Q. Nowadays, the means of expressing stories are expanding towards media such as movies and dramas instead of books, but is watching movies as helpful in cultivating > wisdom as reading books?
A. Movies are like alcohol, so to speak, and books are like water. Books make us cold in a good way, and movies make us hot in a good way, but reason is basically cold, so if I were to answer according to what you're saying, I would say, "As far as education is concerned, movies will never catch up with books," because the nature of reason itself is more like water, not fire.
My original major is film/video, so I watched a lot of movies in college and often wrote reviews and critiques of them, and as I continued to watch and read about them, I had a similar question to the one above. The movies I watched, such as <Mother>, <Milyang>, and <Poetry>, impressed me more than any books I had ever read, because they instilled culture and wisdom in me. Speaking of "getting under your skin," movies seem to require less cognitive effort from the audience than books. In other words, when we watch a movie, we don't have to imagine what the characters are doing, we just watch and listen to the director/writer's direction on the screen. Because the director/writer explains the story he/she wants to tell by borrowing from the world we live in and showing it in front of our eyes, we can feel the message he/she wants to convey more "in our skin" than if we were reading a book.
In other words, I think it happens more often in movies that we realize by being shown than we realize by thinking.
That's why I couldn't help but nod my head when I heard critic Lee Dong-jin's sentence, "Movies make us hot". Not completely, but in my own sense of the word, movies are more intuitive because they "show" us something. It shows us the outcome before we've even had a chance to think about it. So you could say that movies are passive in a way. And we "feel" the happiness or sadness of what we see in the movie. That's why movies are more intensely sensual and close to our hearts. Because the audiovisual information of the movie is transmitted directly to us. Now, don't get me wrong. Hot doesn't mean bad.
The heat that movies generate can even keep us alive. The warmth we get from the coldness of reality can give us the strength to stand up and face it again. So we need some heat in our lives. Movies can play this role. However, as critic Lee Dong-jin said, "Reason is basically cold". If you watch a movie that impresses you and you don't think about it for a period of time, you may easily forget it or not fully accept its message. This is because the "hotness" of a movie will eventually dissipate. In order for the temperature from the movie to affect the rational mind, it has to go through a kind of "transformation process". This "process of transformation" will be a process that we will continue to reflect on within ourselves and translate into our own language. From this point of view, books are the opposite of movies. Books don't "show" us, they make us "think" through the written word.
In this process, the book implies a "process of transformation" that the movie must undergo. As we read, we organize the world of the book and interpret the information in it in our own language. That's why I could sympathize with critic Lee Dong-jin when he said, "As far as the liberal arts are concerned, movies will never be able to keep up with books." Because of their limitations, movies inevitably interfere with our rational thinking. Of course, some movies come to mind without thinking. It's not the rational mind at work, but something else. In conclusion, we should use both books and movies appropriately in our lives. We should use movies to fuel our lives and books to nourish us through the problems we face. All in all, the cold reality is not solved by heat alone. We need to allocate them appropriately to solve the problems in our lives, because only through careful and strategic organization can we solve the problems in our lives.