Film

Power of Mind

That's What Film Is All About

by Seattle City Council Member Nick Licata

I believe in the power of the mind. I believe that beliefs are more powerful than our minds. I believe that what we see is what we believe.

Film projects our beliefs--the belief that what is beautiful to our eye is beautiful to all other eyes, or the belief that what stirs our soul must stir others, or the belief that what we know must be shared with others. These beliefs frame the images that make up our everyday world. We each live in our own movie theater with an audience of one. Film invites others into the theater and leaves them sharing a new vision of the world.

Film is the most powerful tool ever designed by the human being, because it seduces minds and emotions into new worlds. No other tool in the communication cabinet of spoken and written words and still images is as powerful in visual presentation. The spoken word was the first means by which humans bridged their individual worlds together. Twenty-thousand years ago we started to draw pictures to pass those bridges on to future generations. Six-thousand years ago we started to use written words to condense pictures into a series of miniature scratches whose beauty exceeded their image.

And after this last innovation in human communication came "film"--moving images, to put it bluntly. But the power of moving images is a magnitude of 10 over the power of still images or even the written word. The evidence is all around us. How many people go to the movies or buy videos or watch TV, as compared to reading books or visiting art galleries? How much capital is invested in making movies? You don't have to look up the statistics--it's as obvious as gravity.

Don't believe me? The Nazis consolidated their political and social control over Germany through powerful propaganda films. The Vietnam War, the first televised war, brought about a new-shared belief in the tragedy and futility of that conflict. Film, be it celluloid or video, shaped and is changing the world like no other force has ever done. And it's continuing to happen, incrementally, every day, somewhere in the world--including Seattle. We have movie theaters, we have TV, and lord knows we probably have more video stores than coffeehouses. Seattle is a great place to watch movies.

But Seattle is more than just a huge receptacle; it's a cauldron boiling with talent. Seattle is brewing up a batch of its own homegrown films. It just needs to be stirred to bring out the flavor, and some of us are excited to do just that.

This weekend, WigglyWorld Studios, a nonprofit filmmakers' collective, presents "The Best of WigglyWorld." It's a sampling of local Super-8 and 16mm shorts and features, starting April 5 and running through April 12 at the Little Theatre on 19th Avenue East on Capitol Hill. Among the numerous works featured are short pieces like The Joke by Joe Sclichta and Interior Latex by Matt Wilkins. Both present visual portals into very personal, disturbing worlds of everyday people. The film worlds they create are thick with alienation and anomie. With film one can share a vision of a world to be, or reflect a vision of a world we inhabit now. In either case, once viewed, we never see the world we live in quite the same way.

I believe that the city should also support local filmmakers and as such suggested to the Seattle Arts Commission (SAC) that it treat and publicly support filmmaking as any other art form. I also proposed that there be an exhibition of locally produced films.

Cinema Seattle, the nonprofit organization that runs the Seattle International Film Festival, ran with the proposal, and, with the financial assistance of SAC, is sponsoring "On Location--Shooting in Seattle" as part of this year's festival on Memorial Day weekend. Included will be local films shot in 35mm, 16mm, and digital video, and a seminar and panel discussion on Seattle filmmaking involving local filmmakers, craftspeople, and journalists.

I would encourage film lovers to attend this weekend's screenings, and to attend the On Location screenings and experience how Seattle's filmmaking scene is part of the larger cinematic movement changing our world and our beliefs.