I love film! I do! In a grandiose, visionary kind of way. . . I love cinematography, good acting, good scripts, good themes, and how movies have such a deep, communally reflective subconscious, always seeming to say more than they were meant to.

I love that they help me envision how to live my life, how to dream, how to feel the pathos of other people’s lives, and how to just become a larger person through contemplating, experiencing, internalizing, and churning through all of their varied elements.

Of course these elements exist in real life as well, but films frame themes in a finite space and lend character to things you may never experience – history, for example – in much the same way books do.

. . .Only someone else went to the work of imagining it for you. That can be limiting, but it can also free you from the constraints and habits of your own imagination – and for this grace I am thankful. Human beings being what we are, it is easy for us to arrange our minds and hearts in such a way as to never find it too necessary to expand — and when we’re jostled by a loved one, or a poor person in the street, it can be truly unpleasant. Something full of our own personal investment and ego. But movies allow this experience to be a journey chosen freely.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could live our lives with some of the openness with which we approach a piece of art?

~ K Gough