Lumière, one of the principal inventors of cinematography,
said, “The cinema is an invention without a future.”
But happily, Lumière was wrong. Movies did have a
future. They have become enormously popular and immensely
powerful as a tool for telling stories, communicating informa-
tion, and influencing culture. Even the early silent films, with
their jerky, grainy, black and white images exhibited an almost
magical power to captivate their viewers’ attention. Today, with
bone shaking surround-sound, brilliant color, wide-screen for-
mat, and digital special effects, the power of cinema to trans-
port us into other worlds has grown to gargantuan proportions.
As one measure of just how powerful movies have become,
consider how some sociologists, psychologists, politicians, and
clerics complain that movies are changing the way society,
especially children, view themselves and their world. Such crit-
ics point out that in an effort to appeal to the basest elements of
human nature, many movies overemphasize graphic violence
and sex. Of course, their complaint is about the films’content
— not the medium. But it is interesting to note that while such
critics level these same complaints against other media —
books, magazines, popular music, fine art — movies bear the
lion’s share of such attacks. It is illuminating to ask why. I
believe it is because movies, by virtue of their verisimilitude
and ubiquity, have significantly greater power than other media
to move us, to change the way we see our world and ourselves.
It is obvious that many films play to the lowest common
denominators — the base human instincts and desires. Even so,
it is practically impossible to number the movies that seek the
opposite pole, that strive to inspire the highest human values.
The vast majority of movies simply hope to entertain by spin-
ning a good yarn, and even those sometimes end up uninten-
tionally serving as a catalyst for personal insight into the darker
side of the soul. When those dark aspects are brought into the
light of conscious awareness, true inner freedom is possible.
Like no other medium before it, the popular movie pres-
ents the potential of a new power for illuminating the depth of
Introduction 3