16-11-2016 How cinema has

evolved because
of the society
Individual project

Anna Sánchez López

EDUCATION AND EDUCATIONAL CONEXTS - SOCIOLOGY
GROUP 71, SEMINAR C
UNIVERSITAT AUTÒNOMA DE BARCELONA
How cinema has evolved because of the society Individual project

INDEX

1. Introduction ............................................................................................................ 2

2. A before and an after in cinema ............................................................................. 4

3. Gender’s role in cinema ......................................................................................... 6

4. What is represented in today’s cinema? ................................................................ 9

5. Conclusions ......................................................................................................... 11

Bibliography and webography ..................................................................................... 12

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How cinema has evolved because of the society Individual project

1. Introduction

Nowadays the cinema, which is known as the seventh art, has increased its importance
all over the world and among every generation. It is not anymore a product that you
can only get by going to the cinema but now you can enjoy this type of audio-visual
language from almost all spaces where you have an Internet connection and enough
time to watch the film you are interested in.

Its original manifest function was to gather people in front of a screen with the implicit
aim to create different social relations and, although the platforms in which we see the
films have changed, its function is still working, as Lipovetsky and Serroy say (2009):

Aunque las condiciones de recepción hayan cambiado, aunque la televisión, el

DVD y la bajada de material de Internet representen otras tantas formas
nuevas de ver una película fuera de la sala, también es verdad que, a través de
estos nuevos modos de consumo, sigue reuniendo espectadores alrededor de
un mismo espectáculo. (p.317)

Thanks to different platforms like Netflix, YouTube or any other kind of agreement with
your television company, you can see films cheaper and more comfortable since you
can see them from your home and you can watch it as many times as you want
because you have them close at hand. The major advantage of these platforms is that
you can see not only the films which are on billboard at that moment but you are able
to see movies of any time and of any country.

In the current world cinema is no longer an event which can only be afforded by people
with economic capital but nowadays people of all classes can go to the cinema thanks
to different promotions and special days in which the price of the ticket is affordable for
everyone. So, we can say that this art is not anymore an exclusive way of spending
your free time like it was in the past, where only upper class with economic capital
could afford it, but a way of leisure for everyone who is interested in it; it is not a trend
with social class differences but a standard in consumption of every social class.

Moreover, Lipovetsky and Serroy say (2009) on their book La pantalla global that now
children and teenagers don’t only go to the cinema with their family but also with their
friends, since the social structure keeps changing during the years because society is
not a static element. This change involves that the films have found themselves obliged
to adapt the genre and the contents of the films for all the viewers that can go to the

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How cinema has evolved because of the society Individual project

cinema because of the importance that this social agent has in the formation of kids’
identity.

As cinema has increased its popularity in the past few years it is a very important mass
media which can reflect our society and it can also affect or determine different
behaviours of it. The cinema is also a common way of leisure for everyone who is
interested in it and its consumers have also changed. For this reason, I wanted to see
how this audio-visual language has evolved during the years and if it has evolved at the
same time that society, if the content of it has changed a lot and if it has, I wanted to
know the reason why.

So, in this project I am going to try to analyse how the cinema and its contents in films
have changed according to gender positions and also according to the content itself, it
means, what stories are represented in this seventh art regarding to the consumers it
has in today’s society.

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How cinema has evolved because of the society Individual project

2. A before and an after in cinema

Cinema started in the middle of the 1890s decades, when the Lumière brothers
projected a short film, which consisted in mute black and white images in movement,
for the first time in front of an audience. At that time making a film was only affordable
for few people with the necessary knowledge for creating a cinematograph and enough
economic capital to produce one. And now, a little bit more than two hundred years
after, everybody with a mobile phone or a camera and basic knowledges of informatics
can make a video in a few minutes. As we can imagine, there have been many
changes in our society since that moment that have allowed this evolution of the
cinema.

As I already said, the first movies in the cinema were mute and black and white. They
last few minutes but despite of their short extension, people was very interested in this
phenomenon that never before had happened in human history. At the beginning its
content represented ordinary scenes that could happen in the daily life of the
consumer, like workers leaving the factory in which they work, a gardener watering the
grass, waves crushing in the rocks or a mail train that moved forward the spectator. We
may think that this cinema represented reality, but it didn’t. As Baudrillard said what we
see about the world is a fiction constructed from the reality throughout the process of
simulacra, so although we think that a simple film of how workers leave the factory was
reality it was not.

