Moving pictures tell a story 24 times a second.....

 So I've managed to get to my third post without having directly mentioned my healthy obsession with all things filmic. Of course the camera eyed amongst you will have noticed the oblique references already but I shall be scattering evidence of my passion through these pages regularly, for what value life without it's mirror, the moving image?

The moments in what we can call, for want of a more accurate phrase, 'real life' pass so quickly that none of us get a chance to reflect on their significance. It falls, then, to those (film makers) that capture a few, a very few, of those moments; that capture, as it were, the fractions of human existence as if catching a sigh in their hands, to keep for us a small collection of our experiences that we can revisit again and again. The experiences I'm talking about are those that are impossible to describe in words. Walking down a street at night in winter. Sitting in a room alone with the furniture. Standing in a public place and wondering about the life and loves of the people who pass you by, never to be seen again and, of course, standing on a railway station platform. You see? Impossible.

I'm talking about narrative rather than documentary cinema which is it's own country of genius and as such has a language that I'm much less familiar with. Sometimes known as the Seventh Art (I wish someone would tell me what the other six are) or the 20th century art form (ok I get that one) I hope to include examples of what I'm talking about through stills, video, links and so on. Just as soon as I've asked somebody how to do it.

Anyway if you're still with me after that little lot here's something to be going on with: Stop Dave, I'm afraid. First of all the visual beauty is stunning in my opinion. Austere, clinical, almost abstract and the severe geometry and monochrome colour (can you have monochrome colour?) combined with the forlorn, frightened voiceover conjure up, in me anyway, an increasingly clammy panic. That's HAL by the way. He's a computer and he's gone mad.