Movies are meant to be a Community Experience. This idea of hiring movies, owning our own collection, downloading and watching them on our private devices, well, this was never presupposed to be the experience of “cinema”. They weren’t made to be watched alone, but rather, as a community, where people came together into a cinema to become “one Body” and to share this experience with one another. However, they miss the very point of cinema, that it’s a social experience, and in an exceedingly particular way, we do enter into an intimacy with one another. This intimacy transcends the private relationship such it’s shared with the full cinema audience.
Today it seems we’ve lost this sense. How often can we attend the flicks and skill a cinema audience becoming “one body?” People are disconnected, and there’s a failure to have interaction or to really enter into what’s happening on the screen. How often will we watch without feeling, and observe without entering? People still check their phones and send text messages. They lose patience when a trial is held some seconds longer than they’re accustomed, to or when a story doesn’t rush at a specific speed. they’re hardly challenged or moved by what they see, firstly because they need forgotten or never learned the way to engage, and secondly, because I think there’s a lack in cultural quality of what one is presented within cinemas today – and this has shaped cinema audiences into a shallow, fickle, uninterested crowd.
Movies offer us an authentically worthy experience and increase our ability to have interaction. The occasional “silly” movie will be enjoyable, this is often not the problem. But when the overwhelming majority of films are an insult to our potential, our culture is adversely affected. When every film must follow certain pacing or formula so as to appeal to a culture that has watered down and lost its appetite for richness, then we continue becoming what we watch. Even the most effective of recent films partially continue us on this track instead of challenging us to something new. Films like “The Lord of the Rings,” are hugely popular and great movies, yet even these, with their pacing and effects, keep us engaged in an exceedingly way we’ve become conversant in. this can be not necessarily a negative thing, apart from the actual fact that we are at risk of forgetting the way to engage with anything different from this, with anything that will be in an exceeding style we aren’t accustomed anymore. The result’s not just an absence of appreciation for the past, but an actual inability to interact with the past. an entire history of cinematic brilliance becomes consigned to be museum exhibits instead of having a true presence within the cultural consciousness of this generation. Instead, we breed a spawn of youth who are addicted to everything new, up to date, and up to hurry. youngsters who find it hard to ever drop off their portable or dedicate their attention to something or someone outside their immediate field of interest. These same people have to be “entertained” on a superficial level, without patience for any price greater, and without openness to anything which will require an increased effort.
Movies as a kind of Cultural Resistance. Lastly, St. John Paul II living in Poland during WWII organized a gaggle of individuals, who would meet secretly in a very room where they might read aloud Polish poetry and perform Polish plays like a variety of cultural resistance, to stay alive the culture that the Nazis wanted to destroy. With a similarly sized group of individuals, an analogous space, and an identical intention, this cinema club is a force of cultural resistance, keeping alive these films and in how, forming the culture with them, assisting all men and ladies to become people of richness, depth, and engagement.