After Lumière brothers invented the cinema and represented the images of the daily life
of people in that period, the French illusionist George Méliés started in 1897 to apply
illusionism to the cinema. He realised that cinema could not only represent the reality,
but it also could change it and falsify it.

He started doing that with simple photography tricks like stopping recording in the
middle of a scene, changing the disposition of the elements or taking some of them
away, and then start recording again, so this way in the screen seemed that these
elements had disappeared or moved. And after that discovery, Edwin Porter mixed the
description cinema of the Lumière and Méliés illusions in order to create the fictional
cinema, and from that moment on cinema was used to create fictional films.

We have to take in account that all these creations were mute and in black and white
since the technology was not as developed as now. So, in order to create seduction to
the viewer and catch their interest they had to use different elements. There were

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How cinema has evolved because of the society Individual project

extravagant sets and make ups, the actors’ performances were very expressive and,
when Méliés introduced the fictional cinema, techniques like using accelerate images
were used to make the experience more interesting. This era of mute cinema, although
its lack of elements and techniques used in today’s cinema, was able to show the world
as any art could have done until that moment. (Lipovetsky & Serroy, 2009, p.17)

The apparition of sound in cinema, at the beginning of the 1930s, was a revolution in
the cinema world and all people who worked in it had to learn new techniques to
introduce sound in what they filmed. This big change in the cinema company increased
the interest of viewers and cinema was starting to become a frequent element in the
leisure time of people.

After the adding of the soundtrack in films, the investigations around the cinema didn’t
stop: it also started to appear the cinema in colour and after the apparition of television
on the majority of houses the importance of films increased, since everyone could
watch them at home.

At that time the content which predominated was that which was linear, which cannot
lead the consumer to confusion. The set was very important for characterizing the film,
and they started to hire significant people in order to star the film and get the attention
of the audience. These characteristics would be followed and would be a characteristic
of the classic cinema.

But after the Second World War there is a breakup with the classic structure and there
is a new conception of the world. It appears a stylistic and narrative freedom which
leads to the use of non-continuous structures. The special effects appear thanks to the
technology, which is being develop by the cinema company in order to improve the
techniques they already had. So, we can say that there is a big change from the former
way of producing cinema. And in these last years, cinema has evolved in a spectacular
way thanks to all advances in technology, like the virtual reality.

So, we can say that the history of cinema consists in a series of transformations and
reconsiderations. (Lipovetsky & Srroy, 2009, p.16), with the aim of looking for
spectacularly. So, all characteristics and new techniques are used to create a more
interesting and spectacular product to catch the attention of the consumers and to
emotionally connect with them.

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How cinema has evolved because of the society Individual project

3. Gender’s role in cinema

As we have seen in class, gender is an arbitrary characteristic based on a biological

difference that divides the individuals into men and women and attribute to each
category specific social characteristics as the way of thinking, acting or even the way
they feel.

This inequality has been internalized and normalized by the society and one of the
reasons is because we see it every day. This stratification axe can be also seen in
movies in both, in the content of the movie and in the cinema’s company.

First of all, let’s talk about the gender in the characters of the films. In the past years,
and still nowadays, women were supposed to be the weak ones while men were the
ones who were brave and strong. According to this characteristic imposed by their
gender, women were the individuals who took care of other people and of the house.

In the society of the past, this role of the woman was more internalized by the
individuals, so in the films women were represented as the perfect housewife that had
to satisfy all the necessities of their husbands, sexual necessities or necessities related
to their commodities like have a hot meal when they came back of work or having all
the house cleaned, and also as girls who wanted to be beautiful for their partner. And,
on the other hand, men were the responsible of the economy of the house and of going
to work in order to create material and intellectual wealth. So, we can say that at that
time what was represented in the cinema was patriarchy.

At the 1970s these roles start to change because of the increase of women in the
director position in films, which before the 1980 it was mainly a men’s work because it
was a power position and women had not possibilities to be in a power position. This
rise, which didn’t mean that they only did girly cinema but all genres of it, changed the
representation of women in films. The change was also promoted because the role of
the woman was also starting to change in the society: they started to have jobs and not
to fulfil all the necessities of men, but the men themselves were the responsible of
covering their necessities.

