Tribeca Film Festival: Filmmaker and Futurist Jason Silva On How Humans Are Hardwired for Story and Cinema

As part of Tribeca Film Festival's "Future of Film" series, tomorrow, April 22, filmmaker and futurist Jason Silva (dubbed the "Timothy Leary of the Viral Video Age" by The Atlantic) will muse about how humans are hardwired for story and cinema.

"Film is the only technology that allows us to share subjectivity with someone else."

Despite technology, isn't it still about storytelling?

Diana Slattery writes thatImmersionis a "necessary precursor for any kind of interpersonal persuasion or transformation to occur".. Janet Murray writes that we "long to be immersed" and that we "actively metabolize belief in story"... because we are effectively narrative beings.

I'm fascinated by the liminal spaces we enter when we are absorbed by cinema: that magical borderland between dreams and reality, the space of archetype, of myth, of madness and ecstasy, the landscape of the imagination, freed from the constraints of time/space/ distance.

Art is the lie that reveals the truth, as they say. During the talk, I will talk about the lust for immersion we have, the moment we forget ourselves and become part of the movie consciousness and we leave our own consciousness behind.

We want to hold up a mirror to ourselves. Film is the only technology that allows us to share subjectivity with someone else. A film allows us to enter the world of somebody else and the mind of another. I'm such a fan of that power that cinema has. I just find it endlessly inspiring.

My short films, which I call "Shots of Awe" are trailers for the mind-- they explore these topics and many more.

Watch a couple of Silva's short films below and find out more about Silva here.

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Tribeca Film Festival: Filmmaker and Futurist Jason Silva On How Humans Are Hardwired for Story and Cinema