Functions of Cinema
Cinema is the world’s most complex, collaborative and prestigious art-form in the modern world. It is the artform with the biggest impact, the largest budgets, and the most wide-spread audiences.
Collectively, we are aware of cinema’s bewildering capability to invoke emotion : it makes millions of us weep, feel fear or relief, be exalted or disheartened. We do not think of cinema as serving any serious purpose alternate to entertainment, or making money at the box office. This is a great loss for us and for cinema itself. So what are the functions, if any, of cinema?
The famous french advertising slogan that says, “When you love life, you go to the movies,” it’s false! It’s exactly the opposite: when you don’t love life, or when life doesn’t give you satisfaction, you go to the movies.”
― François Truffaut
The quote by the french director, one of the founders of the French New Wave, expresses how he concieved of cinema, as a kind of therapy. This idea isn’t new, during the 5th century B.C.E.,when cinema’s predecessor, theatre, was a flourishing and significant cultural activity in Ancient Greece, the classical Greek writers thought that facing tragedy was a healthy and necessary antidote to human foolishness(Wheeler, 2015).Aristotle, who concluded that a good tragedy could, through letting us witness the downfall of a good character by consequence of his or her hamartia, or tragic flaw, induce fear and pity in the audience, which leads to catharsis, a release of these emotions, inspiring us to be more sympathetic and forgiving towards others and ourselves.
“Tragedy is more important than love. Out of all human events, it is tragedy alone that brings people out of their own petty desires and into awareness of other humans’ suffering. Tragedy occurs in human lives so that we will learn to reach out and comfort others” -C. S. Lewis
A study in 2005 by S C Noah Uhrig of the University of Essex entitled, “Cinema is Good for You: The Effects of Cinema Attendance on Self-Reported Anxiety or Depression and Happiness” the author describes how attending the cinema can have independent and potent effects on psychological well-being because audio-visual stimulation invokes a variety of emotions, and the cumulative experience of these emotions through films provides a safe backdrop in which to experience roles and emotions we might not otherwise be able to experience. Ex. Chairman of the BFI and accomplished film director Anthony Minghella states
“…Fiction becomes this sort of cultural bank balance that we can draw from. We can momentarily be a young woman, an old woman, a black person, an Asian person, a Chinese person, and look at the world and argue a position that is not our own for a while—inhabit a position that is not our own.”
Now we have Cinema therapy,
Cinema therapy is defined by Segen’s Medical Dictionary as:
A form of therapy or self-help that uses movies, particularly videos, as therapeutic tools. Cinema therapy can be a catalyst for healing and growth for those who are open to learning how movies affect people and to watching certain films with conscious awareness. Cinema therapy allows one to use the effect of imagery, plot, music, etc. in films on the psyche for insight, inspiration, emotional release or relief and natural change. Used as part of psychotherapy, cinema therapy is an innovative method based on traditional therapeutic principles.
Programs such as MediCinema places cinemas in hospitals and screens films for patients, have provided vital support for over 17,000 patients and families in 2015 (Medicinema, 2015). Author of The Motion Picture Prescription and Reel Therapy, PhD, MPH, MSW, Gary Solomon, states that that viewing television or film movies”can have a positive effect on most people except those suffering from psychotic disorders.” The Chicago Institute for the Moving Image (CIMI) helps people seeking therapy for depression or other serious psychiatric illnesses, including schizophrenia or amnesia, to write, produce, and direct their own movies.
“We work with patients who tend to have personal interests in making a movie or a screenplay and are already working with a therapist,” says Joshua Flanders, CIMI’s executive director.
The role of influencing attitudes and incentives. An infant has no specific attitudes toward war and divorce, but he probably will acquire them in time. And this acquisition will come from numerous sources within his psychological topography. One of these sources may be film, because the capacity of cinema to help create and modify attitudes and incentives seems to be well established. (Mercer 1953).
In new research, Michelle C. Pautz looked at the impact of two recent films, Argo and Zero Dark Thirty, on audience’s perceptions of government. She finds that after viewing the two films, many of the study participants’ views changed, with most expressing greater levels of trust in government and having a more positive view of government performance(Pautz, 2014).
A study conducted in 1995 by Stanford University psychologist Lisa Butler and her colleagues of viewers before and after seeing the controversial conspiracy film JFK(1991), discovered that watching the film “doubled the level of anger” of viewers. (BUTLER L. D. ; KOOPMAN C. ; ZIMBARDO P. G., 1995). Additionally, it also seems to have impacted their political intentions. Seeing the film “was associated with a significant decrease in viewers’ reported intentions to vote or make political contributions.” (BUTLER L. D. ; KOOPMAN C. ; ZIMBARDO P. G., 1995). The authors attributed this reaction to a “general helplessness effect” generated by seeing the film. The vast conspiracy proposed by the filmmakers made people feel powerless.