From these years on women started to be represented in positions where a woman

had never been because they were positions of power which only could be taken by
men. Examples of this are: a power position like the boss of a popular magazine in
The devil wears Prada; a woman doing a men’s job like in Sky fighters, where a woman

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How cinema has evolved because of the society Individual project

is a pilot; in Million Dollar Baby, where a woman is taking part in such a man sport like
boxing; or like Catwoman, where the role of a superhero is represented by a woman.
(Lipovetsky & Serroy, 2009, p. 117)

The changing role of the woman was not only in the positions that they occupied but
also in the way of feeling and acting. It was no longer bad seen if a woman was
represented as an individual who is not only with one person but a person who has
intimate relations with different guys, or if she started a relation with a boy younger than
her like in The rebound, which in the past years was seen as if the woman that did that
was like indecent or immoral. Films started also to represent the women as a brave
individual who had no fear of doing the first step in relationships. Nevertheless, this
representation of the woman, as it is said in the book, is more a new way of models of
behaviour (Lipovetsky & Serroy, 2009, p. 117) than a reflection of the reality, where
these actions are still prevailing in men.

This change has also involved a new way in the representation of men. They are no
longer though guys with no feelings but they have also an intimate fragility, they also
have feelings and these are represented in the screen. They worry about their physical
appearance and about the beauty and they start to be represented in what before were
femininity jobs like dancers, in Billy Elliot, or in femininity roles like looking after the kids
while the woman is working.

However, this doesn’t mean that characters that represented masculinity or femininity
have disappeared but quite the opposite: there have appeared characters representing
the hipermasculinity and hiperfemininity. In the first case, we can keep our eyes in
superheroes; they are what we can consider a superman, because they are
represented as people in a very good shape, who are brave and fear nothing. If we talk
about hiperfemininity, we can see that some characters are mad of beauty and with the
stethic surgery in order not to grow old and maintain themselves as a twenty-year-old
girl. Nevertheless, this hiperfemininity does not forbid the success of the character, as
we can see in Legally blonde, where a girl who is the personification of hiperfemininity
has the same value as the smartest boy you can imagine. (Lipovetsky & Serroy, 2009)

Finally, the sexualisation of women is still a very important aspect in the gender
differentiation. As we can see in Figure 1, an important percentage of women who
appeared in films between 2007 and 2012 were inducing or referring to sex, in
opposition of less than 10% of men. And according to Gender inequality in film, the
percentage of female teenagers that appear with some nudity has increased 30% from

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How cinema has evolved because of the society Individual project

2007 to 2012. This means that nowadays there is still a sexual objectification of
women, which leads to the discrimination of women because of their sexual position.

Figure 1: How women are portrayed on screen1

On the other hand, the role of women in the industry of cinema, although it has evolved
from the former years, it still suffers inequality if we compare it with the men’s role. This
means that the gender is still a big axe of stratification which can lead to discrimination
and inequality among women.

Although little by little there are more women in power position and in taking decisions’
position, like film director or characters, in the industry of films, as it is said in Gender
inequality in film “it is clear that Hollywood remains stuck in its gender bias”. It can be
seen in Figure 1 that women actresses are less represented and have less major roles
in films, since only a 30,8% of them had a speaking character in films, which means
that only this percentage had an important role. Also, it can be seen in Figure 1 that
there is no equality in the cast of films because in the majority there are more than the
half actors that are men and only in 10,7% of films there was an equitable cast.

We can also observe that the women in power position in film industry doesn’t surpass
the 25% and that in the majority of the job positions is even much smaller than this.
And that the salary of men is much more than the women’s one. The difference is that
big that the actress who earns more earns almost the same quantity that the men who
earns less.

1 Retrieved from https://www.nyfa.edu/film-school-blog/gender-inequality-in-film/

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How cinema has evolved because of the society Individual project

4. What is represented in today’s cinema?

As both, consumers and the society, have changed is easy to understand that the
content of the films has also changed, since it has to adapt to what the audience is
interested in.

At the beginning of the cinema what was represented on the screen were daily life
routines in which we could see patriarchy because the men gender had the power and
they oppressed the women. It also represented, as I said before, women like the
responsible of the house and the care of people and men as the person who had to go
to work in order to sustain the family in an economic way. These situations were
represented mostly in middle-aged marriages and the film had a linear sequence which
was predictable. Collectives like children, teenagers or the elderly didn’t have
representation in this mass media which was starting to grow.

This representation has changed and now all collectives are represented in films.
Family structures and the types of family have also changed, so their representation of
the family has also changed. Now in films we can see all type of family, from a divorced
woman who takes care of her children alone to a gay family who has adopted a kid.

Children are represented as they are, not as adults want them to be. This is important
because it represents how kids are socialized and how the society influences in the
characterization of their identity. It represents the first years of their life in a personal
way, not as a generalised issue.

