The camera is about distance. It frames emotion. It can be connected to the thematic idea of closeness and being far away. We are connected by how far we are apart. All lost souls separated in a sea of mortality. The camera accentuates this separation, this break-up. It shows our separation, our loneliness and our closeness. It shows us this and makes us feel something because of it.

Most films are about a character who seeks a goal. To destroy the ring. To kill Kurtz. We follow the hero on their search and their quest. Films are at their core about human beings. We at our core are obsessed with one simple thing: being human. Each of us has a time we are born, our era in which we pass through the house of life. I am passing through this house in the beginning of the 2nd millennium since the death of our savior. I will only live a certain time and then I will be gone. We follow the exploits and struggles of each beings striving for something but what does it matter? This is my question. If indeed we are going to die, what we seek to achieve matters so little. If our life is truly the systematic continuation of DNA through the spectrum of space-time, across the sands of time - then perhaps the only important thing about being alive is to continue our genetics, prolong life. Is this way the very act of creation - procreation is so pleasurable? The act of the ultimate force of closeness, a penetrative one-ness between the two gender forces.

Our world exists as a series of dualistic connections. The sun and the moon - the light and the dark symbolize the moral forces of good and evil, life and death, woman and man and night and day. It is this rotation of the dualistic forces that maintains the equilibrium of passing time and lived life. Too many humans think of life in terms of the past, present and the future rather than a continuous process. Life never freezes. Moments last forever. Life's future has been lived, much like its past. Once you zoom out, on the lens of the universe - you see that all time is one and has no arrow but one continuous life. While this contradicts the basic 3rd law of thermodynamics, I believe that time is eternally passing - it exists as one mass. A film has no beginning and no end. It is just one contained passage. You can begin it at any time and rewind it at any time - it can begin whenever you want and ends whenever you'd like. Our time here seems forward moving - we strive and seek a goal. But it is not what lies at the end of the road that matters but the journey that leads to us - so again I ask - why does the end matter?

If we die and then that is it - why then do we live out lives struggling for something, for one single moment of satisfaction? We create invisible ladders for ourselves to climb up like rats in a maze. Other human beings control other beings, we love and we live, we fuck and we kiss, we die and we procreate - we are invisible and we are here. If you were to look at life as a painting without an arrow of time, if you were to examine the canvas of life and pull away, as if zooming out to look at it through the eyes of a cosmic God - you would not see the future or the past - you would see one single canvas, existing in multiple dimensions. You would see ink for every lifetime. A series of moments dotted together to form something larger. Think of our brain state or our memories - do they exist only forward? We think long of the past and wonder of the future so then where is the present?

I am a filmmaker. As filmmakers we are forced to make generic stories to make bundles of money. What's the point? Who will care about what money is your bank account when you're dead? We live our lives as if we are immortal and act surprised when we find out we're not. It is a bleak future. A painless invisibility. A nothingness. Emptiness. And yet Buddhism tells us that experience, that life is suffering. That true freedom is escaping the human state. Wait - I thought humanity was the core of an artistic life?

I am not a scientist. I am not fully religious. I only can write of my own thoughts and experiences. If they are invalid, so it is. I have lived a life of experiences, of feelings, of ideas. I have come into a world filled with goals. Filled with quests I must go down. Finding the right girl. Making a film. Winning on a team. But what really made me happy was being good to some people. Was being a good brother. What do terms truly matter? We live our life surrounded by terms. We idolize gods. We sprout opinions. We control others. We kill others and then we punish the people that kill only by killing them. We contend that we know that a God created us. We build nuclear bombs. We build bombs to blow our enemies up, we buy things and sell things. We listen to music. We eat, sleep and drink. We live and we die. We smile and we cry. And through all of this we assume we are important. That is the core of film - the importance of humanism. And yet as a culture we are beginning to learn that we are not as important as we thought. We are not the centre of the universe, the earth isn't flat, the Gods that created us in THEIR image do not exists. Surprise, surprise - we're beginning to learn we are but tiny grains of sand on an infinite beach. I believe soon that one day we will find many other aliens cultures outside of us. But I suppose this is the last bastion of hope - that we are alone in the universe, that as a planet filled with life - we inhabit the only one. But with the discovery of the goldilocks zones and more earth like planets this may be challenged soon. And how are we learning to deal with this. Machines are taking over. Our culture is becoming global and we are becoming mass produced. We have become tiny in a global world. We do not live in villages but a global marketplace. We are sold to as a global community. We board the internet as one, not individuals. We are a crowded mass, not an individual few. And those that lead us become god-like symbol for the unwashed mass. And we as a culture allow our controllers to control us and allow killing to occur under the banner of security to keep us being controlled for fear of what would happen if (god forbid) we became individuals. Democracy was the beginning of the end. What united us as one. In losing our individual humanity, we recognized our own unimportance. How in-fact our lives would not matter and held no important significance.

