The Seventh Art! by Roberto Sironi
What is the origin word of cinema? Somewhere I read that the word cinema or cinematography has origins from the ancient Greek κίνημα, -τος “movement” and γραφή, graphḗ, “writing” today the set of arts, techniques and industrial and distribution activities that produce as a result commercial a film! The combination of movement and writing in a single idea is brilliant! Therefore, the movement can be considered a description of a writing and the writing a component of the movement as long as the two souls merge, magically, in an external form perceivable through the sense of sight called: image! A movie… This term is interesting and apparently, it would be difficult to understand when compared to the word “cinema” and instead... Instead, this term of only four letters brings together an immense world made of images, sounds, stories, faces, colors... “Film” is a loanword from the English language that indicates a membrane or a thin layer of material; it is, therefore, a synonym of film, the most authoritative synonym, and what is very interesting and somewhat astonishing, until the 1930s it was used in the feminine form and then transformed over time into a masculine noun! History tells us that the first example of film was made by the Lumière brothers on 28 December 1895 in Paris, about ten very short documentaries attended by a large and selected group of spectators! But history aside… Dream and reality mix in a present in which the future and the past are no longer a temporal representation of before, after, and during, but of a “here and now” that leaves no time for any reflection: time in a film, therefore in the cinema it no longer has its natural sense, everything proceeds at an almost incomprehensible speed, a speed that has to do with light in a unit of time which, as happens in a dream, considers everything except the weather!
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Spring 2024 - The ART issue