Youth started to be represented in the 1950s but not as an ideal age. They showed
their internal conflicts, as sexuality, how they grow with the absence of a family
member, their problems with authority and also the difficulty of passing from youth to
an adult life. So, we can say that they represented the reality in which most teenagers
were living.

Elderly, on the other hand, were starting to be represented in a different way than
before. At the beginning, they represented the preoccupation that this group of people
had among death, but now it is the opposite, they represent how elderly people
continue living their life by living new adventures. Nevertheless, this is basically fiction
because in the real life, although some elderly people may live new adventures, the
majority of them have a relaxed and monotonous life. By this example we can see that

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How cinema has evolved because of the society Individual project

what is represented in the cinema is that which can be interesting or seduce the
consumers, not the reality.

The other element, a part of the different stages of life and families, which has evolved
the most is the sex. In the old films, there wasn’t sex scenes because they were bad
seen by the society, talking about sex was a thing that only rude people did. Sex was a
taboo.

But after Freud had talked about the unconscious and the desires it has, sex invaded
the screens. The society evolved and its beliefs and values did so. Sex was not
anymore a taboo; the society was not as straight-laced as before so this natural act
could be represented on films. (Lipovetsky & Serroy, 2009, p.20)

Nowadays almost all films have at least one sex scene in it. Our society is more open-
minded and sex is seen as a natural issue, so it is not only represented straight sex but
also gay sex, the same that happens with the relationships since we can see any type
of relationship in a movie.

This great amount of sex is not only because of the commercialization effects, but it is
seen as a cultural revolution of the transformations of the customs, the disappearance
of taboos and the amoralization of the sexual referent. (Lipovetsky & Serroy, 2009,
p.90)

Finally, we can add that this new cinema represents not only the happy moments of our
life but also those which are bad: there are many ends which are not happy or which
are not closed. The films want to reflect the social reality, in which not everything is
good, in order to make us think over that.

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How cinema has evolved because of the society Individual project

5. Conclusions

After all the research and study of the issue, I can assure that the cinema that is
produced today is very different of that which was produced at the beginning of its
invention.

First of all, the technology available today has allowed to improve all techniques and
methods that are used in the film production. This evolution of technology and
therefore, of films has permitted to create a more spectacular content with the aim of
catching the audience’s interest.

Then, a part of the evolution of techniques and technology, there has been, a change
in film industry which can be considered as the most important one. I am talking about
the vision of society, the content that is now represented thanks to the change of
mindset of the society.

Women are not represented anymore as the housewife that they use to be. Now they
can aim for the same positions and characters than men: power positions and all those
that one time were only represented by men. Although this important change, we have
to be aware that in this industry there is still inequality among women, since they are
payed less and there is also less representation of this sex both, in and out of the
screen. So, we have to continue changing this situation until there is equality for both.

Finally, what is represented, I mean, the content that it is shown has also changed with
the society. Nowadays we can see film which show the lives and the problems of all
collectives of the society and not only of the middle-aged people. It has introduced this
content because film producers realised that what the society was interested in was in
their reality, in thing that they could identify. Moreover, issues that before were no
represented in the cinema because of the moral of the time, like sex or homosexuality,
now are showed as a natural issue, as it is like that, thanks to the evolution an
progression of the moral and values of the society.

In conclusion, we can claim that the film industry has evolved at the same time that the
society, but although these changes its function has not changed: it still creates a
social and cultural bond among people that allows them to communicate inside the
same spirit and convictions. (Lipovetsky & Serroy, 2009, p.316)

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How cinema has evolved because of the society Individual project

Bibliography and webography

 A useful page for finding informatiion of cinema’s history

http://www.earlycinema.com/timeline/index.html Retrieved 9 November, 2016
 Gender inequality in film. Retrieved 10th November, 2016 from:
https://www.nyfa.edu/film-school-blog/gender-inequality-in-film/
 Historia y origen del cine. Retrieved 9th November, 2016 from:
http://www.swingalia.com/cine/historia-y-origen-del-cine.php
 Lipovetsky, G.& Serroy, J. ( 2007). La pantalla global: Cultura mediática y cine
en la era hipermoderna. [The global screen: media culture and cinema in the
hypermodern era.] (1st edition). Spain: Anagrama
 Notes taken in class
 World cinema history. Retrieved 9th November, 2016 from:
http://www.cypruscinema.com/article_world-cinema-history

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