As we became insignificant we realized something important. That the human element had to go. 2001 Space Odyssey predicted the next stage of our culture - the shift away from the human element towards human genetic engineering, artificial intelligence and finally to a state where we didn't die, where we didn't need to eat or sleep - where we became Nietzsche's over humans. And this is the great danger of becoming like Gods. We drift away from our own humanity. For mortality is what truly makes us human. The lust towards death imagery mirrors humanity's pursuit to live longer. To become less human. To become monstrous. And reach a level away from ourselves. We have turned the act of procreation into a kind of perverted power act in the war of the sexes. Why - to distance ourselves from the purpose of it - to survive. Perhaps that was the recognition that as we crawled out of the caves and created an earth-like culture held under God that we would need to erase the flaws of humanity that held us back - that to truly survive the dangers of our evolutionary demise, we had to rid ourselves of the human traits that put us danger. The great challenge of our age now is whether we will survive as a world in a nuclear age. With two nuclear disasters and nuclear weapons already used in the field of war - we are not far away from global annihilation. Doesn't this effect many millions of years of genetic evolution? How could we evolve as intelligent human beings to the state where we could destroy ourselves? What is the point of that? While we may well be insignificant, life itself is not, especially a human life in that it can decode how we came to be this way in understanding how the universe was created.

I wonder what the point of my life is. Why I pick up a camera? If the point of my life is to simply continue life, to have children - what will someone look if you made a movie of the moments of my life? Was I too frightened, did I waste my experiences to defend myself from pain? Could I have withstood more? I thought about mortality as a child, I thought of everything that we lose. I thought of love. It brings tears to my eyes. Love is our greatness weakness and yet our greatest strength. It keeps us going when all seems lost. I feel lonely and insignificant sometimes. I feel like no one understands what I'm feeling or asks these kind of questions - do they even care? I want to go out knowing I asked the right questions, the one's whoever made this life for me would've wanted me to ask? Surely if I met my maker I think he'd want me to ask what the most important thing about life was? Was it love? Was it the truth? Was it being human? What is the point of being human, of living? Perhaps it is different for everyone.

When we go see movies we escape from life. Is this a great indictment of the fact that reality has become too hard to bare? Do we disappear into the entertainment of art's other worlds as a voyeurism to experience everything we can't? Does it allow us to dream and keep us from living? Am I manufacturing dreams for people to escape their real lives from? Why aren't real lives as beautiful as our dreams? We always look to events such as slavery as examples of escaping from tyranny and yet we are all human - so really weren't we just escaping from our own human system of brutality? If we are all connected in being human - aren't we indicted by our own evil nature? But there is good in this world. A lot. So where is the separation, where do we draw the line - where is the distance?

