What is a film?

The film is a mix of reality and fantasy, fact and fiction. It’s a story told in images, a fiction with shades of reality, it both reproduces the world
and re-imagines it using the creative filtering of emotions. First reality reproduced, second reality reconfigured.

What about a TV production - news or reality TV? Why we can stay captivated watching a film for over two hours but we can’t stop flipping TV channels? The answer is in the difference between the way communication is achieved. In TV the image is direct, flat and unemotional. In cinema, the films we see are just splashes of light that act as stimuli to our constructive mental processes: we don’t see the characters and scenes at all- we imagine them. So movie watching is heavily imaginative, just as dreaming is.