Think about that! Those people are, most of them, dead now. A few of them are still alive. Kirk Douglas just died. Olivia de Havilland is still alive, living somewhere near Paris, I believe, the last I heard. But most of them are dead now, and still, somehow, they are entertaining us and informing us and uplifting us and communicating with us from beyond the grave. An old movie is a portal through which we can view the past. We can't actually step through that portal and visit the past ... but, in a sense, we can. It really is a form of time travel. And that thought, whenever I watch an old movie, that thought is what just blows me away. It's one of the main reasons why I find these movies from the 1940s and 1930s and silent movies from the 1920s and 1910s so fascinating.
Movies are, as you said, a high art form. One of the highest art forms yet created by us, as a culture and a civilization. The same things could be said about other art forms, too. Novels, stories, operas, paintings, music, any form of expression by which the artist communicates something from his/her soul to another person down through the decades or centuries or millennia...
-- Ron
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