If the movies’ technical evolution is primarily a function of attracting audiences for commercial purposes, and if the visual language of advertising exists primarily to persuade, there is a fundamental contradiction in the suggestion that we learn to read images the way we learn to read words. The latter exists to promote thought and interpretation, while the former exists to promote impressions and feelings. One seeks to work consciously, the other unconsciously. If one reaches the emotions only after a process of intellectual interpretation, the other can be intellectually interpreted only after being emotionally experienced first.

As a movie critic for a major daily newspaper (the Toronto Star), it is my peculiar job to work against this fundamental tendency of motion pictures. I take these emotional experiences – comprised of light, colour, motion, and music – and render them as words. As fundamentally absurd as this may seem from some perspectives, from others it makes perfect sense, In order to properly analyze, respond to, and evaluate movies, for whatever it’s worth to do so, it is first of all necessary that one translate their visceral effects into language. The flow of images, that is, must be interrupted in order to be evaluated.

If this evokes an image of someone standing in a raging torrent, it is an not altogether overdramatic image: the torrent of flowing images has never raged more ferociously than it does now, and the process of evaluating moving images is fundamentally – and necessarily – an act that tilts itself against the prevailing currents of motion picture production.

It is in the nature of contemporary commercial moving image production to flow incessantly: to maintain the appeal to the emotions and circumvent the process of intellectual interpretation – which, by its very nature, isolates and short-circuits the connection between emotion and consumption – it is in the interest of moving pictures to keep on moving – faster than the speed of thought, faster than the speed of intellectual response, and certainly faster than the reasonable tendency to question just what all these images are for. The state of satisfied passivity is image culture’s goal, for the more passive the audience is the more suggestive it is to the call to consume. And so it is a critical priority of moving pictures in consumer capitalist society not only to keep moving, but to do so with such constant ubiquity their very artificial nature becomes virtually natural – part, that is, of the environments we live in, as seemingly natural as weather, or a flowing river, itself.