The Transformation of the World in Film. Relations between Cinema’s Form and Society

1. Cinema Is Everything Filmed

Sequence II
INDOOR. SET. DAY (B&W). 

Medium Close Up of MIMÍ, she is looking at the camera. Behind her a plain, almost black background. MIMÍ raises her right hand and points a gun to the camera. She smiles. She shoots. Then she remains looking at the camera.

MIMÍ (voice-over) 
The trick of cinema is simple: light is mechanically printed on a photosensitive surface at a constant speed and then, reproduced.  

The effect of cinema is powerful: an impression of reality is generated, the resulting image seems to be there, the instant is fixed and reproduced again in the present time. 

If the wind moved the leaves in the distance, when the fragment is reproduced, the leaves will move again. If we capture the moment when someone smiles, when we reproduce it, they will smile again. If the one who smiled in that image was my great-grandmother, she will be able to smile again or her image will do it, reinserting herself in the flow of time and smiling forever, accompanied by the leaves that move in the background, mocking death. 

At the end of the 19^th century, a new technology, daughter of the fairground trick and scientific fascination, gave rise to a portentous industry: a vehicle that articulated dreams and memories collectively. Cinema transformed our understanding of the world by sharing images and stories in the intimacy of darkened rooms, with friends, family or strangers. Philosopher Vilém Flusser (1999) argues that humanity as a whole is going through a cognitive change of dimensions comparable to those brought by the introduction of writing, marking the beginning of history: the transformations generated by the appearance of technical images, such as photography, cinema, and television, from which a new post-historical stage begins. 

Cinema has multiple dimensions: it is both the cultural industry cemented by the great industrial films, as well as non-commercial documentaries, scientific records that accompany research, and even the record of birthdays and other family events. The history of cinema is the history of everything filmed (Cherchi Usai, 2005). As such it has generated substantial changes within societies and has even given us, for better or worse, the feeling that each one of us are the protagonists of history. 

Despite recognizing that film continues to have an impact on our understanding of and our relationship with the world, higher education has treated the issue of teaching film production as a matter of skills training geared towards industries that require film products, rather than using a deep understanding of filmmaking as a tool to generate new knowledge and develop proprietary methods that enable epistemic governance through film, a task especially urgent for the countries of the global South. 

2. Industrial Film’s Form and Its Soft Power 

SEQUENCE IV 
INDOOR. HOUSE. NIGHT. 

Through a skylight, the stars can be seen. At first the skylight is not visible, just the stars in the sky. 

ELISA (voice-over) 
ZOOM BACK. The skylight on the roof of the house is revealed. The stars are now only a small image within the frame. 

ELISA (voice-over) 
All stories will be the same story, since all stories are told the same way. Death to whom differ. 
The development of cinematography as an artistic practice occurs at a time when international relations are in the process of globalisation. Before modernity, each culture had independence in its vernacular modes of artistic practice that grew organically from its specific way of relating to time and space. Using painting as an example, an art that developed in isolation in different regions of the world, let us compare two artistic practices in different cultures, such as that of the Tang dynasty in China and that of the classical Maya period in Mesoamerica, which coincide in time. Both emerge from their particular historical context and serve fundamentally different purposes; they are produced by artists with contrasting social conditions and exhibited for different purposes. One is dominated by landscape with an emphasis on the expressiveness of monochromatic brushwork on scrolls, shared among scholars who gather to share the works over music and tea. The other, on the other hand, focuses on narrative and ceremonial themes, using vibrant colours mainly on murals and ceramics, with an important communal function integrated into daily life and architecture. 

In comparison, in the era like ours of constant interconnection between countries, norms are standardised, especially those related to exhibition, altering the modes of artistic practice. If today we review the different proposals of the International Cinema Show at the National Cinematheqe or the commercial billboard, we will find feature films with a similar duration, for a single screen, in the same type of theatre; the filmmakers responsible for their production usually respect the norms of “cinematographic language” and such films are normally made by production teams with standardised stations and obeying industrial norms regarding post-production. 

