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The Cinema and Popular Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 July 2024

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Every citizen has an equal right to culture. The development of the means of diffusion and of democratic ideas has unquestionably furthered a trend toward the unification of culture, but this process is often hindered and retarded. Profound disparities separate the cultural ideas and practices of society, the ideal or real cultural models of different social classes and categories, those of different groups, and, finally, those of the leaders and of the public. Imbalances result from this, and it is these imbalances that popular culture tends to modify. In order best to meet the continuously new cultural needs of industrial and democratic society, popular culture has adapted to modern life some of the features of traditional culture. It has initiated the masses into the elementary techniques of learning—writing and reading. An increasingly complex and extended primary education has become more widespread. Contemporary society raises problems that evolve so rapidly and are so intricate that popular culture must be continued after school and during a man's entire life. It finds its way into new systems of permanent instruction and training through the agency of large-scale means of diffusion, by means of groups or social relationships.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1960 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1. The international group in the social sciences studying leisure is sponsored and aided by UNESCO's Department of the Social Sciences as well as by UNESCO's International Institutes of Education and Youth. The group comprises sociologists from Germany, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Holland, France, Great Britain, Poland, Switzerland, and Yugoslavia.

2. E. Morin, Le Cinéma ou l'homme imaginaire (Paris: Édition de Minuit, 1958).

3. Ibid.

4. W. Lloyd Warner, "Yankee City" series (4 vols.; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941-47).

5. K. Lewin, Resolving Social Conflicts (New York: Harper & Bros., 1948) (French trans.: Psychologie dynamique, trans. Fauchex [Paris: P.U.F. 1959]).

6. E. Katz and P. Lazarsfeld, Pensonal Influence (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1955).