What does the structure of an experience look, sound, and feel like on screen? How do filmmakers immerse their viewers in the subjective experience(s) of their characters using available methods and techniques of filmmaking? Where one filmmaker may use a pan to represent a specific phenomenon of experience, another may use an element of sound design to illustrate the very same phenomenon. A dolly move in one film may serve to heighten the representation of a character's subjective emotional experience, while in another film that same technique may represent a transition in the space and time of the plot or within a character's memory.

This blog aims to investigate and catalogue how different filmmakers use the tools and techniques of the medium of film in order to craft the structure of experiences—both subjectively in the characters' minds as well as objectively as far as the reality of the events in the film and how the viewer is meant to experience those events.

It has been said that only shallow people with shallow understandings of the world look for hidden meanings, and that the profound always exists on the surface of experience. The writings in this blog don't look to ascribe meanings or attach ideas to films that aren't explicitly displayed on the screen. Instead, it looks right on the surface of the films, where the real meanings are; examining exactly how a filmmaker chose to construct experience. While many scholars and critics seem to struggle to care about movies without tying them to hyper-current social issues, politics, metaphors, or other extraneous ideas into the cinema, the author of this blog believes in the sheer profundity and utter necessity of authors sharing personal experience with others. Can you imagine if we thought that Shakespeare's works were only relevant to the politics of his time? There would be no point in reading and performing his works today. Even though Shakespeare directly comments and satirizes the events of his day, we recognize that it is the universal human experiences in his works which makes them meaningful, and that we can view and reap the beauty of a Shakespeare play today with no knowledge of the historical events of his time. And yet, we subjugate film to this very fate. Are Chaplin's films "about" industrialization in the early 20th century, or do they express the universal human experience of feeling confused and overwhelmed by the absurdity of the times one lives in? Chaplin's films took place during industrialization because that is when he was alive, that is the context of his life—not because he wished to write an anti-machine manifesto. Surely Chaplin was smart enough to simply write an essay if that was what he wished to do. Every film can be said to be about modernization, because every film is made during the modernization of the filmmaker's time. This is not a deep or worthy analysis of the art itself, though it will always make for an interesting anthropological-historical essay.

This blog believes that to create a world connected through empathy, artists can share experience with audiences, and that film is a particularly potent medium as far as its ability to leap over political, cultural, and personal barriers in order to penetrate and rearrange viewers' very cellular compositions. Investigating how authors craft the experience they are sharing allows us to more deeply embrace and understand that experience. By treating the authors' messages with respect by viewing the film on the film's terms with deep concentration, rather than ascribing outside meanings to it, this blog aims to promote these authors' messages further.