In its first decades, cinema maintained a diverse panorama worldwide: Soviet filmmakers developed film montage, German expressionism arrived on screens bringing unprecedented drama, and avant-garde artists in Spain and France made short films that expanded the filmmaker’s tools. Revolutions in Mexico and China were closely followed by film newsreels. The projection of films was not homogeneous: they could be presented in contraptions for individual consumption, in theatres accompanied by live music or even, like in Japan, where the figure of the narrator or commentator had a greater relevance than the actors being presented. Films made in the United States soon centred the causes of their narrative on the psychology and goals of an individual. Soviet films such as Battleship Potemkin or The Strike, directed by Sergei Eisenstein in 1925, on the contrary, move away from the strategy of placing the individual at the centre to pose supra-individual historical problematics. Dadaist and other avant-garde films tended to have an impersonal causality, even moving away from the narrative as the centre of interest and focusing on plastic or rhythmic issues, and in the case of some Japanese filmmakers, such as Yasujiro Ozu, causality had to do with life cycles such as childhood, marriage, widowhood, and old age. 

Vernacular modes of artistic practice are a way for keeping epistemic independence, a way of achieving cultural governance. It is demonstrated not only through content, but through the form itself and the way the narrative is articulated. Standardisation implies becoming epistemically dependent on contexts and norms that belong to other groups. In filmmaking, especially when it is conceived as an economically productive activity, a homogenization of forms has been generated. Within its temporal and spatial characteristics, its material and immaterial practices sustain a defined set of different values, including validation and knowledge that, in practice, make peripheral countries epistemically dependent on the centre. 

The United States film industry has been predominant worldwide since the end of World War I. When the Great War hit Europe, European film production declined. American film industryand other entertainment industries from that country, found a void to fill, especially in the United Kingdom, where no adaptation of the films they exported was needed. At that time films were mainly silent and the simplicity of translation helped American films conquer the rest of Europe quickly. 

A group of major film production studios originally established in the Hollywood district of Los Angeles, collaborated to define and standardise the characteristics of the film industry. Their main tool was to maintain norms of production, distribution, and reception, collectively dubbed as mode of institutional representation (MRI) by Nöel Burch (1981). 

In political and economic terms, films are considered a tool of soft power and often spearhead cultural diplomacy activities. American political scientist Joseph Nye coined the term soft power to describe the use of a persuasive approach to economic or cultural influence. He explains the concept with the following allegory: 
Eventually, the American film industry attracted top foreign directors and technicians to Hollywood, including directors such as Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau, Victor Sjöström, and Alfred Hitchcock. This is a practice that continues today with the recruitment of top talented people from around the world in every department. Technical developments are fully integrated to fit the paradigm, generally contributing to immersion as additional narrative devices, such as sound, colour, or stereoscopic images. These technical advances are strongly promoted and driven. 

There are also two main forces driving the MRI approach that ultimately reflect a set of cultural values driven by its form: a) each story is oriented towards an individual with a goal, who advances overcoming obstacles, and b) a stylistic approach that hides all traces of its construction, aiming for total immersion. The paradigm could be summarised as an invisible style that presents the story of highly motivated individuals confronting a series of obstacles and transforming themselves in the process. 

The basic narrative structure establishes a problem that a character must solve, then, shows the struggle as they tries to solve it, and ends with a clear resolution that has transformed the character. The narrative should focus on an individual protagonist, following a psychological causality that turns each action into an outward expression of inner feelings. All sequences show a clear step towards the goal, advancing the story towards a resolution in a chain of events that present a cause-and-effect relationship. Each sequence must be linked to the next; the first sequence shows the cause, the next is the effect, which in turn causes the next sequence, and so on. 

Narrative in Hollywood cinema follows a Hegelian view of historical progress as continuous development, linearization that relies on a cause-effect narrative, determining an economy of duration (less time): sequences must not go on too long, they must make their point and move forward so that the overall effect is not lost. 

