POWER OF MOVIES, THE: HOW SCREEN AND MIND INTERACT

McGinn (The Making of a Philosopher) presents a lighthearted exegesis of film's hold on our imagination. He begins by suggesting a movie screen is something we look into rather than at, then considers what else our gaze takes on in this manner. Looking into an open fire, for example, captivates in a manner similar to the flickering lights of a film projection. The real meat of McGinn's theory, though, is in his assertion that watching a movie is like having a dream - it's better than dreaming, infact, because a movie is "a dream as it has been rendered into art." The conjecture makes sense when he grounds it in earlier proposals that cinematic techniques of composition and editing mirror the processes of consciousness, but occasionally, theinformal elaboration is taken to silly extremes, as when McGinn wonders if early evening is the best time to watch movies because previous generations went to bed right after sundown. And neuroscientists will have a field day refuting his argument that dreaming is such an elaborate process our minds simply must be working out our dreams before we fall asleep. Even at his most debatable, however, McGinn should remain entertaining to general audiences and more cerebral readers alike.