Helping us imagine is, in fact, one of cinema’s main functions—for better or for worse. In order to make something real, we first need to imagine it. Cinema, made possible in part by the scientific and technological revolution, allows us to imagine through storytelling—and the stories told by cinema (and here we include both films and series) end up becoming part of the larger narrative through which we understand and define ourselves.
There was a parallel development to cinema: television. This meant that watching a movie gradually shifted from the ritual of gathering at a specific time with other devoted viewers in those temple-like movie theatres—silent spaces removed from the outside world—to consuming it at home, without any ritual at all. Then came TV movies and series, the cinematic equivalent of fast food: highly accessible, tasty but forgettable, and generally unhealthy. Over the past three decades, the rise of the Internet has intensified this home-based consumption through digital platforms, so-called “piracy,” or the explosion of TV channels. Today, cinema is accessible from anywhere and in any format—even on a mobile phone or tablet. It’s not unusual to see someone watching a movie or series on their smartphone while riding the subway. Beyond the question of these people’s mental health, this is a quiet but real affront to cinema as an art form, and a rebranding of “cinema” as a disposable consumer product and an escapist drug.
As an artistic form of expression, cinema is steadily losing its value and becoming a tool of power—a means of social control. It supports the consolidation of liberal nation-states, but its role was cemented with the rise of “the film industry.” That industry has become openly subservient to political and economic powers—especially from the second half of the 20th century onward, when Anglo-American dominance emerged and began to see the seventh art as more than just propaganda: as a tool to shape society, weaken it, and bring it to heel. Ideas and worldviews once unthinkable have been introduced into the collective imagination—and ultimately accepted—thanks to cinema.
But beyond the fact that each film transmits certain ideas and values (or counter-values)—sometimes following the dictates of power (most of them), and other times opposing it (a few)—the way cinema is consumed today, in a deliberately impulsive and uncontrolled manner, at any time and in any format, fragments people and makes them incapable of thinking. It steals time from reading, reflection, and human relationships. It overstimulates and leads to addiction. It creates individuals—not full persons—who can no longer think slowly, silently, or deeply, because they’ve become addicted to dopamine, to constant emotional highs, to fantasies increasingly detached from reality. They become emotional, easily manipulated, fragmented, isolated, and exploitable.
The truth is that real problems—political alienation and polarization, economic exploitation, poverty and exclusion, and the materialist anthropological reductionism of post- or transhumanism—are either left on the margins in impotence or sublimated into the beautiful alienation encouraged by cinematic “desire capitalism.” When power wanted to break people’s bonds in order to turn them into atomized individuals—easier to control—it didn’t hesitate to use cinema to do so, increasingly brazenly and without restraint.
Our society, like any other, needs cinema as an art form to understand itself—to reflect on its own way of being and organizing. It needs a kind of cinema that denounces the abuse of power against the vulnerable; that offers models of life, behaviour, organization, and human relationships. A cinema that helps us imagine utopias, that generates hope for building a better world. That plants this longing deep in our hearts. But to do that, cinema must break free from the grip of power. The filmmaker must tell stories out of vocation—not just to make money (even if it’s true that workers deserve fair pay). That’s why we need new ways of making and distributing films that don’t depend on wealthy patrons or multimillionaire investors. Because whoever pays, calls the shots—and if cinema doesn’t find a way to be self-managed, it will continue to be created according to the orders of power.
