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The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact
How is watching a movie similar to dreaming? What goes on in our minds when we become absorbed in a movie? How does looking “into” a movie screen allow us to experience the thoughts and feelings of a movie’s characters? These and related questions are at the heart of The Power of Movies, a thoughtful, invigorating, and remarkably accessible book about a phenomenon seemingly beyond reach of our understanding. Colin McGinn–“an ingenious philosopher who thinks like a laser and writes like a dream,” according to Steven Pinker–enhances our understanding of both movies and ourselves in this book of rare and refreshing insight.
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
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257 people want to read
About the author
Colin McGinn
41 books75 followersColin McGinn is a British philosopher currently working at the University of Miami. McGinn has also held major teaching positions at Oxford University and Rutgers University. He is best known for his work in the philosophy of mind, though he has written on topics across the breadth of modern philosophy. Chief among his works intended for a general audience is the intellectual memoir The Making of a Philosopher: My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy (2002).
Colin McGinn was born in Blackpool, England in 1950. He enrolled in Manchester University to study psychology. However, by the time he received his degree in psychology from Manchester in 1971 (by writing a thesis focusing on the ideas of Noam Chomsky), he wanted to study philosophy as a postgraduate. By 1972, McGinn was admitted into Oxford University's B.Litt postgraduate programme, in hopes of eventually gaining entrance into Oxford's postgraduate B.Phil. programme.
McGinn quickly made the transition from psychology to philosophy during his first term at Oxford. After working zealously to make the transition, he was soon admitted into the B.Phil programme under the recommendation of his advisor, Michael R. Ayers. Shortly after entering the philosophy programme, he won the John Locke Prize in 1972. By 1974, McGinn received the B.Phil degree from Oxford, writing a thesis under the supervision of P.F. Strawson, which focused on the semantics of Donald Davidson.
In 1974, McGinn took his first philosophy position at University College London. In January 1980, he spent two semesters at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) as a visiting professor. Then, shortly after declining a job at University of Southern California, he succeeded Gareth Evans as Wilde Reader at Oxford University. In 1988, shortly after a visiting term at City University of New York (CUNY), McGinn received a job offer from Rutgers University. He accepted the offer from Rutgers, joining ranks with, among others, Jerry Fodor in the philosophy department. McGinn stayed at Rutgers until 2006, when he accepted a job offer from University of Miami as full time professor.
Although McGinn has written dozens of articles in philosophical logic, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language, he is best known for his work in the philosophy of mind. In his 1989 article "Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?", McGinn speculates that the human mind is innately incapable of comprehending itself entirely, and that this incapacity spawns the puzzles of consciousness that have preoccupied Western philosophy since Descartes. Thus, McGinn's answer to the hard problem of consciousness is that humans cannot find the answer. This position has been nicknamed the "New Mysterianism". The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World (2000) is a non-technical exposition of McGinn's theory.
Outside of philosophy, McGinn has written a novel entitled The Space Trap (1992). He was also featured prominently as an interviewee in Jonathon Miller's Brief History of Disbelief, a documentary miniseries about atheism's history. He discussed the philosophy of belief as well as his own beliefs as an atheist.
Colin McGinn was born in Blackpool, England in 1950. He enrolled in Manchester University to study psychology. However, by the time he received his degree in psychology from Manchester in 1971 (by writing a thesis focusing on the ideas of Noam Chomsky), he wanted to study philosophy as a postgraduate. By 1972, McGinn was admitted into Oxford University's B.Litt postgraduate programme, in hopes of eventually gaining entrance into Oxford's postgraduate B.Phil. programme.
McGinn quickly made the transition from psychology to philosophy during his first term at Oxford. After working zealously to make the transition, he was soon admitted into the B.Phil programme under the recommendation of his advisor, Michael R. Ayers. Shortly after entering the philosophy programme, he won the John Locke Prize in 1972. By 1974, McGinn received the B.Phil degree from Oxford, writing a thesis under the supervision of P.F. Strawson, which focused on the semantics of Donald Davidson.
