Entertainment

By justed

Is there any debate about it?

It didn't start out that way, but the idea of mechanically reproduced projected pictures (moving pictures) dramatically changed world culture as we don't know it.

Originally, like most ideas, it was just another low cost way to expand profits.

Live shows - Vaudeville, plays etc - were limited by the size of the audience you could squeeze into the size of the venue. And worse, from the promoter's viewpoint, the human toll of performing limited performances to perhaps five or six per day.

So amongst other revolutionary things, the new technology of the early 1900s, dubbed 'motion pictures,' allowed unlimited numbers of performances at multiple venues simultaneously. Filmed artists never suffered from fatigue (nor produced performances of an uneven quality). And all for the cost of one performance payment to the artists!

In fact, one performance could be shown any number of times and always be the same.

But there was an ancillary effect, and it was on people in widely diverse geographic locations all seeing the same performance.

It's human nature to take from the world around you elements of what you experience into your personal life. With the novelty and fascination of the new medium of moving pictures, people in all parts of the nation had a universal touchstone with which to compare their attitudes and ideas.

You might be for it or against it, but either way the images and ideas of the silver screen entered the public consciousness and became part of the unconscious ongoing public zeitgeist (the spirit of the age).

Some movies had great impact - movies that today, it's hard to imagine having the sociological impact that they did.

You've probably heard stories of the first use of swear words (the word damn) in the movie Gone With the Wind (1939). It's pretty much everyone's favorite example of deeds of cinematic daring. Today, of course, with use of words like mo'fo' that's pretty much a joke. But it was conscious-shattering in its time.

Whether it was 'art imitating life' or 'life directed by art' is so stupidly moronic I won't even comment. But it was a great raging debate in its time.

You may even have heard of the D.W. Griffith movies Intolerance (1916), or The Birth of a Nation (1915), two films that had a major psychological impact on the nascent American collective consciousness. Keep in mind these films were seen by veterans of the Civil War (who were in their seventies) whose memories and passions would've been reawakened by these movies. And so debate was enjoined.

Sexual appeal (something that has always existed) was brought to public debate (made legitimate to discuss and was widely discussed by all and sundry - not just by the self-appointed arbiters of acceptable discourse) through the glamorization of Actress Clara Bow 'The It Girl' (It (1927)) - dduring the euphoric era just prior to the bursting of the stock market bubble of 1929.

Does that give you some hint of the awesome historical impact of movies on our collective consciousness?

Now think - the equivalent today would be WW II vets watching Jar Jar Binks of Star Wars: Episodes 1 and 2 for example.

Somehow, I don't think marketing campaign add-ons such as Jar Jar Binks merit the same degree of debate, although they do seem to raise the larger question of the bean counter world that movies have become.