Blackwell Reference Online

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Since the 1960s the cinema has aroused the interest of social scientists, and films have been studied as a human, cultural product with response from the masses, which can constitute a document or a tool for social research. This is not because cinematic representation is an exact portrayal of the world; the characters and relationships represented on the screen do not always portray things as they actually happen, even in documentaries. What renders a film as a document is the fact that, in every case, the creation of the artist is rooted in reality and, particularly, in the social–historical circumstances of life; and it is these that are expressed in his/her work. Art always provides information about both its creator and recipients, while actively contributing to our knowledge of the world. “The principal function of art is communication,” as Tarkovsky (1989 : 54–5) perceptively maintained. In general, he considered art a post-language and believed that the artist expresses him/herself in expectation of a response. This communication requires shared common knowledge. Thus, the cinema with its dual properties, as an art as well as a form of the media, is systematically studied by philosophers, sociologists, and historians, influenced by the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, the theories of Berger and Luckmann, Habermas, Schütz, and Barthes, and also by Gestalt, phenomenological ... log in or subscribe to read full text