On Cinema as Mass Intimacy

The paradox of cinema is that it is most effective when it seems to fuse two contradictory elements—the general and the personal—into a kind of mass intimacy. The work itself is unchanging, aimed at an audience of millions, and yet—when it works—a film seems to speak to each member of the audience in a powerfully personal way.

The origins of this power are mysterious, but I believe they come from two of the primary characteristics of motion picture: that it is a theater of thought and that it is a collaborative art. (p.142-143)

Interaction designers also deal with the paradox of the general and the personal. On one hand, we create abstract models of experience and draw upon general principles in order to explore a design. On the other hand, the product of that process is ultimately experienced by a particular person in a personal way. Interaction design is an weird reconciliation between these two facts.

So it is interesting to look at Murch’s reasoning for how cinema manages to create this “mass intimacy.” First, he calls cinema a “theater of thought” in that it’s uniquely focused on making the thoughts of characters visible on screen. He implies that this essential focus on human experience and emotion is part of what allows the same film to be accessed by different people in a personal way.

His second point is particularly interesting because it isn’t about the film itself, but about how it was created. The fact that a film is a collaboration between multiple people creates “a multi-faceted and yet integrated complexity that will have the greatest chance of catching and sustaining the interest of the audience, which is itself a multi-faceted entity in search of integration.” (p.143)