In 1974, McGinn took his first philosophy position at University College London. In January 1980, he spent two semesters at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) as a visiting professor. Then, shortly after declining a job at University of Southern California, he succeeded Gareth Evans as Wilde Reader at Oxford University. In 1988, shortly after a visiting term at City University of New York (CUNY), McGinn received a job offer from Rutgers University. He accepted the offer from Rutgers, joining ranks with, among others, Jerry Fodor in the philosophy department. McGinn stayed at Rutgers until 2006, when he accepted a job offer from University of Miami as full time professor.
Although McGinn has written dozens of articles in philosophical logic, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language, he is best known for his work in the philosophy of mind. In his 1989 article "Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?", McGinn speculates that the human mind is innately incapable of comprehending itself entirely, and that this incapacity spawns the puzzles of consciousness that have preoccupied Western philosophy since Descartes. Thus, McGinn's answer to the hard problem of consciousness is that humans cannot find the answer. This position has been nicknamed the "New Mysterianism". The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World (2000) is a non-technical exposition of McGinn's theory.
Outside of philosophy, McGinn has written a novel entitled The Space Trap (1992). He was also featured prominently as an interviewee in Jonathon Miller's Brief History of Disbelief, a documentary miniseries about atheism's history. He discussed the philosophy of belief as well as his own beliefs as an atheist.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
September 27, 2018
Intriguing theory, but it seems to make claims that are both too bold (specific claims about the substance and production dreams that need further validation and seem to fly against some of the evidence) or too narrow (why wouldn’t a similar theory apply to reading a novel or watching a play?). He also seems to handwave much when answering potential criticisms.
December 2, 2021
[2.5/5 is a more accurate score]
McGinn tries to answer the following question: why are we so interested and invested in watching movies? What's in it that is so fascinating to the point of making us sit through hours watching moving images?
His theory appeals to three factors:
(i) Perception: Film watching is a case of looking-into, instead of the usual looking-at; what this is means is that seeing a film is like seeing a transparent object: you never look at the object, but rather through it. Specifically, the movie screen is something through which we look at the objects it represents, and McGinn thinks that the act of looking-into is in itself something pleasant, as an exercise of looking for something interesting by looking through another object. Other features of film perception that could explain its attractiveness are the following: (a) they invite mindreading (i.e., the attempt at interpreting the mental states actors exhibit), specially due to the exploration of formal techniques such as close-ups, lighting, etc.; (b) they invite imaginative seeing and the construction of interpretations or narratives; (c) they invite voyeurism, i.e., unreciprocated looking into the bodies and minds of characters and their particular situations (this seems to me to be the most interesting aspect of film perception, and one that could explain some particular problems such as the problem of painful art in the case of films -- but that is another matter).
(ii) Mental connotations: Cinematic images are, McGinn says, analogous to mental images. By this McGinn means that the formal aspects of film images have connotations with the folk psychological concept we have of a person, according to which a person is not really identical with the body, but is actually a non-tangible, unified, volitional entity -- in other words, a soul. But since souls have no spatial properties, and movie images have two spatial properties, McGinn revises his hypothesis to defend that what movie images are analogous to are what he calls "dematerialized (i.e., odorless, weightless, unified, idealized) bodies". Now what does this have to do with the attraction in movie watching? I believe that McGinn's point is that movie images of actors cause us to associate with the mental notion of the dematerialized body, and so its formal properties seem better suited to exploring and revealing psychological insights about humans -- the same way we may ordinarily think that "looking directly at the soul" is more insightful way of knowing a person than looking at its body and social behavior alone.
