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The Museum of Vestigial Desire

People-propelled cinema

tags: semantics published on:

This idea involves looking at human bodies as cinematic narrative machines. We talk about cinema for sure but we talk about people-propelled cinema. We talk about a continuous human channel, self-aware of its inherent responsibilities to deliver a continuous stream of experience. People have called this transmission different things at different times. People have called this love, synthesis and romance. But there should be only one name for this, and that singular name is cinema. When the electricity flows, when the chemistry smells right, the movie has begun. This movie has a variable length and might or might not have intermissions, but it is a movie. A movie of the same kind that you pay money to see every Saturday but more organic in nature. Produced by a biological system and not a financial one. Produced by the spontaneous combustion of pent-up lust, frustration and boredom in the blood vessels. When a human body is in this mode of performance and a matter of transient experience is being produced, time appears to slow down and the memory-functions of the audience becomes sharper. Things which ordinarily not be a part of the archives of the personal archives of the memories of a lifetime become a part, small and meaningless things then appear to be carrying deep meanings and bear enormous significance.

People-propelled cinema explores a different set of issues. The themes it explores stand apart from those which you see depicted in conventional enacted cinematic productions. The film theory of people-propelled cinema also differs. A very different moral compass is in operation. For one, there is no illusion of balancing the delivery of a good story. The flow of the story evolves in its bitstream and resonantly reflects the presence of pressure in the pipeline of experience. At one point the story might seem to be a tragedy but at the next instant it can seem to be a gut-wrenching thriller and at times there are shades of comedy and sarcasm too. This stream of the story that emerges is so unpredictable that some people do not even accept it as a story. They say that this is more like a documentary story which requires a macro lens for its perception. They say that the familiar manipulable graph of a story with strands that hang loose like strings of a parachute is what defines a story. The familiar pattern of a story allows it to actually become one. It offers joy on being discovered by the reader like a hidden key or the answer to a riddle. This pattern is the story and nothing else they say. But we disagree. The story is the bitstream that is a encapsulated and encoded form of an experience that has to be imagined to be understood. People-propelled cinema makes sense as this cinema that is only a narrative hyperlink to another cinematic experience that actually has to be imagined. In the person-as-movie there is nothing to see, there are only references to be gathered and resolved in terms of hyperlinks to access the screen action going on inside the head. When we look at you, and you are a movie, we enjoy a movie inside our heads. We enjoy this movie and end up feeling very sedated and relaxed. So sedated that our fingers could be faucets of chilled water that have an infinite supply of water to serve.

When we watch this movie, surprisingly time passes like the proverbial silk from the eye of a needle. We get to deal with an engaging distraction. We are trapped within a portable air-conditioner of life-sustaining gasses that are constantly flowing towards our nostrils . To have a worthwhile distraction which grips us by the handles of our consciousness and gives us enough time to check out of the friction of our ongoing bitstream data is a big thing. We lust after the experience. We seek individuals who have a cinematic bent. We are not easily satisfied and we do not make trade-offs. These moments of waiting for the individual who literally inhales bitstream and exhales cinema are enchanting in their own way, it feels like you are in love with a person whom you haven't met yet. It feels like being in the heat of a romantic moment.

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