Chapter 4

Motion Pictures and Visual Storytelling

Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.

—Ingmar Bergman, director, quoted in John Berger1

The term “motion pictures” is most commonly applied to film or the cinema: movies projected to audiences of relative strangers in a theatre setting. Our daily lives are now so immersed in moving images, it’s hard to believe there was a time they didn’t exist. Few of us can remember a world without television, movies or video games. The oldest of these three – the medium of film – is still extremely young in the broader history of storytelling and yet is a primary influence and consideration ...

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