presentation cinema and society 9th april 2009

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Cinema and Society – Issues For Humanities

Lecture by

Dr. Susmita Dasguptasusmitadasgupta@hotmail.com

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Why do we study the cinema and society?

Because cinema plays a very important role in modern societies such as India and the USA.

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Cinema can be of two types

Art or high brow cinema AndPopular or commercial or low brow cinema

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While art cinema can be studied as any work of art

Commercial cinema appears to have grown on its own. It has a inner drive that exists apart from its director, or auteur.

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Principle differences between art and commercial cinema

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Storyboard

Art cinema shows to us the paradox of human existence and helps us critique the system.

Art cinema has no effective solution and its end is escape

Commercial cinema shows to us the problems that human beings encounter and the way to resolving them.

Commercial cinema dwells upon logical conclusions to premise problems.

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Characters

Characters in an art cinema represent the typicality of ordinary life.

Actors seem to have a good time playing out complex and realistic characters.

Characters in a commercial cinema are extraordinary who can rise above their constraints.

Stars and not actors play out such roles.

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Ideology

Art cinema critiques our existence and the consensus around politics, economics and so on.

Commercial cinema builds new kinds of consensus.

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Targeted Audiences

Art cinema addresses sympathetic viewers who will see the director’s point of view.

It accumulates across the viewers’ similarities of perception and hence is the LCM method.

Commercial cinema addresses a universal audience and hence must apply the HCF method to address the common issues of concern.

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Viewers’ Feeling

Sense of despair, agreement or wisdom after viewing art film

Sense of elation, victory, emancipation, liberation.

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Commonly referred to as..

Art film is aesthetic, original.

This is why art cinema has limited interpretation as is possible out of the author’s intentions

Commercial cinema is trivial, entertainment and formulaic.

Commercial cinema is an open text, participative and open to interpretations.

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Such characteristics actually help the commercial cinema to become socially relevant and restricts art cinema as a cultural product.

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Looked at in this way, art cinema is a cultural product

Commercial cinema is a cultural process.

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What then is the relationship between the commercial cinema and the society?

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The commercial cinema

Selects specific issues that “bothers” people. “Botheration” constitutes those issues that constraint upward social mobility.

Does not select issues that are crucial for survival.

Concerns with upward social mobility makes the commercial cinema so political.

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..contd

Positions social agents so that they can best maximize social opportunities.

Suggests that right and positive attitudes helps people maximize social opportunities.

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All these characteristics of the commercial cinema

Imply a kind of social behaviour.

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We will inquire what kind of social behaviour it implies?

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Irrespective of the specific film viewed

Commercial cinema is a story of the human being rising above the ordinariness of her existence.

It is a discourse of upward social mobility.

Helps viewer to believe that the best will happen and that justice will be done.

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Radicals say that

In this way commercial cinema co-opts the viewer out of his critique of the system.

Appropriates political activism against the system and helps in keeping the political consensus.

Reinforces the status quo. Helps play out politics against the

genuinely marginalized through social stereotyping.

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Hence cinema plays an important role in

Making citizens submit to politics. Help citizens adapt to new ways of

democracy and modernity. Helps create a public space for debates. Steps in where traditional authority and

conventional forms of human association is collapsing.

Helps the individuated and alienated to belong.

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The above mean that despite the rather revolutionary views of the cinema

It helps in maintaining order and not revolution.

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Do you agree?