricks of light and shades.