SYNOPSIS: Growing up in post-World War II era Arizona, young Sammy Fabelman aspires to become a filmmaker as he reaches adolescence, but soon discovers a shattering family secret and explores how the power of films can help him see the truth.
REVIEW: I realized that the name of the protagonist is Samuel Fabelmans which can be translated from Hebrew as 'God the Storyteller'.
Apart from this being self-biographical by Steven Spielberg, it touches on the subtle subject of its impact on humanity. In this case, it is the people around Samuel Fabelmans - his family, love life, and college mates.
Sam wouldn't have felt deeper about his mother's affair if he had not played and edited those moments on film. He wouldn't have even noticed it if he didn't record it. And his spiraling emotions wouldn't have even existed without film as a medium.
The significance of the ability to replay past moments was truly something. It is a heavenly gift to humanity. It's the ability to create new realities and affect the viewers deeply emotionally. Like how Sam has made the recording of his collegemate Logan looking like a superstar celebrity on screen. That has indirectly put him in a dilemma regarding the bullying he puts on Sam. It has turned Logan be a different man. The power of the screen.
Today, it has not only showing us films, but also the recordings of happenings in other places in a form of news, which we suppose to believe and take as the truth. It is also an indispensable tool for Capitalists to make us buy and consume. This has taken some of us to question what we see on screen for the same reason as how Sam's auteurism had changed Logan.
“The image in cinema is based on the ability to present as an observation one's own perception of an object” ― Andrei Tarkovsky.
This has taken us into the Platonic Cave where the human population stares at the shadowplay composed by the propagandist to keep us in control, like how the film 'They Live' has accurately fictioned. From the 1896's first projected film, ’Arrivée d’un Train' to the great WWII Nazi propaganda film 'Triumph des Willens' in 1935. To all the rubbish you see on screen today due to the ability to record and project to the mass has been given to those non-auteurs because the ones in power want the population to be kept numbed.
“Modern mass culture, aimed at the 'consumer', the civilization of prosthetics, is crippling people's souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.” ― Andrei Tarkovsky.
The true 'auteurs', or in Malay 'Terajutama' are gods in the meta that they have created. Yes. I think the metaverse idea started the first day film was projected to humanity. Like how Stan Lee is the god in his Marvel Universe as the T.O.A.A. (The One Above All) and Mamat Khalid's portrayal of the 'Deus Ex Machina' in Man Laksa with the scene of Dato' M. Daud Kilau descending from the heavens reversing all the damages in the festival. And to top it all, Andrei Tarkovsky likens the artistic act with film akin to sculpting in time.
The ending scene cameo is another reminder of the industry's (fabled!) archetype that has been lost for ages!
Watch the trailer