I think that cinema and the arts are central in our lives because we grow up and learn about the world through our exposure to stories. Parents use them as a tool to teach their children fundamental truths and values, much as adults can view them to gain exposure to cultures and individuals that they'd never be able to view in their own lives.
Interpretation
Cinema and the arts play a crucial role in shaping our understanding of the world and imparting values.
In this quote, Forest Whitaker emphasizes the importance of cinema and the arts in our lives, highlighting how they serve as a medium through which both children and adults gain knowledge and understanding of the world. By engaging with stories presented in films and other artistic expressions, individuals can learn essential truths and values, while also getting an insight into diverse cultures and experiences that they may not encounter in their everyday lives.
In practice
In a speech about the significance of education, one might quote Whitaker to underline the role of stories in teaching.
As human beings, we all have reasons for our behavior. There may be people who have certain physiological issues that dictate why they make certain choices. On the whole, though, I think we're dictated by our structure, our past, our environment, our culture. So once you understand the patterns that shape a person, how can you not find sympathy?
In some sense, when you take a child soldier out of an armed group, you've taken away the identity he or she has had for years, and you can't assume life is just going to return to normal.
Cinema and the arts invite viewers to focus on a story and, in doing so, peel away its layers and peer into the depths of the human soul.
I put down the camera long ago, you know? I was here in London, aged 19, and I was obsessed with my camera, shooting everything I could. Then someone stole it. It helped me to see things for the first time.
You try to pull away the experiences until you get to the core of humanity, and you find that light that exists in everybody. It's that light that I'm searching for in all of my work - is that connective thing, that ether that enters all of us - you know what I mean? That's a part of God.
For many child soldiers, war and violence are all they have ever known. If we don't take it upon ourselves to show them an alternative, then they're going to be soldiers forever, and they'll continue to be recruited and to participate in violence if another conflict starts five or 10 years down the road.
If a story doesn't give you a hard-on in the first couple of scenes, throw it in the goddamned garbage.
The thing that hasn't changed, and I don't think will ever change, is that the operative word in music is "play." You have to have a playfulness about it. As the world shifts, it's starting to understand more and more that to have a playfulness about any and everything is actually the way of having a better life, or being more creative, or being more productive.
Dress designing, incidentally, is to me not a profession but an art.
Originality is... a by-product of sincerity.
Beauty . . . cannot be interpreted. It is not an empirically verifiable fact; it is not a quantity.
My scripts are possibly too talkative. Sometimes I watch a scene I've written, and occasionally I think, 'Oh, for God's sake, shut up.'
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