Cinema @ MindSay

I has seen it!

In recent times, I have been plagued with a seemingly unanswerable question: who or what do I want to be as an adult? Which career will I choose?

I think, however, I finally know the answer.

I want to be Eric Rohmer.

Eric Rohmer, for those who are not familiar with international cinema, is a French filmmaker who has been making unusual, excellent and intelligent movies for almost 50 years. My concern, however (and this is unrelated to the fact that he is one of my favourite film directors), is more to do with his career prior to filmmaking - that of an intelligent, intellectual film critic for the influential French magazine Cahiers du Cinema (other names who shared this pursuit were Chabrol, Truffaut, Rivette, and one of the most famous names in cinematic history, Jean-Luc Godard).

Of course, I fully realise that I may never have the necessary talent that Rohmer possessed to move into the world of filmmaking. However, I believe I do share his passion for analysing films, and perhaps some of his critical writing ability - could this alone be sufficient for me to become a film critic, even a great one like Rohmer was?

However, one does not become an esteemed film critic overnight, and I am puzzled as to how exactly I would achieve my goal. Some have suggested looking into a journalism degree, but, to be honest, I am held back from exploring this field by the sheer immoral populism of the mainstream media. One of the last things I want to become is some writer for a major newspaper, with exaggeration, fear, and looseness with the truth being my main weapons, in a desperate search for irrelevant, barely existing news. That is the opposite of my dream, yet I fear that that is where a degree in journalism would leave me.

And, more than anything, I see such a degree as unnecessary - surely, possessing a basic writing ability as I do, a degree in journalism seems useless, especially in relation to being a film critic. Surely film studies would be a far more relevant field of study for the work I want to find.

At least I'm thinking about it, I suppose. I hope that counts for something.

It is my belief that film is currently the greatest of all art forms - in that, it incorporates so many aspects of other disciplines of art.

It contains elements of photography and painting, but allows movement. It can include music, but adds images to the sound. Through literary adaptation, it can add sight and sound to almost any novel, and yet is not necessarily reliant on literature as a source, as films such as The Man with the Movie Camera and Koyaanisqatsi have shown. Film bears similarities to the theatrical tradition, but allows far more freedom for editing, special effects and setting. For such reasons, I think a claim can be made that, within the art world, cinema is the most advanced representation of life known to man.

I think this is the reason I love this art form. Naturally, there is a place for all fields of art - I am not saying that film makes them redundant; simply, that it is the currently most advanced stage in the evolution of art.

However, I believe that that evolution is ongoing. Which, indeed, leads to the question: what would a yet more evolved art form consist of?

When you look at film, as impressive as it is, it still only makes use of 2 of the 5 senses of the human body (sight and sound). This is no mean feat, considering that until the onset of cinema, art (with the exception of theatre) had generally exercised only one sense at a time. So, what of the other three senses, taste, touch and smell?

While these senses might not usually be associated with art, they are not completely foreign to it. Tactile art does exist, and I have little doubt that smell and taste have been incorporated in some more experimental artworks: indeed, some might even consider the realm of cuisine preparation to be an art of its own kind.

However, these senses are still undoubtedly on the periphery of mainstream art. Apart from a few embarrassing experiments with 'smell-o-vision' back in the 1950s, the idea of introducing these things to a popular art form hasn't really had much of a run.

Still, it is my belief that there will, one day, be an art form that enables the use of all five senses. Clearly this is not going to happen anytime soon, and I'm expecting it would be a gradual development. Also, the very nature of incorporating all these faculties within an art form probably implies some kind of virtual reality situation, where the viewer is actually placed within a three-dimensional environment.

While virtual reality has usually been associated with video games, my idea is more based around the idea of artistic potential... whether that means employing a narrative flow, as in cinema, or using something of a more stationary entity. I reckon it would become used as both mainstream entertainment and a fine art, much as cinema is today.

Until then, film is the art form that should continue to reign supreme.