It was an article I had wanted to write for a long time, without being able to find the right words to talk about Cinema Art.
This post strongly linked to my previous:
What movies do you need to watch to start with Italian cinema?
Everything stems from a simple question that I will try to answer in an equally simple way.
Why is cinema art, such as important art?
Personally, I grew up with movies. I fed on it.
They accompanied me in sad moments as in happy ones, with friends and lovers as well as absolutely alone.
I think the answer could be enclosed in one sentence:
One Art to rule them all.
Painting, sculpting, act, dancing, singing, composing music, knowing how to play an instrument … and writing.
Cinema embraces all these arts in itself, and each scene can be a mix of two or more of these.
How many times a hit song became a hit because it was included in a film?
To give you an example let’s see three cult films from when I was a kid:
Dirty Dancing, The Karate Kid, and First Blood.
The similarities between the first two are quite evident.
She learns to dance for the sake of a poorer boy; in the other, he learns karate for a richer girl.
He eventually wins with his famous “crane kick” while she flies with her “eagle move” into Swayze’s arms.
They are basically the same films, although one is about dance and the other about martial arts.
But what really needs to be underlined is the social impact they had.
After their release in cinemas, it was not counted how many boys and girls had enrolled in karate courses or dance classes.
Just as after First Blood, don’t forget it, there were so many emulators of Stallone and his soldier Rambo enrolled in guerrilla and survival courses.
Art imitates life. Life imitates art. Movies made who we are.
Changing genres, think of the impact of two movies as A Fistful of Dollars and Night of the Living Dead.
Two films were released shortly after each other.
Still today, after more than 50 years, they continue to influence all kinds of artists.
Sergio Leone is now a way of making cinema, and all directors use his style, conscious or not.
And how much the zombies created by Romero have taken possession of our imagination?
I want to take, for example two mass media phenomena such:
the TV series The Walking Dead and the famous video game The Last of Us
Two products of the modern entertainment industry very similar in the tints used and in the contents.
A fusion of Leone tension in the characters’ confrontation, obviously set in zombies or zombie-like worlds populated like Romero’s monsters.
So returning to the initial question, “How to understand Cinema?“
We must first understand that movies settle in our minds and don’t go away anymore.
It is not just a question of exploiting the nostalgia effect recycling films and TV series from the 70s or 80s or 90s.
The thing is, those movies invented a system that works.
Those movies figured out how to understand cinema and how to feed people’s minds and hearts.
Therefore, the only way to understand cinema is to let it sediment in our consciousness.
Obviously, don’t stop only on a genre, actor, or director you like; without ever going further.
Some movies you love are inspired by others you don’t know, adding something that others too will then be inspired again.
I hope I have managed to make myself understood.
Forgive my Englishized Italian, I apologize in advance, but I hope you will continue reading me.
In my blog, I recommend films that give me these particular sensations that I wrote about.
Always wishing the best to you and if you want to support my blog, I ask you to please:
