Movies made me

Since its birth just over a century ago, cinema has perhaps changed the way we see the world, and ourselves within it, more than any other art. In his essay this month, Prospect's film columnist Mark Cousins takes a long look at what cinema has meant to him throughout his life, and the innumerable ways in which it touches our society.

Movies, Cousins argues, shape our aspirations and desires. We live through them, we seek structures and emblems for our lives within them; and—as with all art—we are challenged and jarred by their friction with the world. Most movies aren't great art, of course; and much movie-making is about money, plain and simple. But, as Cousins traces the course of his own cinephilia, he finds that film does matter; and that, throughout its mixed, imperfect lifetime, it has dramatised certain kinds of human hope and struggle as nothing else has managed.