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No other art form has had quite an impact on our lives that the motion pictures have. Indeed, the movies are truly an art of our time – they were born and have come of age in the twentieth century, and they now demand the serious consideration given to the other arts.
Everybody loves a story. Children mesmerized for hours before a television set watching cartoons they are seeing for the fifth or sixth time, or long lines of shivering movie-goers outside a theater on a winter night, convincingly demonstrate that truth. And today the love of story, as these examples suggest, is requited much more often than not with a narrative told in visual images.
There can be no question about the supremacy of the visual image in the realm of story. The fact that images and movies have many uses besides story-telling simply adds gratuitous evidence in support of the observation that the life of the mind today receives its nourishment primarily from visual, rather than verbal sources.
Clearly, in terms of sheer quantity, visual narrative is the greatest aesthetic and educational force in the world today, and the movies, the visual narrative media – qualify unchallenged as the art of our time.
No one has ever seriously doubted that the movies are a powerful force in contemporary life. Quite the contrary. Their potential for propaganda purposes was immediately recognized and in some cases exploited. What has been questioned is the capacity of the movies for doing good. Youthful and perhaps too much a work horse in the cultural market-place, they have been vulnerable to the charge that they are unable to awaken and refresh the mind, that they cannot tap the deepest reaches of man’s spiritual life and so, incapable of articulating anything of consequence, are at best a rudimentary art.
Yet the movies are not now as disturbing for intellectuals as they once were. One reason, no doubt, is that they are no longer, at least in the United States, the popular art; television has stolen the limelight.
At present suspended somewhere between the hell of mass culture and the heaven of high art, the movies are undergoing aesthetic purification.
Much remains to be accomplished, however. Since we have to live with the movies, we would prefer not to be embarrassed by them; we want the chance to exercise our humanity in and through the movies, and so we persist in demanding that the movies make more room for man within their aesthetic boundaries.
We would not, by any means take the fun off movies in order to fit them into the traditional earnestness associated with education … but the aim is, and should be a higher hedonism which more profoundly entertains the heart and mind. With the existing film classics and the fifteen to twenty a year from around the world capable of captivating attention – there are enough good and great movies for us to grow by. The movies arouse the mind and soul when given undivided attention.
