American Society and Culture in Film Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

American Society and Culture in Film - Essay Example It would not be a mistake to suggest that the course heavily relies on several concepts that are used to design a framework for a detailed analysis of the cinema. Thus, the concept of historical as well as industrial contexts is engaged in order to show the diachronic value of films. Ideology is a notion which is used to translate the messages that are being sent. A genre is an important term which defines the place of a movie in a general perspective. Cinematic codes shed light on the way actual scenes, the building units of movies, are created. Visual politics explain the content of messages that are conveyed by the movies. The first concept that will be analyzed in great detail is historical context of a movie. It is quite obvious that cinema should be regarded as one of the forms of art, in spite of the fact that it is rather young if compared to others. Nevertheless, the popularity of it is big and resulted in the fact that movies became â€Å"an alternative to such established pastimes as the music hall, vaudeville, professional sports, and the saloon† (Jarvie, 1997, 249). As one can easily see, out of the pastimes which were named in the quote above, only professional sports survived. This means that movies should not be regarded as some kind of senseless entertainment, but rather an important act of aesthetic interaction between various parts of society – the function which the above-mentioned pastimes used to fulfill. One would make no mistake suggesting that watching a movie may be regarded as a modern equivalent of listening to folklore stories since both engage a person in an aes thetic dialogue and teach a certain lesion. The only difference is the extent to which image is used. In addition to that, movies often were used as a means to convey important messages, for example, in the movie The Great Dictator the directors designed aesthetics in a way to reflect the contemporary situation in Nazi Germany. What is more important is that at the present moment there is a clear distinction between watching a movie and going to a cinema.