If, for some reason, anything that people ever wrote about the world were lost and only films were left as testimonies of human society, then all those who attempted to judge had sufficient material to form a picture of to give to the people and the different societies that populated our planet. Cinema, at least an important part of it, has intuitively and consciously, often in a masterful way, reflected people’s lives. One has made use of the written, that is correct, but also of the imagination, in order to penetrate to the deepest levels of truth, to which in their own way only art is able to arrive. Now free movies are also available so that all can afford it.
Different movie ideas
If you want to get an idea about life in North America in the Thirties, just look at some key movies for example, “Mans Castle” by Frank Borzage. It’s an almost immediate representation of the United States of those years, “Dead End” by William Wyler, depicting the dramatic lives of poor children in the shadow of luxurious skyscrapers. Or some of the outstanding works of Frank Capra, John Ford or Lang, who portrayed the outstanding events of the thirties with crisis, unemployment, fascism, the beginning of the war, and so on. By means of these films one approach the time, their images, types of people and conflicts. Without having to spend a lot of time, it is easier to open up the components of that society and the social conditions at that time. Even though these films were produced by a branch of industry that sought mainly for economic profits, the directors were able to transmit the historical moment ingenuously and with the necessary depth.
One approaches that North American moment in a sensual, subjective way, but at the same time sufficiently provided with objective elements. The same could be said about the social and psychological climate of the post-war years in Europe. For example, in a projection of “Bicycle thieves” by Vittorio De Sica, classic work of Italian neorealism and, according to the great French cinema historian Georges Sadoul, a “soliloquy about human loneliness and a meeting with the social reality of Italy, which provokes an awareness of the audience”: An hour and a half drove to the doors and into the depths of an Italy recovering from those traumatic years. Here we are talking about the fictive cinema that reales works to give us back its essence. But there is also the documentary cinema, a less inventive cinema that requires accuracy, scientific research and not a little talent, and that provides us with accurate information and images.
Films makes the past visible
It would be difficult to comprehensively understand the prewar years in Germany without the vision of his cinema, the expressionist German cinema that already heralded the tragic and gruesome spirit that threatened that people before the advent of National Socialism.
If there is an art form whose study is necessary for the judgment of human society, this is the cinema. While this certainly applies to the study of theater and literature, film art adds to the incomparable magic of images, the celluloid-captured, convincing, visual and sonorous presence of people and settings. The study of the moon cinema is an extraordinary instrument to learn about human behavior, the development of societies, their culture and their spirit. It may be the most interesting medium for judging the identity of nations, the character of a people and the experience of its history.
