Cinema and the Perceptions for The Viewers

Now, the entertaining thing, and here comes the cinema, is that the more we know, the more we expose ourselves, our cognitive schemas, the file we have in our heads grows.

For example, if we have never eaten sushi and we only see an image of sushi or of people eating sushi, my cognitive scheme regarding this is prejudiced. But prejudice can be transformed into knowledge through experience. When we experience, the world changes. We did not know Aysén, we only knew him from photos and it is super different to be there. Now when he says “Aysén”, images come to us that we saw with our own eyes, and our cognitive schema regarding that physical space changed. The use of the on demand reviews come easy there.

What the cinema does is “stretch” our cognitive schemas

The more movies we see, the more experience we are getting inside. For example, we was not in Santiago de Chile in the 1960s, we was not born, but if we see a movie like “Largo Viaje” we can get an idea of ​​what Chile was like at that time. And that, along with what my grandparents tell me, with the news that we can see, makes the image of Chile in the 1960s ever richer and my cognitive scheme more powerful. We do not know what the reality of children in Iran is like, but watching a movie like “The Children of Heaven” which we highly recommend helps me to get an idea about them, of course it is a limited idea, absolutely, but it is already an idea that gives something to my cognitive scheme.

In summary, we know the world through two sources: one, what we have learned from the world and what we can expect from it and two, what directly, at that precise moment in life, is being generated for us.

When one as a teacher comes the first day of classes, teachers and students, we get an idea of ​​the other. That prejudice is not going to be knowledge until the semester has passed, on one side and on the other. And after a semester of working together we can already say “this is so” or “my experience with that was so”. So we look at people again and we see them different, because we went through an experience that changed my perception.

We can all have a critical voice

Films are products made by a specific industry, with specific economic and ideological interests, and are sold in a specific market; consequently, its material conditions of presentation, distribution and consumption are what they are as they arise from and circulate within a socially accepted institution that includes a historiographical canon, a theory and a critique

Basically and in summary, what this quote means is that movies do not come flying from outer space. There is no movie island where movies are made alone and there is no movie island where we watch movies. All cinematographic works, as cultural production, come from a context and that context is defined by the ideological moment, the economic moment, the political moment and they are also defined by the context in which they are exhibited.