It's here that McGinn presents the general theory he'll be comitting to in order to explain our fascination with movies. Basically, this general theory is film mentalism: there is a significant analogy between the way movies work and function, and the way the mind itself works. One interesting point of analogy McGinn brings is that both film screen and mind possess intentionality: both are capable of representing objects, of being about something; furthermore, both essentially involve contrastive juxtaposition: even though the movie image and mental images are about some object, they are not themselves their own objects: consciousness represents spatial objects but is not itself an spatial object, and mental images are not what they are an image of. (I should notice, however, that the notion of physical objects capable of intrinsic intentionality is deeply controversial in philosophy, and should not be simply assumed as McGinn does).
Specifically, McGinn thinks that cinematic images are best thought of as being analogues to mental images; that is, images one visualizes, and whose objects do not strike us as being present or existent. E.g., I can visualize a whale right now, even though I know it's not really present here; similarly, I can see into the movie image and know that the objects it represents are not really present here in the moment. What is important here is that being visual is a crucial component in the analogy. This is why McGinn doesn't think that mental images are analogues of thoughts, for thoughts are not necessarily visual.
(iii) Dreaming connotations: Finally, McGinn specifies his own version of the mentalist theory of films. According to him, the most plausible mental analogues for movie images are dreams (actually, he makes a last revision at the end of the book to add that lucid dreams are the best analogues): experiencing a movie is analogous to experiencing a dream in the sense that both experiences involve the same mechanisms and processes characteristic of dreaming states. The bulk of McGinn's book is trying to establish the plausibility of this theory by setting a number of relevant analogies between film experiences and dream experiences; I cannot do justice to his theory in a short paragraph summarizing his analogies here.
Is his theory any plausible in accounting for our fascination with movies?
First of all, it is important to note that McGinn's reasoning is almost entirely analogical, trying to establish the mere plausibility of the dream theory by noting certain relevant similarities between two types of experience. This is notably a feeble kind of reasoning that is prone to have some problems the moment a relevant disanalogy is discovered. Unfortunately, the dream theory does have its share of disanalogies.
Before going into these, I must note that a lot of the analogies McGinn tries to pull off are just plain ridiculous, and frankly not that relevant. E.g., when he's talking about the looking-into feature of film experiences, he tries to show that our looking into objects such as water, holes and the sky are similar to film experiences; one of his evidences is that people began applying metaphorically the astronomical term "star" to people because they "must have been thinking of the stars of the sky, and hence analogizing sky and screen" (p.26). Not only is this plain false (as one critic from the NY times has noticed, this metaphorical application began during the 18th centurym well before the birth of cinema), it's just unnecessary and feels like a waste of time. Similarly, when discussing the merits of the dream theory, McGinn believes that one evidence in favor of the film-dream analogy is that there is a functional analogy between NREM dream states -- states that precede full-blown deep dreams characteristic of REM sleep -- and movie trailers, in that bot of them serve as devices of transition between different states; not only that, McGinn actually seems to believe that "in both cases, there is a period of transitional consciousness before deep immersion becomes possible". Does he actually believe movie trailers are necessary in order to have a full immersive film experience? Does he actually believe this is the reason we have movie trailers in the first place? Can you actually take him seriously? Pardon my rhetoric, but I must confess this strikes me as parody rather than actual theoretical reasoning. Something similar happens elsewhere in the book: McGinn suggests that most people watch movies at night as their preferable time because most of us don't sleep during the afternoon -- he seems to believe there is evidence of analogy here, instead of a sociological explanation on why we don't usually watch movies during the afternoon: most people are in their working hours or studying, and many want to socialize and watch movies together when their friends are available -- isn't that reasonable enough for an explanation? Do we really have to explain this with the dream theory?
Examples of failed analogies abound in the book -- which is a shame, because I actually am very interested in the mentalist theory of films. I do believe that they seem to partially explain our fascination with this kind of artistic medium, and McGinn's theories of film perception and the ontology of the image screen seem promising enough as a start to understanding film appreciation.
