Cinema’s artistic-industrial ambiguity: discussions about aesthetics, market, industry and authorship

Abstract

In this paper, we aim to pursuit some of the transformations on the concept of cinema, to which the notions of art, market, industry, and author were aggregate during the 20th century. From the silent film, we allude to the first attempts of “cultural elevation” of the cinematographic form and, among those, to the theoretical propose of Ricciotto Canudo, who attributed to cinema the double condition of scientific and esthetic event. We also describe the authorial ambiguity of the classic Cabiria, today credited to Giovanni Pastrone while, in the past, it was credited to Gabriele D’Annunzio. Then, we point to the affirmation of the art-industry binomial in the theoretical discussions made by the Cahiers du Cinéma and the Nouvelle vague, indicating its reverberations in the underground and New Hollywood cinema of United States. Based on those premises,  we show Alberto Moravia’s critical resistance to the conciliation between art and market, signalizing the dichotomy between what he considered author cinema (made by Morrissey, Markopoulos, and Warhol) and commercial cinema (made by Kubrick, Coppola, Altman). By the end, we confront Moravia’s to Jameson’s thinking, observing the confluence of both around the idea of reification, a mark of the consumer society pictured by Andy Warhol.