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CHAPTER 2
On Theatre and Cinema — Universal Audiences — Political Philosophy
JT erhaps it is possible to assess the social function of our contemporary cinema correctly only when we compare it with previous historic phases of our Western cultural development. I shall choose the theatre of the Greek City State, the Roman theatre and amphitheatre as main examples to illustrate the intimate connection between state and dramatic art, including its degeneration into the Roman circuses.
In a separate chapter I shall give a comparison between the Elizabethan theatre and the modern cinema. Needless to say, I am clearly aware of the selective and almost arbitrary character of the illustrative material I have chosen in order to gain my norms for a sociological interpretation of the cinema to-day; but the subject is clearly of an encyclopaedic character and it would take a long time to investigate its full implications with regard to a theory of culture.
Drama appears in all historic societies as a late form of art. 'The stage', writes Jacob Burckhardt in his Renaissance,1 'which in its perfection is a late product of every civilisation, must wait for its own time and fortune.' When it appears in the Greek city-state
— its origins and early development do not concern us here it is
intimately related to the state structure as such. Religion, art, in short culture as a whole, cannot be separated from the state. When Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolutions in France defined the state as a 'partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, and in all perfections',2 he obviously defined not only his own norm of the state, but also implicitly the norm of the Greek citystate. Only our modern specialisation, resulting in the separation of 'spheres' of culture — economics separated from religion,
1 Phaidon edition, 1944.
2 Cf. R. M. Maclver, The Modern State, pp. 83 sq.
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