The main problem, though, is with the specific dream theory; this is where I tend to disagree the most with McGinn; Fortunately, my problems focus on specific details rather than on the general picture, so there might be some work to do with the dream theory yet. Basically, I disagree with McGinn on how dreams and films work. McGinn thinks films and dreams share a basic sensorial-affective structure (they have a function of venting out our emotions, and their narratives try their best in doing this by giving us certain sensorial inputs), I don't (in fact, I don't think neither of them have any kind of function -- film is a medium you use according to other more basic purposes and values, while dreams are mere spandrels of certain evolutionary processess); McGinn thinks there are necessary emotional components and a base self in dreams, I don't (in fact, vicarious dreams and external observer dreams count as severe counterexamples to McGinn's understanding of dreams); McGinn thinks we believe what we see in dreams, I don't (lucid dreams are an example); McGinn thinks there's a reactivation of dream mechanisms when we watch films, I find that deeply dubious at best; McGinn thinks it's implausible to think that dreams are constructed during sleep ("the dream content is too intelligent and cunning to be brought out instantly" (p.186)), I don't (dreams don't have intelligent design anyway, and the fact that they're rooted in past experiences doesn't prove that they're constructed well before sleep occurs -- McGinn is forcefully projecting film construction into dream construction).
Despite all that, I think the dream theory is interesting, but McGinn fails to convince me on account of two disanalogies (and I don't have to reject McGinn's understanding of films and dreams in general to point them out). First, films are public activies, while dreams aren't. Answering that "you could get together with other people in a big room and go off to sleep" and that "there is no logical bar to having the same dream they do" doesn't solve the problem: The fact that we're having the same type of dream doesn't mean that dream is public. I cannot communicate or interact with those people because they're simply not there -- the dream space is necessarily individual and closed to one perspective only. Second, the dream theory fails to capture certain kinds of film; comedy films and documentaries (if we're thinking that dreams have a sensorial-affective structure) are examples. We don't have humorous dreams, and some kinds of filmes don't have emotional components at all, so certain relevant disanalogies threaten the theory. McGinn's answer ("When I am amused at the cinema [...] it is like my amusement at the recollection of a dream [...]" (p.175)) seems suspiciously ad hoc to me, but others may share his intuition. If these criticisms are relevant, then the dream theory fails, and needs at least a revision.
All in all, this was alright. I felt inspired by some of the insights given by McGinn (even when I was directly against him), but the excess of uninteresting analogies, coupled with a boring, "not too academic but not too popular" writing style made me want to skim most of the book -- and you can read the entire thing is just a few hours. I highly recommend reading chapters four and five, which constitue the bulk of the dream theory. The rest is up to you.
McGinn tries to answer the following question: why are we so interested and invested in watching movies? What's in it that is so fascinating to the point of making us sit through hours watching moving images?
His theory appeals to three factors:
(i) Perception: Film watching is a case of looking-into, instead of the usual looking-at; what this is means is that seeing a film is like seeing a transparent object: you never look at the object, but rather through it. Specifically, the movie screen is something through which we look at the objects it represents, and McGinn thinks that the act of looking-into is in itself something pleasant, as an exercise of looking for something interesting by looking through another object. Other features of film perception that could explain its attractiveness are the following: (a) they invite mindreading (i.e., the attempt at interpreting the mental states actors exhibit), specially due to the exploration of formal techniques such as close-ups, lighting, etc.; (b) they invite imaginative seeing and the construction of interpretations or narratives; (c) they invite voyeurism, i.e., unreciprocated looking into the bodies and minds of characters and their particular situations (this seems to me to be the most interesting aspect of film perception, and one that could explain some particular problems such as the problem of painful art in the case of films -- but that is another matter).
