Film as a Means of Social-aesthetic Communication: Substantiation of Historical Mission

Abstract

The emergence of fiction film came into being as a reaction to the people’s objective need for the vivid spectacle and the need to fill people’s expanding free time due to the effect of industrialization, urbanization and the growth of cities. Great capacity in this regard lurked in professional artistic creativity.
At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, of parallel existence were two worlds of the artistic culture: professional art for the privileged classes and folk art created and consumed by the populace. Professional art capable of systemically filling the free time of the broad popular masses did not exist. In a large measure fiction film eliminated the deficiency.
The commercial practice of film made a certain contribution to the convergence of film art with folk art. The products of professional artistic creativity were widely accepted by the masses. But they above all are the means for the business to commercially express itself. Here there is no provision of a true self-expression of the populace in the process of consuming them.
The self-expression of the populace is also limited through the excessive aestheticism of the artistic creativity. On the territory of the massed — in its essence — film there emerged a field of limited production: the elite art. Its esthetic practices contend for the status of the main line in the development of film art and the communication related to it.
Film came to a halt halfway in realizing its historical purpose: the convergence of the professional artistic creativity with folk art as regards the potential for the populace’s self-expression. Unsolved remains the issue of institutionalizing popular film as the «golden middle» between the polar means of cinematic communication. The root of the cause is, above all, in the absence of necessary contextual conditions, social and epistemological.