How Monkeys Watch Movies and People Tell Stories
Movies — or good ones, anyway — manipulate us. A good director knows how to put scenes in a sequence that will attract our eyes, stir up our emotions, and ultimately connect those heightened feelings to cerebral associations, memories, and ideas. Good movies will tell a story and deliver a message. It’s why we watch them in the first place: to be moved.
This isn’t a new idea; it has been around since the early days of movie-making. One of the most famous examples of it comes from “Stachka” (or “Strike,” in English) a silent film made by Sergei Eisenstein in 1925. Stachka takes place in Soviet Russia in 1903. Its plot, in a nutshell: factory workers go on strike, asking for more money and fewer hours; the company rejects the terms; the workers are hungry, angry, rowdy; the military storms in, corrals all the workers into a big field, kills them all.
The movie is best known for a few scenes at the end, in which Eisenstein cross-cuts the workers running for their lives with graphic footage of cattle being slaughtered.
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