What’s the purpose of cinema?
Cinema, also called the seventh art, emerged as a modern variation of theater it’s in our days the spectacle that most audiences enjoy. If we could define it cinema would be known as “the art that represents all arts”.
It represents the desires, the illusions, the triumphs and the failures of millions of spectators who sit for around 2 hours to forget their lives and contemplate the life of others (fictional or real) whose fortune or misfortune makes them relevant. Inside the magic enclosure we call movie theater we found individuals from all social strata and with the most varied occupations. Unlike literature, cinema doesn’t require a specific level of education to be valued or at least to be enjoyed.
All of that being said we now get the question: given all the influence that cinema has in its audience, what’s the purpose of cinema?.
The most natural answer for the casual spectator it’s to entertain. Give the individual who watches the opportunity to sit and be free at least for a couple of hours. But, if that’s so, why do we discuss the quality of a movie as if it were an artwork?, the work of a director as if he were a sculptor?, or the ability of an actor as if he were a musician?.
To entertain has historically been only one of the purposes of cinema, maybe the most valuable but also the less significant. Cinema also has for example the cappacity of showing sentiments through its images, to tech through its characters, to learn, to forgive and to inform for mentioning just some of them. Cinema or its work “the movie” can’t have as only purpose “to entertain” and get away with it. It has to have something extra, something to give to the world something to make it count.
Oscar Wilde wrote in the preface of the Picture of Dorian Gray:
“ All art is quite useless”.
Obviusly Wilde Never saw a movie (because cinema didn´t exist). That being said, I firmly believe cinema has proven this quote wrong and I hope that it keeps doing so. To give us more than just “Entertainment”.
