Film as the discovery of this democratic century must decide how it represents its age and whether it, as its mirror, lets itself be pulled down or would like to be raised up to become art.
In America, the houses in which films were shown were, according to the historical example, called theaters, where one represents the world, theaters for all, quick and cheap, but theaters.
The traditional arts received their mandate from the church and the royal power-holders and from the self, which liberated itself more and more in an echo of the divine or royal structures of man for the mission of society, until this art atrophied into the museum-like routine care of heritage and became a market value of the successes of the momentary benefit at the cash-register and in the media or in ideologies. And film sought its power in Hollywood, Hollywood, which in the meantime determines the style, and the styling of the world, in speech, clothing, gestures and food through its serials. This art of profit and selfishness is ruled by motives in which the sex and violence monopoly of a neurotically impoverished world (“money makes the world go round” and sex business) is not only chosen as the subject of its representation but in which these speculative motives themselves become the motifs and criteria of its aesthetics. That happens through sensual stimulation of a public becoming impotent, when freedom is sold, comparable to the enslavement of the senses, in that attack on the elements in the daily life of rivers, woods, animals and plants on the earth, in the wind and in the seas. There arises the question if this is still art as the mirror of an impoverishing reality, after the loss of things, or rather after it became a seductive propaganda in order to accept this world or to prepare it, beyond the norms that hitherto existed, and if one must not — since art no longer relates to this world — find entirely different values, with a parting from culture in general. And already even the American definitions for the artistic discovery of this century as “movie” and “picture” and “show” seem overtaken by new observations ousting even these categories.