The name is absent

Chapter III

Cinema and (un)reality

Clearly influenced by the current visual technological development and
simultaneously able to express the contemporary situation with regards to our
social understanding of it in a most accessible and palatable way, cinema, a
(sometimes distorted) reflection of the ideology, collective imagination,
knowledge and vision of our potential future, provides a most unique point of
reference with respect to the confusion between reality and unreality. It is an
art form that also has the ability to produce adhesion and cohesion between
the realistic and mythical contents, and, for Gerard Imbert, this can be
explained by the special characteristics of cinema: it has the potential of
transforming the abstract configurations and signs into easily identified and
communicated elements; to condense symbols, concentrating abstract and
undefined aspects and shape them into stories (Imbert, 2002: 92). It is
through the natural selection of the eye in the perception of reality, and the
artificial discrimination of the camera, that reality is filtered, created and
transformed in cinema to produce cinematic (un)reality.

Cinema is an art of our time but simultaneously it has inherited
important cultural baggage since its invention. Unlike the other arts, cinema
does not have a past of centuries to be used as a reference. Yet, this is by no
means a negative characteristic as it has facilitated the medium in absorbing
technological development without prejudices. It is impossible to find an art
that has had, in its first century of life, such a rich and dizzying evolution as
cinema. The ‘culmination of two centuries of industrial modernism and
technological sophistication in visual representation’ (Darley, 2000: 38),
cinema had its genesis in the fusion of the machine with culture, producing a
massive cultural diffusion and thus breaking with the principle of art being
destined only for the benefit of a privileged minority.

André Bazin (1967: 21) explains how the genesis of cinema began with
photography, and he distinguishes a chain of progressive steps towards
attaining the ideal of faithful reproduction of reality through visual

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