Describe your interest in art and film - Essay Example

Describe your interest in art and film. The world would be very dull without art and film. As a child I was always very keen to play with crayons and paper and I enjoyed many hours of recorded television programmes from a very early age. There seems to be something very meaningful about pictures because they convey a whole lot of impressions and emotions without going through the thinking part of the brain. Even babies react to pictures with smiles. An example of the power of art can be seen in the Statue of Liberty which is a sculpture symbolizing the kind of society that America represents.

Famous painters like Andy Warhol and David Hockney capture the mood of their age and make us reflect on what is important or even just popular in society. The movies of the 1940s and the early color movies of the 1950s also capture elements of American culture and I find it fascinating to observe the way the people are different from people today. All of the visual aspects of these movies, including interior decor, costumes, and the details of street scenes conjure up a world that is gone now.

Through watching these films I can imagine what it must have been like to live in those days. I I also enjoy analyzing the way the film is put together from a script and a set of many thousands of still frames with different camera angles, musical score, etc. to make a complete whole. The world of film is very commercialized, and this is something that people today have learned to accept without thinking. I find interesting to see which films are released for the mass market, and to work out why some of them are such great successes, and some of them lose a lot of money.

One genre that I find fascinating is science fiction, because it allows the director and the audience to venture into a parallel universe, where the strangest things can happen. Alien creatures used to be always presented as the enemy, as for example in the Alien series, but in modern times there is more of an attempt to see things from a non-human point of view. The film Avatar, for example, presents some of the most pressing issues of our modern Earth, such as ecology and getting along with different points of view.

By making the actors non-human, and mixing computer technology with live acting, this film has made me reconsider all the traditions that we take for granted in film: “Every aspect of how films are made, viewed, and thought about has been affected by digital technology” (Lehman and Luhr: 2003, p. 354). It will be exciting to see where this technology leads in the future. In art I am impressed by artists who can paint realistic images, because I know this is technically difficult to achieve.

Going to an art gallery to look at old paintings is a humbling experience which shows me that previous generations may have had less technology but they often had more dedication and skill in their art. I like modern art that is quirky, and especially art pieces that have a sculptured quality. I think touch is a very important part of art appreciation, because the way a substance feels tells me a lot about its real nature. I cannot imagine life without art and film and I am looking forward to studying them more deeply so that I can learn more about human nature and creativity through the ages.

References Lehman, P. and Luhr, W. (2003) Thinking About Movies: Watching, Questioning, Enjoying. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.