(ii) Mental connotations: Cinematic images are, McGinn says, analogous to mental images. By this McGinn means that the formal aspects of film images have connotations with the folk psychological concept we have of a person, according to which a person is not really identical with the body, but is actually a non-tangible, unified, volitional entity -- in other words, a soul. But since souls have no spatial properties, and movie images have two spatial properties, McGinn revises his hypothesis to defend that what movie images are analogous to are what he calls "dematerialized (i.e., odorless, weightless, unified, idealized) bodies". Now what does this have to do with the attraction in movie watching? I believe that McGinn's point is that movie images of actors cause us to associate with the mental notion of the dematerialized body, and so its formal properties seem better suited to exploring and revealing psychological insights about humans -- the same way we may ordinarily think that "looking directly at the soul" is more insightful way of knowing a person than looking at its body and social behavior alone.
It's here that McGinn presents the general theory he'll be comitting to in order to explain our fascination with movies. Basically, this general theory is film mentalism: there is a significant analogy between the way movies work and function, and the way the mind itself works. One interesting point of analogy McGinn brings is that both film screen and mind possess intentionality: both are capable of representing objects, of being about something; furthermore, both essentially involve contrastive juxtaposition: even though the movie image and mental images are about some object, they are not themselves their own objects: consciousness represents spatial objects but is not itself an spatial object, and mental images are not what they are an image of. (I should notice, however, that the notion of physical objects capable of intrinsic intentionality is deeply controversial in philosophy, and should not be simply assumed as McGinn does).
Specifically, McGinn thinks that cinematic images are best thought of as being analogues to mental images; that is, images one visualizes, and whose objects do not strike us as being present or existent. E.g., I can visualize a whale right now, even though I know it's not really present here; similarly, I can see into the movie image and know that the objects it represents are not really present here in the moment. What is important here is that being visual is a crucial component in the analogy. This is why McGinn doesn't think that mental images are analogues of thoughts, for thoughts are not necessarily visual.
(iii) Dreaming connotations: Finally, McGinn specifies his own version of the mentalist theory of films. According to him, the most plausible mental analogues for movie images are dreams (actually, he makes a last revision at the end of the book to add that lucid dreams are the best analogues): experiencing a movie is analogous to experiencing a dream in the sense that both experiences involve the same mechanisms and processes characteristic of dreaming states. The bulk of McGinn's book is trying to establish the plausibility of this theory by setting a number of relevant analogies between film experiences and dream experiences; I cannot do justice to his theory in a short paragraph summarizing his analogies here.
Is his theory any plausible in accounting for our fascination with movies?
First of all, it is important to note that McGinn's reasoning is almost entirely analogical, trying to establish the mere plausibility of the dream theory by noting certain relevant similarities between two types of experience. This is notably a feeble kind of reasoning that is prone to have some problems the moment a relevant disanalogy is discovered. Unfortunately, the dream theory does have its share of disanalogies.
Before going into these, I must note that a lot of the analogies McGinn tries to pull off are just plain ridiculous, and frankly not that relevant. E.g., when he's talking about the looking-into feature of film experiences, he tries to show that our looking into objects such as water, holes and the sky are similar to film experiences; one of his evidences is that people began applying metaphorically the astronomical term "star" to people because they "must have been thinking of the stars of the sky, and hence analogizing sky and screen" (p.26). Not only is this plain false (as one critic from the NY times has noticed, this metaphorical application began during the 18th centurym well before the birth of cinema), it's just unnecessary and feels like a waste of time. Similarly, when discussing the merits of the dream theory, McGinn believes that one evidence in favor of the film-dream analogy is that there is a functional analogy between NREM dream states -- states that precede full-blown deep dreams characteristic of REM sleep -- and movie trailers, in that bot of them serve as devices of transition between different states; not only that, McGinn actually seems to believe that "in both cases, there is a period of transitional consciousness before deep immersion becomes possible". Does he actually believe movie trailers are necessary in order to have a full immersive film experience? Does he actually believe this is the reason we have movie trailers in the first place? Can you actually take him seriously? Pardon my rhetoric, but I must confess this strikes me as parody rather than actual theoretical reasoning. Something similar happens elsewhere in the book: McGinn suggests that most people watch movies at night as their preferable time because most of us don't sleep during the afternoon -- he seems to believe there is evidence of analogy here, instead of a sociological explanation on why we don't usually watch movies during the afternoon: most people are in their working hours or studying, and many want to socialize and watch movies together when their friends are available -- isn't that reasonable enough for an explanation? Do we really have to explain this with the dream theory?