I wonder why I've become a filmmaker. What line do I draw to form my goal? What am I going for? Cinema has polluted art and destroyed inventive storytelling. The agents and the producers stand in the way of true art. Real art. Human art. Our culture has been destroyed. The lines that we set ourselves to become heroes our set by our own standards - by people and not by talent or strength or even force of will. Cinema is so young because it is not the intended medium for stories. It is a simplified way of taking artistic art forms such as art, music, drama, writing and theatre and combining them into one monstrous form. It is large and gigantic and yet a strange, diluted mixture. It's as if we took our five favorite foods and combined them into one meal. What would that taste like? Art is a representation not of reality but of the senses. It is not a representation of real life because then it is no different to a mirror. It has style because it represents how we interpret the world through our sight and sound connecting to our minds. Art, photography and theatre connect to our eyes in a visual while writing and drama connect in an intellectual way while music affects our ears. Cinema was an attempt to create an Avengers style recombinant of art to market to the masses. It was created as a way to bring all the fans to give their money over much as Avengers has done this year - it took many different films and drew more people into one. Film has no core, no real medium of philosophical backbone because it has no history. It is a mutation of form. The precusor of photography was the beginning of the end - an unreliable and unreal representation of really as we know it. The death of the human imagination, the end of thinking and the mind - the beginning of forming into one and the loss of the individual - the moment the camera zoomed back to see everything and the death of mystery, of wonder - of contemplation. Truth may have told us what was really there but our imagination cannot be held back by truth. Film is a bastardized child of once important art. It has no history. Music goes back to Pythagorus and further. Drama to the Greeks. Storytelling all the way back to ancient civilizations and art to cave paintings. Oral stories survived through the eons of time because they were not mutated but important to one of our most cherished desires - imagination. Movies are the product of thousands of people, of computers, of advertisements. We visit church like cinemas to adorn ourselves in a massive, communal experience of a bastardized art form. And what have movies given us but the same basic plot-formations:
A hero we come to love
A goal the hero seeks
Noble friends
Love
An enemy that stands in the hero's way producing conflict
A series of trials
A resolution

You may argue this is the corner-stone of all ancient storytelling, yes this is true but can we apply the same formalistic attention to music, to prayer, to art - even to theatre. Cinema had more possibilities than simply trying to create the same basic storyline as the novel. But the novel itself is a young and dying medium. Poetry is an old art form. The Iliad and the Odyssey were poems. My favorite film 2001 acts as a kind of science fiction tone poem for evolution. It creates images in our imagination that connect to our inward experience. It speaks of life and death. Dualism.

And yet poetry as an industry is dead commercially and there are few poets around anymore.

So the real question is whether there is much artistic merit in cinema? Really not much in my opinion. It is really not a true art form, it lacks a history. A sense of its own life. It stokes the ego's of the stupid and repeats the mindlessness of the masses. And how we argue for it to represent our reality when it helps us escape from ours?

It is not real life and so is robbed of its own realistic decency. Of its own humanity. It manipulates into paying to be manipulated. Imagine if we had to be paid to see movies, to endure these stories rather than to be entertained them. In the world of mass culture, of instantaneous communication - why do we go out of our way to escape? Because reality has become terrible, unlivable. But hasn't the world become safer? No, it's become bigger. We see ourselves as one. As whole and collapse individually because of this.

As we lost our individual humanity, we died as individuals and become one and so art became one. It fused inorganically into one mutated medium. We didn't want individual art forms so we made a Frankenstein-like "one" that contained them all.

Cinema comes from the word for movement. Moving images. It moves us and the images move as do the stories. That act in a state of constant change. And yet is not endless, it has definitive end points. It is an exercise and nothing more. A journey that people like to take. It does work upon us like music or prayer but as a kind of meal that we consume. We do not move in our seats - we watch people moving. We become watchers, observers bringing art to life in a quantum world. We become passive, immobile, unspoken and therefore INHUMAN in becoming participants for cinema. It allows us to become passive. It distances us from reality.

We can no longer tell the difference between reality and CGI. Real and fantastic. Magic has overtaken the world. Myth and religion have been replaced by actual hyper-fantasy. All our stone age dreaming has become real. We cannot call a medium that creates Avatar ever a realistic medium. It is not real - that's the point! We grew out of our dreaming of heavens and Gods and now we can realize it in our cinematic churches. We can worship what isn't real and escape from what is.

