Cinema and Its Contexts Essay Fragment

The cinema, in terms of both its thematic and stylistic tendencies and its place within culture and society, has often shifted over its first hundred and twenty years of existence, but its fundamental properties, at least in terms of so-called image making, have stayed constant within the Hollywood tradition. In this system, a feature film is formed from shots edited together that themselves are formed from frames photographed at twenty-four frames per second on a camera. It almost always involves actors reading from a script, and relies on sundry production roles, including but not limited to the director, the producer, and the cinematographer. From this programmatic description, it is made clear that the cinema is a fundamentally technological enterprise, one as governed by the apparatus of the motion picture camera as the people running it. Cinema must be regarded, as per Walter Benjamin’s article “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” within the context of the technologies and societies that surround it due to its intrinsically populist and industrial qualities.