Examples of failed analogies abound in the book -- which is a shame, because I actually am very interested in the mentalist theory of films. I do believe that they seem to partially explain our fascination with this kind of artistic medium, and McGinn's theories of film perception and the ontology of the image screen seem promising enough as a start to understanding film appreciation.
The main problem, though, is with the specific dream theory; this is where I tend to disagree the most with McGinn; Fortunately, my problems focus on specific details rather than on the general picture, so there might be some work to do with the dream theory yet. Basically, I disagree with McGinn on how dreams and films work. McGinn thinks films and dreams share a basic sensorial-affective structure (they have a function of venting out our emotions, and their narratives try their best in doing this by giving us certain sensorial inputs), I don't (in fact, I don't think neither of them have any kind of function -- film is a medium you use according to other more basic purposes and values, while dreams are mere spandrels of certain evolutionary processess); McGinn thinks there are necessary emotional components and a base self in dreams, I don't (in fact, vicarious dreams and external observer dreams count as severe counterexamples to McGinn's understanding of dreams); McGinn thinks we believe what we see in dreams, I don't (lucid dreams are an example); McGinn thinks there's a reactivation of dream mechanisms when we watch films, I find that deeply dubious at best; McGinn thinks it's implausible to think that dreams are constructed during sleep ("the dream content is too intelligent and cunning to be brought out instantly" (p.186)), I don't (dreams don't have intelligent design anyway, and the fact that they're rooted in past experiences doesn't prove that they're constructed well before sleep occurs -- McGinn is forcefully projecting film construction into dream construction).
Despite all that, I think the dream theory is interesting, but McGinn fails to convince me on account of two disanalogies (and I don't have to reject McGinn's understanding of films and dreams in general to point them out). First, films are public activies, while dreams aren't. Answering that "you could get together with other people in a big room and go off to sleep" and that "there is no logical bar to having the same dream they do" doesn't solve the problem: The fact that we're having the same type of dream doesn't mean that dream is public. I cannot communicate or interact with those people because they're simply not there -- the dream space is necessarily individual and closed to one perspective only. Second, the dream theory fails to capture certain kinds of film; comedy films and documentaries (if we're thinking that dreams have a sensorial-affective structure) are examples. We don't have humorous dreams, and some kinds of filmes don't have emotional components at all, so certain relevant disanalogies threaten the theory. McGinn's answer ("When I am amused at the cinema [...] it is like my amusement at the recollection of a dream [...]" (p.175)) seems suspiciously ad hoc to me, but others may share his intuition. If these criticisms are relevant, then the dream theory fails, and needs at least a revision.
All in all, this was alright. I felt inspired by some of the insights given by McGinn (even when I was directly against him), but the excess of uninteresting analogies, coupled with a boring, "not too academic but not too popular" writing style made me want to skim most of the book -- and you can read the entire thing is just a few hours. I highly recommend reading chapters four and five, which constitue the bulk of the dream theory. The rest is up to you.
March 3, 2016
What kind of book can talk about "the power of movies", and never refer to a single scene in a single movie? Oh sure, McGinn mentions Citizen Kane in the second chapter, but says absolutely nothing about it: he uses the movie, and the fact that Orson Welles played the lead, not to tell us anything about the art or craft of making movies, but merely to ruminate on the relation of image to object. This is not helpful.