Movies are a constant influence on our conception of continuous progress and a cause-and-effect narrative in our own life experience. Sequences that do not show the protagonist are there to give us context, to provide us with the information we need to follow the plot. Other characters are used as vehicles that oppose or help the protagonist achieve a goal. The soft power of cinema reminds us that other people are there only to help us achieve our goals. We are shown that deviation from the goal must be discarded. Movies teach us to see events like wars or natural disasters only as obstacles in the cause-and-effect chain of our goal-driven lives. Even commercial documentary films are often edited according to these rules. Stories that fit the narrative structure are favoured and moulded to follow it. While national film industries outside the US have succeeded in exporting their cultural identities and leaving a lasting impression outside, regionally, as did Egypt or Mexico during the 1940s and 1950s, or Hong Kong and South Korea in the 1990s, most films with commercial distribution in mind use the RIM features developed in the early decades of the 20^th century by the US film industry. There are also other dependencies that do not include other countries. For example, licensing fees for the use of sound systems such as Dolby are required in order to show films in certain commercial theatres. Professional film cameras are usually of German, Japanese, or American origin. Most feature films are edited on systems that require a monthly fee (including those we use at UNAM) in order to use standardised applications and are reminiscent of landlord practices that now occur in a technological environment. 

A variety of circumstances in recent decades have brought about significant changes in the industry. There are internal factors such as the gradual replacement of the traditional photochemical process of image capture, as digital capture, along with computer-generated images, are now the norm. Two external factors have also affected the industry; other forms of entertainment, such as video games, have economically overtaken movies as the leading industry in the field, and traditional distribution chains have been disrupted by the emergence of streaming platforms, as the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic caused a significant drop in traditional movie theatre audiences. 

Even with all these changes, the RIM has hardly changed from 1917 to recent years (Bordwell, 2006) and movies continue to have a strong influence on their competing industries. While the form of commercial films has remained stable, since the late 70s their function has been transformed. Beginning with the Star Wars saga, which started in 1977, the focus of movie production companies shifted from box office ticket sales to diversifying profits through other means, especially the sale of merchandise associated with movie characters, such as toys and clothing, or in commercial collaborations in which the characters are used to promote other products. 

The main virtue of a Hollywood movie is probably its efficiency, since in just a few minutes a character must be presented that is of interest to the audience, and the world in which he or she inhabits. Barring extraordinary circumstances, a self-contained story must be told, show extraordinary actions and memorable events. Although we are living in a period in which the means of film production are more accessible due to their lower cost, year after year the production costs of commercial films are increasing. It is common for studios to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to produce the biggest blockbusters of the season, and this has resulted in lower risks for them. The focus now is on films driving media franchises, generating interest in specific characters and worlds, such as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but one only has to look at the titles of the highest grossing media franchises to know that very few of them do not have feature film production.

TODAY’S FILMMAKERS MUST THINK ABOUT THEIR PRODUCTS APPEARING SIMULTANEOUSLY IN IMAX CINEMAS AND CELL PHONES

While the only franchise that has a movie origin is Star Wars, the only one that does not use movies as part of its marketing strategy is Hello Kitty. There are twenty-three Pokémon movies, thirty-two Anpanman movies, thirteen Batman movies, eleven from the magical world cinematic universe (Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts) and thirty-four from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. With very few exceptions, the main source of revenue for any franchise is the sale of spin-off products such as clothing and toys featuring its characters. Movies often function as events to revitalise the franchise as a whole; they may find new audiences outside their usual channels, as in the case of Pokémon, or narratively synthesise complex dramatic arcs that in their original formats expand into many issues of comics, novels or video games. 

Today’s filmmakers must think about their products appearing simultaneously in IMAX cinemas and cell phones. Audiences around the world must be able to follow the plot and feel involved in the action. What does this have to do with art? Where do we look when we look at national identities in cinema? When we talk about the style of Japanese cinema in modern films, what distinguishes it from other international commercial films? What do we mean when we think of “art cinema”? Most films are plagued by commercial notions, including their length and distribution models. Fortunately, cinematography is much bigger. 

