On the Poetics of Cinema in the Light of the Present Culture

Abstract

This paper deals with the subject enunciated in the title thereof according to a ground thesis: that cinema stands for the symbolic framework of the social coexistence insomuch as it (independently of the existence of the so-called “art cinema”) is essentially a mass spectacle whose main function is to level down the differences of the individual sensibility and allow to perceive the world of objects and functions wherein average existence unfolds as a whole and independently from the personal choices, which is a lot more necessary for a culture that furthers the individualism and is permanently threatened by the atomization, as it happens with the final phase of Modernity, which is what we call “the present culture”. We shall set out this thesis as follows: in the first section, we shall clarify the symbolic weight of cinema through the analysis of a cinematographic work; in the second one, we shall differentiate the scope of cinema with regard to television and literature; in the third one, we shall dwell upon how the cinematographic language builds up a reality that is simultaneously within the reach of everyone and is for defining aims that go beyond the average imagination; in the fourth one, we shall proceed the subject in order to take up the specific making of the film; in the fifth one, we shall show why cinema implicates perforce a dramatism that oddly enough goes hand in hand with a universal efficaciousness of the present culture; in the sixth one, we shall round off that with an analysis of the sui generis dualism existing between the immanency of the situations that cinema depicts and the boundless projection of the characters that participate in them; finally, in the seventh and last section, we shall explain why the category “action” stands for the very kernel of the conception of individuality that support the cinematographic symbolism.

It is funny how the colours of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on a screen.

A Clockwork Orange.