Check the “popular” in cinema may seem like a strange project for a magazine that wants to be critical in its questions about society and the uses of social philosophy. However, it is not necessary to go far to realize that representations of the world, in their complexity, are often found in a medium that links people’s perceptions, fantasies, hopes, frustrations and fears. , all social categories combined. Thus, the seventh art, which has long replaced literature as a vector of ideological formation, illustrates as much the specificities of societies as those of the public. For more details on this topic you should visit 123movies .
The aim here is to explore the social and political content of cinema offered to the general public. To do this, we must confront an unavoidable problem both in terms of definition and conceptual: how to distinguish the “popular” cinema cinemas “author”, “experimental” or “documentary”?
The dividing line between arthouse cinema and popular cinema seems to be well defined in people’s minds. In this context, “popular” should mean a cinema aimed at a mass audience without implying an exceptional “popularity”: popular cinema would be a sort of privileged place where social representations express themselves through ‘image, and the staging, apart from this distanciation that we find in auteur films, anchored in a critical and / or innovative vision in cinematographic style and form, the’ art ‘defining the work as a personal expression for the initiates.
The cleavage between “popular” films, intended for the greatest number of people, and auteur films seems less marked than it seems. Entertainment cinema does not forbid the delivery of “messages” to the public, and the financial aspect is rarely absent from the production of “auteur” cinema, even imposing itself at the expense of aesthetic creativity and creativity. Originality: It is not a question of separate areas or forms of gender-basedness, but rather of a process in which talent and creativity take different forms depending on the means of production and initial project. If the financing of a film has a direct influence on its content, the artistic or philosophical objectives are not necessarily absent from films made for the “masses”.
For many, popular cinema remains essentially commercial, seeking above all to reach the greatest number of admissions. From there to think that its aesthetic and political limits are obvious compared to the cinema of art and test, there is not far. “Reducing” popular cinema to a purely commercial role, such as relegating auteur cinema to hermetic productions or political allegories, ignores the complexity of what makes a movie successful.
When we talk about popular cinema, ranking comes immediately from spontaneous perception. But on reflection, does the classification depend on the largest number of entries, distribution, broadcasting or rebroadcasting? The whole question is there, because the definition blithely mixes the reception of the public with a cinematographic product, and the “market” of the cinema, held by the chains of production and distribution. Is it then necessary to consider as popular the film which is distributed in many rooms (several hundred copies in the national park, then international)? Or is a popular film, despite the limited number of copies made (sometimes only one), who will benefit from a “word of mouth” success with a large audience thanks to the network of art studios and festivals? Or is media coverage the only criterion by which the “popular” label can be awarded to films whose advertising budget exceeds that of production, to the detriment of cinematographic works which, despite economic censorship, have ambition of a content?
