I wrote out the following twenty points when I was recording the test episodes for the Breaking Cinema podcast.
The twenty points served as a reminder to myself and to the other project members of the expansive and essential nature of the podcast, i.e. it wasn’t just a podcast where a group of people sat around discussing dusty old film topics that had been discussed a million times before.
The points were key components of the DNA of Breaking Cinema…
1) The bigger picture
2) Constructive
3) “Human beings are very complicated things. They live in several dimensions at once, not just one. And if they try to live just in one, they warp themselves horribly.”- Olaf Stapledon, Four Encounters, 1983
4) Five-dimensional thinking a.k.a. lateral thinking
5) Film history, analysis, criticism and appreciation can take care of themselves
6) Holistic = transdisciplinary
7) “The world we perceive is an artificially constructed environment whose character and properties are as much a result of unconscious mental processing as they are a product of real data.” – Subliminal: The New Unconscious and What it Teaches Us, 2014:50
8) Willful blindness a.k.a. the art of ignoring reality
9) Reflective
10) “I am not a good man and I’m not bad man. You know what I am… I am… an idiot! With a box and a screwdriver, passing through, helping out, learning.” – The Doctor, Doctor Who: Death in Heaven, 2014
11) Homo sapiens are the best and the worst thing about the planet Earth
12) “[In the future], the Internet will disappear… you won’t even sense it, it will be part of your presence all the time.” – Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, Google
13) Engaging with content is anything but passive
14) “All of us want to bury our heads in the sand when taxes are due, when we have bad habits we know we should change, or when the cars starts to make that strange sound. Ignore it and it will go away – that’s what we think and hope. It’s more than just wishful thinking. In burying our heads in the sand, we are trying to pretend the threat doesn’t exist and that we don’t have to change. We are also trying hard to avoid conflict: if the threat’s not there, I don’t have to fight it. A preference for the status quo, combined with an aversion to conflict, compel us to turn a blind eye to problems and conflicts we just don’t want to deal with.” – Margaret Heffernan, Wilful Blindness, 2012:211
15) Hybrid
16) “Until eight weeks old, every fetal brain looks female – female is nature’s default gender setting” – Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain, 2006:36
17) Creativity
18) ‘Listen’ – if you re-arrange the letters it becomes ‘silent’
19) “my mind was filled with one thought, one conception, one purpose. So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein, – more, far more, will I achieve; treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.” – Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 2003:49
20) Us
I also wrote twelve additional and more detailed points on what Breaking Cinema was not.