ABSTRACT
Ars gratia artis, art for art’s sake, is the motto of MGM, one of the major Hollywood studios, yet from the beginning the business of cinema was to produce entertainment for a popular audience, at a price. The significant debates surrounding film as a popular form, rather than an art form, revolve around a number of questions: is cinema as an institution shaped largely by industrial forces or by cultural forces? Does cinema give expression to a democratic vision of the world-that is “popular,” as in “of the people”? Or is cinema the purveyor of an ideology imposed by the captains of industry that transforms the active citizen into a passive cultural dupe, who then buys into a system of beliefs and practices that are contrary to his or her own interests? There is no single answer to this question. Depending on what dimension of cinema we examine, we may come up with different assessments of cinema’s role.
