On the role of the viewer/listener/reader

The hardest thing for a viewer, listener or reader is to enter the specific space of a work. Precisely its specific content, rather than creating/inventing their own space inside the author’s.

Of course, a person always perceives a work through their own experience, mood and erudition. But experience and erudition are needed precisely in order to hear, understand and feel the author as accurately and in as much detail as possible, to catch the author’s mood.

In practice, it more often happens that when the viewer, listener or reader notices the first details of a work, their own memories, associations, fantasies ... switch on reflexively, and from then on the person no longer enters the author’s work but goes off to create their own.

Creating one’s own work is not bad as such – it is even great – but it is not about quality contact with the work. Creating one’s own work is a wonderful and logical next step or a parallel action, but not a replacement.

Moreover, the viewer often builds their own space reflexively, unconsciously, along a well-trodden chain of thoughts that is hard to break out of.

This phenomenon could be called "everyone sees what they want to see". I often notice it when we analyse films with students. If people do not try to catch all the details of a film, they give the film their own meaning. But if you draw people’s attention to more details, the thoughts and feelings the work leaves turn out to be different.

My personal statistics show that the result of careful immersion in a work delights people many times more than their first reflexive reading and impression of it.

This is the role of art – to raise people’s ability to feel to a new level, not to provoke what they already feel easily on autopilot. Authors try to do this through their level of attention, involvement in the subject, sensitivity and mastery of expression.