Table 1. Earnings by category for different cinematographic franchises
(billions of dollars)

Media Franchise	Total Estimated Revenue	Merchandise Revenue	Video Games Revenue	Trading Cards Revenue	Box Office Revenue	Comics Revenue	Book Sales Revenue	Home Video Revenue	Other Revenue
Pokémon	$147.0B	$102.9B	$27.6B	$12.1B	$1.8B	$1.5B	-	$0.9B	-
Hello Kitty	$89.0B	$88.5B	-	-	-	$0.02B	-	-	-
Winnie the Pooh	$76.0B	$76.2B	-	-	$0.5B	-	-	-	-
Mickey Mouse &  Friends	$74.0B	$73.4B	-	-	$0.5B	$0.0005B	-	-	-
Star Wars	$70.0B	$42.2B	$6.0B	-	$10.3B	-	$1.8B	$9.1B	$0.3B
Anpanman	$56.0B	$56.4B	-	-	$0.1B	-	-	-	$0.03B
Disney Princess	$46.0B	$46.3B	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
Jump Comics  (Shōnen Jump)	$40.0B	-	$0.2B	-	-	$39.8B	-	-	-
Mario	$38.0B	$4.3B	$32.4B	-	$0.0B	$1.6B	-	-	-
Marvel Cinematic  Universe (MCU)	$35.0B	$12.5B	-	-	$22.6B	$0.001B	-	-	-
Harry Potter	$32.0B	$12.3B	$1.6B	-	$9.9B	-	$7.7B	-	$1.1B
Transformers	$30.0B	$12.2B	-	-	$4.9B	-	-	-	$0.9B
Spider-Man	$29.0B	$15.9B	$1.7B	-	$7.2B	$1.1B	-	$2.2B	$1.4B
Batman	$28.0B	$21.3B	-	-	$6.1B	-	-	$1.2B	$0.3B
Dragon Ball	$27.0B	$7.7B	$6.2B	$1.0B	$0.8B	$9.2B	-	$2.1B	$0.05B
Gundam	$26.9B	$26.4B	-	-	-	$0.2B	-	-	$0.3B
Barbie*	$24.7B	$22.7B	-	-	$0.01B	-	-	$2.0B	-

3. Other Cinematographies: A Possible Strategy from the University
The current set of circumstances facing the film industry offers filmmakers an opportunity to reshape the way we make, distribute, and teach film, with an impact on the new media of digital distribution. Even if there appears to be a homogeneous cinematic style that was established early in film history, the form was not always the same and other film practices, such as experimental film, expanded cinema, and contemporary artists’ film works for museums and galleries, demonstrate that divergent approaches can be considered. Filmmakers must be aware that, if their values differ from those promoted by the dominant form, they have to build forms of their own that are consistent with them. 

UNAM approaches cinema in multiple spaces, starting with the student film clubs in many faculties; spaces for reflection and discussion; through The General Office for Cinematographic Activities; through its Film Library which preserves, safeguards, and disseminates film and documentary materials of the country’s historical memory; cinemas and online platforms, etc; allow a permanent and diverse dissemination. UNAM’s International Film Festival, which is annually organised, is a meeting place where you can take the pulse of contemporary cinema, including sections dedicated to the avant-garde of cinematographic artistic practice. The Ingmar Bergman Extraordinary Chair in Film and Theater proposes a program of activities where there is a constant encounter of the public with creators, critics, and academics around thinking, making, and celebrating these two disciplines. In conjunction with TV UNAM, film is programmed, transmitted, analysed, and discussed publicly on television for the whole country. 

For sixty years, the National School of Cinematographic Arts has been training filmmakers through editorial publications, continuing education courses, and a bachelor’s degree in cinematographic studies. The Graduate Program in Arts and Design offers a Master’s Degree in Documentary Film and the Documentary Film Line in its doctorate. All these spaces allow the convergence and deepening of high social commitment, research, production, and experimentation. The General Office of Visual Arts at UNAM, through the MUAC museum, as well as Casa del Lago, are constantly exhibiting film materials made by contemporary artists. Many other faculties and schools have specific subjects or contents on film studies or audiovisual production and many more use film as a pedagogical resource. 

This incomplete and never-ending list demonstrates the profound impact that cinema is having within the university. In the face of this established capacity, it is necessary to reflect on the functions that our cinemas are actually fulfilling. Universities, and especially public universities, in the countries of the global South, have the responsibility to generate spaces conducive to the emergence of modes of production in line with our reality which will generate their own epistemological models. We must continue the path where we have travelled so that cinema becomes a true way of thinking and living in the world.

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