The Art of Storytelling

 Movies enjoy a lasting foothold as the premier artform of the twentieth-century and beyond.      Differentiating “movies” from the broader categorization of “film” or “motion pictures”, the medium has a broad sense of accessibility, relatability and perceptibility to a mass audience. These can all be credited, in part, with the genre’s lasting dominance within the modern era. Distinct from more catchall sobriquets, the term “movie” refers to a film style that utilizes narrative and representative reality to engage with its viewers. Through narrative, movies engage with its audience by harkening to the inborn human curiosity of “cause” and “effect.” We are able to perceive this causality with intense clarity due to the variability of framing and focus. By being shown in pictorial form, these details mean more to us than they ever potentially could be in less overt media, such as novels or even stage-plays. Movies, in essence, have a mass appeal because of the fluidit...

       The expression “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” while perhaps accurate, remains vague -- more appropriately, beauty is attributed to the fluency in which a viewer can intake and process aesthetics and stimuli. Objects which can be rapidly and reliably interpreted by its perceiver seem to almost universally prompt more positive responses, owing to many varying qualities including object symmetry, contrast and information saturation while also being attributed to the viewer’s history and familiarity with the subject.       The alacrity in which one can intake and interpret data, stimuli and information refers to one’s “processing fluency” (Reber 366). Generally speaking, subjects that require less processing in turn have been found to have a more positive effect on those viewing than other, more complex subjects. Often this is attributed to a feeling of “error-free processing,” and being able to accurately recognize the stimulus at han...