Importance Of Cinema As A Medium Of Communication

CINEMA AS A MEDIUM OF COMMUNICATION

Cinema can be taken to mean very different things at different times —a physical space (“I am going to the cinema.”), a medium of entertainment (“Casablanca is a cinema masterpiece!”), or even an entire industry with all the connections and entanglements that entails (“I am studying Bollywood cinema.”).

The question of when cinema began has both a simple and a complex answer. The “simple” answer often given is that cinema began in 1895, with the demonstration of an invention by two French brothers, the Lumières, of a machine that could both “capture” and project moving pictures.

Another way of looking at cinema is that it was the convergence of several long-term processes, such as: the appeal of visual stimulation for humans; an awareness of certain peculiarities of vision; a nineteenth-century interest in technology, machinery, and spectacle; and some financial acumen by specific individuals.

While some aspects of the precursors to cinema are fairly well acknowledged (for instance the relationship of photography to cinema), it is interesting also to think about what elements leading to the development of the cinema are overlooked. Generally speaking, there has been a lack of recognition of the role of the theatre in the early days of film, and that lack of recognition could be extended to other forms of entertainment. For millennia humans, more or less across the globe, have created visual stimuli — from drawings and paintings to shadow puppets to theatre and opera. The addition of technology in the form of photography and the various types of magic lantern shows expanded that repertoire of visual stimuli as much as they created new visual media.

The study of the cinema has benefits to offe...

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...gulated. However, Media critics remain captivated by the modernist myth of the new: they assume that digital technologies such as the World Wide Web, virtual reality, and computer graphics must divorce themselves from earlier media for a new set of aesthetic and cultural principles.

In a richly illustrated study, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin offer a theory of mediation for the digital age that challenges this assumption. They argue that new visual media achieve their cultural significance precisely by paying homage to, rivaling, and refashioning such earlier media as perspective painting, photography, film, and television. They call this process of refashioning "remediation," and they note that earlier media have also refashioned one another: photography remediated painting, film remediated stage production and photography, and television remediated film etc