Of course, film’s capability of shaping perceptions of its viewers can also work for wrong ideas. Perhaps the most significant example of cinema’s effects on a mass public is demonstrated in films such as the Nazi documentary “Triumph of the Will”(1935) directed by Leni Riefenstahl, and D.W. Griffith’s inflammatory silent epic “The Birth of a Nation”(1915). In his brief preface to Hinter den Kulissen, Hitler describes Triumph of the Will as “a totally unique and incomparable glorification of the power and beauty of our Movement.” American film critic and historian Roger Ebert states that Triumph of the Will is “by general consent [one] of the best documentaries ever made”, while american writer and filmmaker Susan Sontag considers the film “most successful, most purely propagandistic film ever made”.The Birth of a Nation whos portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan as a heroic force was considered a catalyst for gangs of whites to attack blacks.
“Of all of our inventions for mass communication” said Walt Disney “…pictures still speak the most universally understood language.”
Next, the role of discovery. Cinema can allow us to discover the unknown (Mercer, 1953). We can glimpse cultural differences and engage with all kinds of diverse attitudes to life when we broaden our viewing horizons beyond the mainstream. Themes explored in film, also speak a universal language that anyone can understand regardless of background, education or race, which makes it a truly democratic art form.
“Movies have become a world-wide feature- and as it relates to what movies tell us? I don’t know that I knew as much about, for example, Cuba as I wanted to- I’m talking socially not politically. We (the Academy) sent an outreach program to Cuba, and believe me- we learnt SO much about society from their movies. I believe, personally, that movies allow people to be taken places they can’t get to on their own- be it travel, or culture, or learning.” ( Sherak, 2009 )
For Dr. Pautz, movies “can be a great mechanism for conversation and reflection.” They can also “help us understand societal opinions, help us understand institutions, and even demystify aspects of society.”
So a movie like “Selma” or “American Sniper” can be a “wonderful mechanism for discussing highly charged topics in society, and providing a way to tackle issues without doing it outright.” She added, “Discussing race relations/racism is still hard for Americans and an often taboo subject, but one can much more easily talk about a movie that might then lead to conversation about those more sensitive topics.” Movies contribute to the “political socialization of people (young adults in particular),” Dr. Pautz said, “and so what audiences watch and how certain institutions are portrayed over time can be very significant.”
By looking at films from different regions of the world, we are given a window into what makes people all over the world so different, and also what makes those people the same. In this way we can each develop a better understanding of ‘the other’: an understanding that avoids stereotypes and acknowledges both the unity and diversity in humanity.
Increasingly, historians have begun to not only document a history that chronicles wars, treaties, and presidential elections to one that tries to provide an image of the daily life of the people: how they worked, what they did for fun, how families were formed or fell apart, or how the fabric of daily life was formed or transformed. Film has an important role to play in these histories. While traditional historical documents tend to privilege great events and political leaders, historians now use other records to discern the lives of “ordinary” people: census records, accounts of harvests and markets, diaries and memoirs, and local newspapers. Film is perhaps more like these records of daily life than it is like the documents that record great events. Motion pictures may provide the best evidence of what it was like to walk down the streets of Paris in the 1890s, what a Japanese tea ceremony was like in the 1940s, what the World Series in 1950 looked like, or how people in factories did their work or spent a Sunday afternoon in the park. All of these subjects could be staged and distorted, of course, and film can be transformed in many ways. But as a record of time and motion, films preserve gestures, gaits, rhythms, attitudes, and human interactions in a variety of situations. In almost any film archive, and in numerous places on the internet, one can glimpse images of simple actions, from the way a Buddhist monk in Ceylon folded his robe in 1912 to the way people boarded trolley cars in New York City in the 1930s. While film shares much of this information with other forms of documentation, especially still photography, motion pictures allow viewers to see and compare the everyday physical actions of people across the globe and throughout the twentieth century.
Our horrified consciousness of the Holocaust relies partly on the filmed images from the liberation of the camps, and our knowledge of the devastation of the Atomic bomb comes partly from motion pictures of Hiroshima or of A-bomb test explosions. Conversely, twentieth-century disasters or traumas that went unrecorded by motion pictures – such as the genocide of the Armenians or mass starvation in Asia – are less present in public consciousness because of the lack of vivid images. But when we focus on social and cultural history, especially the important role of leisure in the lives of ordinary people, film not only provides evidence and records but takes on a key role.
Of course, because most films are fictional, we must consider whether fictional films can be used as historical evidence? Evidence of what? Fictional films serve as historical evidence in the same way that other representational art forms do – by making events vivid, portraying social attitudes, and even revealing the unconscious assumptions of past societies. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation cannot be viewed as an objective or accurate view of the era of Reconstruction, but it does – painfully, and even unintentionally – indicate the sorts of hysterical anxieties and aggressive fantasies that underlay American racism, especially in the early twentieth century. Attitudes about gender, class, and ethnicity, as well as heroism, work, play, and “the good life” are all portrayed in fictional films as they are in an era’s novels, plays, and paintings. But as a form of mass visual entertainment, films reflect social attitudes in a specific and vivid manner.
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