I suppose the subtitle of the book (How Screen and Mind Interact) ought to have been a clue. Still, you would expect (OK, I would expect) that to talk about "movies" would involve talking to some extent about actual, specific movies. What can you possibly hope to achieve by generalizations? When talking about "movies" are we meant to think that there is nothing different between the films of Peter Jackson and those of Carl Theodor Dreyer? That the mind "interacts" with all films in the same way? McGinn seems to suggest exactly that, as when he says that you don't look at the image but "through" it. That may be true for many films and for many viewers, but it is nowhere close to true for certain films (12 Monkeys, or Un Chien Andalou, or Daisies come to mind). And it is certain that film students, actors, and directors look at the images, to figure out how the director and cinematographer achieved the effects, the "power", that they achieved.
This was just a disappointing book. As I was reading it I felt that McGinn was being lazy, that he hadn't done proper research. But I think the problem is more fundamental: McGinn simply doesn't see this (the understanding of cinema) as an object of empirical research. For him it seems to be a matter of pure analysis, taking the most evident features of cinema as a jumping off point. What next? Will he write a book, The Power of Painting, and never refer to any specific painting or artist? What could anyone ever learn from such a book? And what can anyone learn from the book that he actually wrote? Nothing, I think, or very little.
I suppose the subtitle of the book (How Screen and Mind Interact) ought to have been a clue. Still, you would expect (OK, I would expect) that to talk about "movies" would involve talking to some extent about actual, specific movies. What can you possibly hope to achieve by generalizations? When talking about "movies" are we meant to think that there is nothing different between the films of Peter Jackson and those of Carl Theodor Dreyer? That the mind "interacts" with all films in the same way? McGinn seems to suggest exactly that, as when he says that you don't look at the image but "through" it. That may be true for many films and for many viewers, but it is nowhere close to true for certain films (12 Monkeys, or Un Chien Andalou, or Daisies come to mind). And it is certain that film students, actors, and directors look at the images, to figure out how the director and cinematographer achieved the effects, the "power", that they achieved.
This was just a disappointing book. As I was reading it I felt that McGinn was being lazy, that he hadn't done proper research. But I think the problem is more fundamental: McGinn simply doesn't see this (the understanding of cinema) as an object of empirical research. For him it seems to be a matter of pure analysis, taking the most evident features of cinema as a jumping off point. What next? Will he write a book, The Power of Painting, and never refer to any specific painting or artist? What could anyone ever learn from such a book? And what can anyone learn from the book that he actually wrote? Nothing, I think, or very little.
October 10, 2015
Excellent! An important book that explores why it is that we like movies so much. I learned a lot about seeing, dreams, and even a little philosophy as I read this important little book. We all love movies, but how often do we stop to ask why? I think McGinn is clearly onto something in his analysis. It is one of the few books that I wish was bigger so that I could learn more. See comments on my blog as well: Sects and Violence in the Ancient World.
March 12, 2018
My favorite thing about the book was its promulgation of perspectives. What I mean is, the author creates a surface or network to provide all of his ideas and perceptions, and this I found very interesting because it provided me with new visions on how dreams and film could interact... + It allowed me to imagine new ways of viewing the topic, introducing to different visions on this specific topic (the views of the writer Colin McGinn).
I recommend this book if you are learning about cinematography and films because it could provide you with new ways of looking at movies and how they could evolve in time.
The lesson I find this book has to offer is that, movies are kind of like dreams in the way that they interfere with our senses and allow us to get inmersed within a story. The characters are not physically with us or in front of us, they are on screen, yet they resemble characteristics and emotions that stay with us until long after we have watched them.
I appreciate the content of this book in the way that I learnt a different person's view, yet I didn't like how , many times the book felt like mere opinions (in part because they are, it is all following a thesis, based out of thought) .
To finalize, "The Power of Movies" is a good book if you are interested in grasping all you can about films/movies, this is an insightful journey inside of Colin McGinn's perceptions about dreams and their comparison to films.
I recommend this book if you are learning about cinematography and films because it could provide you with new ways of looking at movies and how they could evolve in time.
