Movies: Why do we love them so much? There's not one person on this whole planet that doesn't enjoy watching movies. There isn't anyone who hasn't seen at least one unless they've been living under a rock for centuries. We watch the same movie a thousand times, we know scenes by heart. Some of us are movie directors, actors and actresses, so what is this industry and why do we love it so much? Cinema is the youngest among different forms of art like literature, music and painting. It emerged from mankind's growing desire to reach their imagination, which led to many discoveries and inventions from which is the camera, a mightything that gave birth to a phenomenon now known as motion picture. The very basic, surface-level role of cinema is entertainment, to make people enjoy themselves by experiencing different emotions, sometimes different universes altogether. During times of war, when nations were trying so hard to tear people apart, movies brought them together. They gave people the ability to escape their reality and experience another, even if it was just for a couple of hours. But cinema is not always about escapism. There are some movies that capture the very real and basic everyday life. Which leads us to the essence of cinema, the reason why we even watch a movie: story. A filmmaker's job is to deliver and feed the audience with stories, and a lot of times, we find ourselves judging a movie by this one make-it-or-break-it aspect. This leads us to the question, not why we like movies, but rather, why do we enjoy storytelling? From the time cavemen sat around a campfire and recounted their hunting tales, stories have become the most effective way for knowledge transfer. It congregated people, and brought them closer to one another. Communities developed and shared identities and culture solely through storytelling. And with time, these campfire stories turned into legends and legends turned into bedtime tales and eventually, they became a movie that we sit down and watch. No wonder we find anecdotes amusing, and have the propensity for narrating them. “Human minds yield helplessly to the suction of story,” asserts Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Storytelling Animal. “No matter how hard we concentrate, no matter how deep we dig in our heels, we just can’t resist the gravity of alternate worlds…If the storyteller is skilled, he simply invades us and takes over. There is little we can do to resist,” Our minds are powerless against stories, we can't help but pay attention. It's been a huge part of our development as a human race, the only way we know what we do now. It's one of the most important stilts in every existing civilization. Cinema has helped provide a new way for storytelling, a new way of transferring knowledge, that is by seeing it unfold right in front of your eyes. Movies provide us with stories and universes we never imagined possible. It broadens our minds and exposes us to different characters, different circumstances and different time periods, sometimes even offer solutions to our very own problems. We see ourselves in the characters we watch, we get sucked in and lose ourselves inside the scenes, we experience a whole spectrum of emotion in the span of two to three hours. Between hatred to compassion to indifference, we understand ourselves and comprehend people's motives. Who wouldn't love that? Personally, I think if there's any kind of magic in the world, it's in cinema. That marvelous creation that has granted us with the best lessons and the most enjoyable escapades. Writer: Annan Gamal
Editor: Habiba Essam
Art: Farah Hany
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