Films - Dreams - Psychoanalysis - Myth

When I started becoming interested in more than a film's plot - I became excited about a film's camera angles and shot types and sounds and the technical terminology. And so I thought it was so different from literary analysis. English was my favourite subject in high school because it was an escape from all the other courses I was taking by the end but at the same time I sort of hated it because it just repeated itself over and over: okay now, we're going to examine a character and the world that the author has created. At the end of the day, it was cool but deep down inside I was always asking, "Yeah, so, what's the point? I can't relate, really, to any of these characters." Not the guy from Fahrenheit 451 or Brave New World or girl from To Kill a Mockingbird or Hamlet.

So I started taking cinema classes and it's all this stuff about visual representation and whatnot but then when I write papers about the films it's all this other stuff you have to consider like the industrial complex and the social and historical circumstances (as well as the "aesthetic" bits). And then you have to explain the character's motivations. And interpret it. Well. I'm becoming increasingly convinced that cinema studies is psychoanalysis of a text, with all the other 'circumstances' thrown in for good academic measure.

Myths, films and dreams all do something to our subconscious that should be analyzed pscyhologically, and they intertwine, which is interesting, but shouldn't we be leaving these to the psychologists? Cinema studies should be a social science. I was tricked into thinking it was in humanities! Or the performing arts, even!

Well, we'll see where all this theory leads to eventually...