We are escaping from what is the most real - being human. There is a war on humanity. On reality. On living. It's battlefield is art. We have escaped from the real world, gone through the cupboard to our Narnia-like state of existence. We have scanned the real world and decided to go to a better one.

Cinema, as a polluted form of mass produced culture allows us to create our own worlds. And yet doesn't that allow our imaginations to grow? What am I arguing for? The death of cinema. No. I am simply pointing out that we are becoming less and less human. We are being taken over by fantasy and the machines.

We have distanced ourselves from ourselves, we have become separate. As one we are not individuals anymore. When we do not matter, we have no importance.

If I bring this piece back to my own personal life I wonder what the point of being a filmmaker is but more now I wonder what the point is of being human? Am I really asking that? What it means to be human? The goal is to bring back humanity. Not through film. In another way. Wrestle back what it means to be human. We are frightened of our own human possibility. Our minds built the bomb and fought world wars. And yet these same minds loved each other to continue our species. We worked hard enough together to go to the moon. We built beautiful cathedrals and wrote symphonies. We created beauty and discovered the heavens that hid above us. Storytelling is not real humanity. The closest thing to real humanity used to be religion but that in itself requires a kind of tyranny. A kind of control. What more than simply being human makes us have meaning? That itself is the most important question that we haven't discovered yet. What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of my life? I can search back through all my memories, contemplate the future that is yet to be but really remains truly a mystery to me is what it all means?

The meaning of my life is something larger than art. Meaning from a human stand point must have some connection to goodness. I do not believe in scientific meaning except for us to evolutionary runners, continuing to pass the torch on of our genes. But human meaning must be equated to human goodness. So then I must ask what good I can achieve in this life? How can I make other people's lives better? Especially those that I care about. And this again reflects a simple idea: the death of the self. The death of selfishness. Buddhist and yet the very thing I have written about this whole time. The end of the individual.

When God became a monotheistic idea - when we believed in heroes, we understood humanity as being an individual experience but now it has become many. Celebrities are worshipped. A mass culture lives on.

If cinema is not a true art form - then what is art? Art in the eyes of Aristotle is an imitation of life. A replication of reality. Then what about reality? What if we looked on to reality - what do we see there? Look at this piece of writing, it exists not as a conversation but as an art piece, a piece of writing? Culture has led to art transmographying into itself. Everything becomes part of the wheel. It has no beginning and no end. No point just a continuum.

And maybe that is the point? The meaning of life is to find any meaning in this pointless canvas. If we can find any meaning in anything it is worth something. Even though we die, even though we are insignificant - to find some form of meaning in all this meaningless has to mean something!

If I can look at a sunset and it can make me happy I have found meaning it. Can a tree find meaning in it or a rabbit? We live our lives as a series of values, positions, ups and downs - distances. We strive and we seek. We win and we lose. But at the core it is all pointless because we have the same fate. We are all the same. We are many.

If you look at something giant and extravagant and compare to something tiny and small - what of their separation? This giant universe carries around tiny human beings. And yet we matter. On a cosmic level our giant cosmos makes us tiny human beings quite insignificant and yet we find importance in ourselves, despite reality.

We think we were created by gods. Does an ant think it was created in seven days? Does a whale wonder who created us, does a dolphin question where it will go after it dies? If we are all animals, from the same primordial soup - what innate knowledge rests inside us that tells us who we are.

Do whales have meaning as they move through the ocean? Do they build churches to gods? Do whales pray? If whales prayed what would happen? Would the earth shatter, would the savior return? We created gods to symbolized that we were made for a reason. We killed our savior because we knew we knew we are not god-like. However close we get, we will always fall down - it's gravity you know...

