The cinema : 1952 (1952)

T54 THE CINEMA What bearing has this on the movies, which reinain, in spite of everything, our best artistic hope for a new and synthetic conception of the human world? Marxism, I would suggest, is critically important because it has driven home to us the importance of the social factor, showing that the cinema, for instance, can be truly healthy only when it is the expression of the life of the community as an undivided whole. Catholicism has brought a whole and coherent philosophy to the problem, and, because its emphasis is on the nature of man, it can be argued that it is in a better position to determine what experiences are good for man. But Marxists and Catholics, like the rest of us, run the risk of being blinded by their own dogmas. There have been two dangerous pit-falls : the first, to judge work politically or morally and without reference to aesthetics; the second, to which non-conformists are liable, to ignore content and confine the discussion to so-called essential form. Neither way produces sound criticism. For that we must first consider a work of art as art, and then, irrespective of its quality, consider its moral and social implications. Parenthetically, it should be said that in film criticism there is a tendency to assume that if a work is bad then it can have no vital relation to the society from which it springs, and therefore there is no purpose in discussing its symptomatic aspects. Without going all the way with Dr Kracauer, this seems a dangerously mistaken attitude. Finally and this is what sticks in the throat of the dogma-bound reviewer we have to recognize the existence of films which we know to be good, but which are still a sign of an unhealthy state of society. It is only, I would suggest, on the basis of a humanist philosophy that the cinema or any other art can be seen as an activity with a function and a value of its own in society. What is that function? I would say that it is not only to provide us with a knowledge of the world in which we