It's Not Kansas Anymore: It's Cinematic Thinking
And it just struck me this semester that these are interesting ways of thinking about thinking, and particularly thinking about the act of writing. But it generalizes even beyond that. The idea is that you're always putting things side by side. Why are you doing that? Why this thing, then this thing? "Tempo," then, becomes a question of how you pace the experience for your audience. And how do you make that juxtapositioning and that tempo enhance the effectiveness and the expressiveness of what you're doing? There should be an element of discovery, and an element of expression.
If you remain aware of all that, you're always going to be alert for any insights about how things now connect that maybe didn't connect before and how you can make that experience accessible for the viewer — or in the case of writing, for the reader. You become a thinker of opportunities to see new connections or reveal those that might not have been apparent before.
You're always going to be alert for any insights about how things now connect.
Grush: …And this thinking that you're doing is cinematic thinking.
Campbell: Of course.
Grush: Many of these concepts — like juxtapositioning, tempo, and other relevant ones — are part of film theory, but may not be stated in terms of a more generalized cinematic thinking… Is that right?
Campbell: Yes, and there is a rich history and theory of film. You can find discussions of juxtapositioning and tempo, for example, all the way back in very, very early writing about film, from people like Eisenstein and Pudovkin and some of the great Russian film theorists. They recognized there was something unique about what you could do with these bits of plastic or nitrate as you put them together as an expressive medium.
Grush: Thank you for telling us about your fascination with all of this and your own paths to cinematic thinking. Maybe, for some of the rest of us, there is a yellow brick road to that place!
About the Author
Mary Grush is Editor and Conference Program Director, Campus Technology.