So where does this leave us? This separation from ourselves and gods? I don't know if my life has meaning. I don't know if anyone will ever read this. But I know I'm human. Why? Because I am told so. No, it must be something I know - otherwise how could the first person know? It must be something inside of me. Some truth. I know that when I stare into space I only see emptiness. I don't see humanity. The closest thing to realizing I'm here is to look into my reflection. To re-create reality and reflect it back. And that becomes art. The purpose of art is to remind us that we're human. To point at lens back at ourselves and says - we are alive. We are human. But that was the point of art long ago. Soon we will no longer appear human. We will have no use for our muscles, our minds, our fingers, our eyes and our mouths. We will lose any need to live a human life. Machines will do our work. Computers will do our thinking. Robots will do our labor. We will see what we're told to see and have've nothing to say because everything will be said for us, as one culture. So what will the point be in being human? What will be the need for art? We have forgotten we are human beings. That we make catastrophic errors, that we contain great evil and great love - that we die. That we are important and unimportant at the same time. That we are all unfortunately the very same in a very different way.

And after we have forgotten we are human, perhaps again we will need art to remind us. We will listen to the great sonatas of Mozart, the flawed heroes of Shakespeare and the great paintings of Da Vinci and realize our humanity again and destroy the computers, break the machines and kill the robots. Once again human beings will rule the earth and art will make us human again. But perhaps not. Perhaps this is not the future we face.

It is not technology that is the problem. The problem is a human problem. When we killed off our Gods - we acknowledged that we were not being guided. When we journeyed from the heavens, we realized we were alone and when Darwin understood evolution, we realized we did not come from angels but from apes. To be without purpose, alone and animalistic made us strive towards a dark future - one where we became separated from ourselves. At our core, to become whole we need to understand not who made us but why they made us - meaning. We turned away from meaning. We turned to potential. Instead of understanding why we were - we sought to know what would we become. You cannot become anything important without first understanding why you are who you are in the first place. We built nuclear bombs without the emotional capacity to understand why we couldn't be allowed to have them. We toppled religion in the name of science without understanding the value of belief and faith. And for what truth? For what meaning?

I am long way from understanding all of these questions. Perhaps I never will understand. But I know I am looking towards important questions. Questions no one else is allowed to ask.

It doesn't matter what I say or do or even create. Why am I a filmmaker doesn't matter. I'm not a filmmaker. I'm a human being. So why am I human being? Is it about what made me human or what makes me human? Gods or nature? I am a human being because I am contemplating why I am a human being. I'm thinking, therefore I am. To think is to exist. This is what dies. Thought. This is what drives us. This is the true art form. The art form of thought. Thought is not cinematic because you can't see it but it is larger than anything in the world. More powerful than the most powerful things. It is a beacon, a weapon, an imagination - a world. In the world of thought, there is no limit. It is endless. I think a lot and I notice that people don't like to think anymore. That's a shame. Thinking is what separates us. We think about things. We wonder. Contemplate. Dream.

I dream a lot these days. Of other places. Of random thoughts. I think too much perhaps. But I love to think. You can't take away what I think, you can't even know it. It's my own. You can't buy it. You can't realize it. You can photograph it. You can't take it away from me. I can think about whatever I want.

One day I believe we will realize how important thought really is. It is the reason cinema is not an art form. It is the reason that language and words separate us from the animals. It is what dies. It is what we can create from our flesh. It gives meaning to our lives and asks to contemplate meaning. It allows us to dream and to create. It cannot be seen but can be felt. It is invisible but everywhere. It is in you and me and everyone you know. It gives me hope and joy.

Do not stop me from thinking. Do not ever make it a crime not to think. Think a lot. Think more than anyone will ever allow you too. Don't ever stop yourself from thinking too much. Don't be lazy and not think. Thinking will protect you, save you - inspire you on through the bleakness of life.

The war on thought is beginning though. We are instructed not to think. Orwell was right. Thinking is the most powerful tool of a revolution. Thinking makes us human. As humans we were meant to be free. Thinking is free.

I think that you think this essay must come to an end. I think you're right. If you don't think so then I will leave you with this:

Our minds are the most important asset we have. To have a mind is a very important thing. Consciousness is very poorly understood. It is mysterious. In a world where everything is exposed, we must seek the ideas that remain in mystery. The world of the mind is unexplored. As the first settlers must have contemplated the new world soon we will voyage into the mind. What will we find? What are we capable of? What lurks within our thoughts?

The point of life.

Thoughts?