By Jon Jost (Film Director, Professor at Yonsei University Graduate School of Communication & Arts) The movies. A night out with friends. A ticket and a big screen. Normally that's what we think of when we think of "the movies". Or we think of stars, of glamour, of all the money they get. Or fantasizing of being just like whoever the guy or girl who is big now. It all seems so normal, so innocent, so casual--just like a night at the movies. Hollywood is called "the dream factory", and its equivalents around the globe peddle the same concept: pre-manufactured dreams sold as a commodity, for the same reason most commodities are sold--money. In the normal world the bottom-line point of making films is for someone, or a lot of someone's (the stars, the producers, the directors, the writers, the technicians, the PR people--just about everyone involved in the movies makes good money just because it's the movie), to make money. Preferably lots of money. And that it comes coated with glamour and fame makes it all the better and more enticing. With this as the purpose, cinema devolves from an excellent communications medium to just entertainment to something closer to drugs. If the purpose is to make money, and almost all film and video-making these days revolves around this, then the temptation to go for the easiest, most effective way to grab the most people with 10,000 won ready for a ticket, is to dish up the usual: glamour, sex, surrogate danger, thrills, and murder. There's a lot of sex and a little murder in nearly everyone, so a second hand version tends to work like magic. With a bit of luck and cynicism you can make a lot, a whole lot. And the world stands in awe at those who do--Spielberg, Brad Pitt, Wong Kar Wai--the list is long and dazzling. This is the regular stuff of a thousand film and TV magazines. The glory, the glamour, the riches and, of course, the bust-ups, the falls, the suicides, the 100,000,000 dollar flops of the dream factories. And what about the real world? The one in which 2/3rds of the world's people live on a handful of dollars a day or less, while big stars work 6 weeks and walk away with $20,000,000 or more? The one in which the jet-set life of the few (and the many) is rapidly heating the globe we live on, shortly to drown many coastal cities and land areas populated by hundreds of millions of persons? And bringing drought to vast areas? As we quickly approach a time of at first minimal and then no oil, and hardly anyone seems to be doing anything about it. What on the screens today, aside from facile horror films with the usual quotient of sex, violence, and glamour but dabbling in current "scares" brings us to an understanding of these things? Almost nothing. After all, in the real world a dose of truth is not likely to make the most profit. Better then some more falsity, fantasy, and delusion--more poison. There is, in fact, another cinema--a cinema which attempts to guide the viewer into real perception, to a deeper understanding of our world and our place in it. It is a serious cinema made not for the maximum financial profit, but to broaden the mind and spirit. It comes in many forms, from documentaries such as “Our Daily Bread” (Niklaus Geyrhalter) to essays such as those of Chris Marker, to narrative fictions such as those of Tarkovsky and many others, to abstract and so-called "experimental" works. This cinema is perhaps more difficult to find than it is to watch and appreciate, though thankfully much work nearly impossible to see in the past has found its way to DVD. It is, though, a kind of cinema which can quite literally open your eyes and heart and change your life. Next time you “go to the movies" give a thought about what you are really watching and why, and what it really does in the world and maybe change the program.