The lesson I find this book has to offer is that, movies are kind of like dreams in the way that they interfere with our senses and allow us to get inmersed within a story. The characters are not physically with us or in front of us, they are on screen, yet they resemble characteristics and emotions that stay with us until long after we have watched them.
I appreciate the content of this book in the way that I learnt a different person's view, yet I didn't like how , many times the book felt like mere opinions (in part because they are, it is all following a thesis, based out of thought) .
To finalize, "The Power of Movies" is a good book if you are interested in grasping all you can about films/movies, this is an insightful journey inside of Colin McGinn's perceptions about dreams and their comparison to films.
January 7, 2020
Maybe this would be the perfect book for someone else but it was not what I was looking for. I think it would have made a better essay than book, it's so repetitive as to be mind numbing. Every interesting thought gets dragged out to death. I am looking for something more introductory for thinking about movies, philosophical but not 50 pages of all the things that can be compared to movie screens.
July 30, 2022
If this was an undergraduate dissertation I would mark it around 55, so a mid ranking 2:2, i.e makes numerous assertions that are either wrong or unsupported, betrays a lack of research and reading, and the author mistaking their own opinions for facts. This is a shame as McGinn has written some interesting books. This is not one of them.
January 14, 2023
True rating: 3.5
Some very interesting points but occasionally so far up it’s own ass. This is a quote I liked though: “Dreams and movies put us in touch with parts of ourselves that may not have much outlet in the civilized and restrained world we mainly inhabit.”
Some very interesting points but occasionally so far up it’s own ass. This is a quote I liked though: “Dreams and movies put us in touch with parts of ourselves that may not have much outlet in the civilized and restrained world we mainly inhabit.”
October 2, 2023
انا حطيت كل املى وفلوسى بس ماكجين خذلنى
May 16, 2025
This book was near unreadable. I had to stop a quarter way through.
November 4, 2014
A New York Times review of this work, which got its title wrong, called its first 60 pages “twaddle.” The reviewer is speaking of McGinn’s distinction between looking at and looking into. McGinn says we look into movies in the same way that we look into people’s faces to discover their souls. I like this distinction, but McGinn does not explore the idea of soul in any depth. In terms of film theory, he is much more in the camp of Arnheim than that of Kracauer. Like the surrealists of the twenties, McGinn says that film is at its best when it approaches the condition of dream, not when it most faithfully reproduces the exterior world
April 27, 2008
I read the first two chapters. McGinn's basic premise is that movies are so powerful because they are dream like. His whole premise hangs on the idea that movies, as we experience them in the theater, are the power. I think that movies are powerful because they are living stories, and they do a good job of telling stories, just like the old days of myths around the campfire. Also, movies are powerful whatever medium they are presented through, even 6 inch screens of portable DVD players.
March 15, 2009
I found the subject quite interesting, but the presentation was lacking. For a book about the power of movies McGinn seemed reluctant to use examples from film history. He also is quite adept at pounding a point home ad nauseum. Two hundred pages to point out that films are very similar to our dreams seems like overkill. He comes at his theory from every possible angle, but by the end I was wondering what the point was.
September 14, 2015
McGinn explores some interesting ideas about the way our minds connect with movies as though they were dreams. The book analyzes several implications of the theory, and provoked thought about the importance of both ways of thinking. Nothing earth-shattering, but still worth a read.
January 29, 2008
Compelling philosophical/theoretical treatise on the persuasive connection between watching/making movies and dreaming. Worth reading.
January 25, 2016
How interesting! I've done dream journals off and on over the years and I love film. To combine ideas about the two captured my imagination. I'm sure I'll be referencing this book for years to come.
April 26, 2010
So far I've been enjoying this accessible philosophy book. I've yet to get to the best sections: how movies are like dreams!
February 13, 2013
Talks about viewers psychological connection to the movies and movie images. Short book with some interesting insights.
January 11, 2014
Some good points, but mostly specious, obvious, or just plain wrong.
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