Watching film can already be like a StarTrek holodeck, transporting us from a classroom in Coventry to another place, another time, even another body.

Each film today was a window onto another place in space and time. Man of Aran (Flaherty, 1934) might have issues of truth and realism but it still places us closer to Aran than not going at all. Questions of realism and truth appeared quickly in discussions of still and moving photographed images, Cinema Verite and other movements have developed to more and more deeply immerse the viewer in a realistic moment. There are ethical issues of voice and authorship involved in this process; why is the film-maker making the film? why are we watching? who benefits from the film? But the film can still be that time and space machine.

Today I was transported from a warm day in central England to an Irish island, the Atlantic and an institution for the criminally insane, 1930s, 1990s, 1960s. The immersive film-making of Leviathan (Castaing-Taylor and Paravel, 2012) was especially jarring, the visceral nature of action camera footage highlighting the physical jeopardy of the workers out at sea. I was safe in a classroom, I was not going to loose an arm, but they might, would/should the film-maker have included that?

Two other films created interesting juxtapositions with my own day.

Iron ministry (Sniadecki, 2014) allowed me time onboard a long distance train in China, it contrasted with my own train commute to university, different trains, different places but similarly packed with a cross section of the community they were traveling through. The long uninterrupted stretches between cuts in Iron ministry ask us to look more intently. I felt the film-maker questioning me to see what they saw, whispering in my ear, look, look. On the train home I looked up, trying to avoid the temptation to avoid looking around. Screens normally help me to avoid looking around. Observational film-making often forces me to question the power relationship of the subject to the film-maker, the one holding the camera and editing machine gets to control what we see; would the subject of that moment want us to see them like that? In the case of Iron Ministry I felt this less keenly, I had been on one of those trains, slept on one of those bunks, drank too much tea, bought buns through the window. Tourism is a privilege, invading someone else’s space to come and look for entertainment, but I have found sharing that time with others also builds bridges, highlights similarities rather than differences. As one of my peers noted film as “empathy machine”.

Another film Majoor 9195 (Darji, Unreleased) transported me from the construction site that I had walked through to get to my class to a construction site in India. This time the similarity of dust and heavy machinery was even more starkly contrasted with the difference of labour practices, safety and workforce. I felt the film making technique here put the film-maker into the situation, at risk, like the women who were participating in the film. This sense of shared experience for me disarmed some of the questions that I had of Leviathan, I could watch, experience, and learn along with the film-maker; I could travel with them.