Knowledge is Power Magazine No. 8. 2023

We and Cinema Cinema. At first, it was the 'great silent', a fashionable entertainment. Even then, it not only amazed but also delighted, saddened. Then it spoke, finally turning into the art of cinema. Its works to this day do not leave us indifferent, making us praise them, criticize them, argue. The older generation, who had the opportunity to live in the Soviet era, of course, knows Lenin's famous phrase, said to Lunacharsky: 'You must firmly remember that of all the arts, cinema is the most important for us.' Lenin first of all saw two tasks that cinema solved: the effectiveness of film production for the propaganda of communist ideas and its accessibility to the masses. It was much easier to build cinemas than theaters, which required stages and complex equipment, and the service staff in cinemas was much smaller than in theaters, and did not require such a variety of specialties: directors, actors, costume designers, makeup artists, etc. And mobile cinema installations reached even the most remote corners of the country. In the West, the development of cinema was driven by the profitability of this type of activity, but this did not prevent the creation of true masterpieces of film production. In the post-war years, television widely entered our lives, and then there were many who claimed: the era of cinema is over. They were wrong: cinema and television quickly learned to coexist harmoniously: films that had been shown in cinemas soon appeared on television screens. And a new genre was added to films: TV films - films designed for viewing on television, slow-paced, multi-episode. Now we live in the era of the internet. Has it displaced cinema? Not at all! On the contrary, it has seriously expanded our ability to access the art of cinema. Now everyone has the opportunity to watch any film of interest to them at a convenient time. And with what additional conveniences: if you want to interrupt viewing for one reason or another, you press pause and leave for hours, if you didn't understand a certain episode, you rewind and watch again. The VCR, which appeared in the 80s of the 20th century, also provided such opportunities, but you had to go to a special store or video rental point for film cassettes, which were not always nearby, sometimes quite far away. Later, video cassettes were replaced by DVDs, then Blu-rays, providing increasingly higher quality playback. But all this is a conversation about the possibilities of getting acquainted with works of cinematic art. What about the films themselves, how do new possibilities associated with the advent of digital cinema, computer technologies, increasingly advanced film shooting and sound recording techniques affect their production? What are the secrets of modern cinema technology? About this in the materials of the main theme of this issue.