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- Title
MOVIES AND MODERN AMERICAN SOCIETY AT S.U.N.Y. BUFFALO.
- Authors
Plesur, Milton
- Abstract
The article reports that the development of the medium of the motion picture was one of the principal achievements of the United States in the twentieth century. This article examines that development in terms of the film as a social and personal document. Films tell a great deal about an era and its people--their hopes, ideals, values, and concerns. The movie is more than low-brow entertainment. Movies can help recover the total spirit of a period; in essence they can be considered one significant manifestation of the popular culture of an era. Films were and are used as escapism and fantasy, as social comment, as commentaries about the nature of society, and as expressions of innocence and idealism tempered by the realities of everyday life. The motion picture has provided a form of culture whereby divergent peoples can share the same cultural experience and thereby has influenced behavior, manners, and taste. Movies can show mistaken impressions about realities but they can also improve and enrich American experiences. This course, then, is in essence a study of the evolution of the motion picture as a medium of expression and communication--how it has become what one authority calls the most "culture-pivoted" form of expression, how it can examine society, how it may even stimulate social change, how it reflects the felt needs of the people in a given period, and in general, how it has proved to be as changeable as American society itself.
- Subjects
UNITED States; MOTION picture industry; HISTORICAL sociology; CULTURE; CULTURAL industries; MOTION pictures
- Publication
Film & History (03603695), 1975, Vol 5, Issue 2, p16
- ISSN
0360-3695
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1353/flm.1975.a487230