In this a first article we lay out, in dead-simple plain terms, a few thoughts on what 'cinematicity' means and what the focus will be here as this website aspires to create a reasonably intelligent magazine dedicated to the importance of cinema.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Cinematicity is the quality or condition of being cinematic: it is the subjective impression of something perceived to be associated with the cinema. This can refer directly to cinema we see in the multi-plex, on the big-screen, or at home. This is the most clearly cinematic: spectacular special effects, larger-than-life situations projected there on the big-screen in a dark room. Just as likely, though, it can refer to the cinematic we perceive in our everyday life, in the form of another Godfather imitator who 'couldda been somboddy', or the reflection of light on a lake as people walk past talking, us watching from a distance quietly, or privately toiling at a computer screen, imagining an eventual break-through.

More than 120-years since the Lumière brothers shot what many consider to be the first film on a city street in Lyon, the cinema and film, is now more than ever, inextricably linked and implicated in nearly every dimension of our lives and culture, just as we and our culture have become inextricably bound-up with the cinematic. Politics imitates the cinema(think of yet another empty congressional hearing with exaggerated passion and fake concern); the News imitates the cinema(think of a photojournalism that elevates almost any story to the cinematic, of 24-hour news channels' coverage, CGI graphics, performing correspondents); Democracy imitates the cinema(as another person stands before a crowd giving a prepared speech that imitates some overly-enthusiastic manifesto for action); Business and Economy imitates the cinema (as traders imitate their Wolf of Wallstreet or Boiler Room roles as unhinged individuals at the limit of human intelligence and creativity, outside the scope of normalcy and law); Police imitate the cinema (as they look to representations that help them decide how to investigate or whether to investigate at all, if it lives up to the bar of the cinematic, of CSI Miami or some other police procedural); and Law imitates the cinema (as yet another prosecutor goes for broke with little evidence and nothing but his audience and hope of getting broader recognition from a moving, exaggerated corporate performance). The list could go on and on.

The point of this site is to explore this intersection between the cinema and our life and culture. Because while we live in a time saturated with cinema and with reflexive feedbacks between the cinema and our life, we really do have an impoverished perspective and ability to analyze and understand it. On the one side, we have the purely consumer-oriented industry that surrounds it, the reviewers and the bloggers who want to help us understand if something is worth watching, to tell us if a performance was good or if it 'sucked', who determine the box-office success of a film based on its dollar profits--all of which is superficial and leaves one wanting something more, which just ends-up being filled with the next big hype that falls flat. On the other hand, there is the academic analysis of film, that creates elaborate and many times today, predictable post-modern political analyses focusing on charged issues of a multi-cultural, liberal society, such as race, gender, representations of money, power, politics etc, that leaves one wanting something less, with the impression that an entire intellectual edifice has been bolted onto a film for nothing beyond the desire of its author to elaborate his or her own framework and that film just presents itself as a convenient vehicle for accessing a broader audience.

Both of these approaches, while interesting in ways, fail to properly appreciate the importance of cinema in the here-and-now, in the moment and at the seam of its production and consumption, where its potential (political and otherwise) is determined. And when this happens, we are left in a situation where the immense political, cultural, economic and philosophical machine that is the cinema simply perpetuates an empty form of consumption tied to the marketing strategies of the studios producing the films and of the 'content creators' whose aim is to profit from their association with the cinema; or, some critical and intelligent perspectives become syphoned-off into academic discourses on particular issues that don't have much to do with the actual role that film plays in structuring and producing the social.

Since the advent of the cinema, of the incredible technology of cinema that brought together elements of the free expression of art within the context of a structure that simultaneously weaves together disparate elements of reality into the montage as well as disparate people and places, near and far, that constitute the social and cultural span of film, people have understood and sought to understand the political, cultural, social and philosophical potential of the cinema. Is it just something that produces apathy and passivity in the viewer, creates an immense receptacle of the audience; or are there some redeeming qualities, some ways in which the cinema becomes political, is able to turn the passivity of its natural form of consumption into something more active, as many tried to do in the early days of cinema?

The reviews and short essays you will find here are attempts to elevate a perception of the cinematic of the everyday--of its cinematicity--so as to be able to get a better perspective on these issues while at the same time attempting to pay real respect to the social and cultural transformation specific to a film's own function. In this way, the hope is that by taking films and their political and social significance seriously, their effects can, first, be understood and, secondly, be amplified and extended (or, diminished and critiqued) and so that the cinematicity of life becomes the basis for the emergence of a conscious cinematic sociality/politicality (e.g., the social and political existence arising from out of this consideration of the cinematic). That's the general idea.