"If in one sense the camera never lies, we can see that in another sense it never does anything else. It excludes far more than it includes."

bishop n.t. wright, new testament and the people of God, p. 83

this is, i think, both the power and the peril of film. it's perilous because, as wright says, film is a lie in a very important sense, an intentional blinding to the rest world in order to create a story. it truly is a moving picture -- a capsule of life no bigger or more encompassing than a normal picture frame can be, yet it allows us to tell a story. and this is the power, because in that snapshot, in the distillation and intentional limiting of our vision, we can inspect much more closely character, plot, motif, theme, metaphor, in short, we can more fully realize who we are in our own grand story by comparing that story to the director's limited one.