Question of the day: what is popular cinema?

To answer this question posed by our tutor Tyson Wils, we first had to look at how to define popular culture. For those in the contextual study this may have been an easy question but I had to take a quick look at the readings to help me out. I found Raymond Williams’ definition in A Vocabulary of Culture and Society a particularly interesting one, because it described the word culture‘s origins in the Latin verb colore, meaning inhabit, cultivate, protect or honour with worship. I thought it was fascinating that even going back thousands of years we could see the relevance of this definition to pop culture today: the idea of ‘honouring with worship’ and ‘protecting’ seem to me to be very applicable to the way avid fans today really appreciate and defend their favourite works.

Further breaking down this discussion of pop culture, Williams describes the two parallel definitions of popular, that are ‘of the people’ (linking in with the idea that pop culture such as pop music is inherently opposed to elite or high culture) and ‘well-liked’. But the particularly interesting point Williams raises 9that was emphasised by Tyson as a focus of this subject) was the idea that there is something “calculating”, in Williams’ words, about the term popular; there’s this idea that pop culture is designed to be liked and bought.

Tyson reiterated this point when writing up a prompt for our reflections, referring to films that “try to offer something new/sell themselves as offering something new.” It was with this statement that he asked what films we might then classify as popular cinema. A good starting point for this thought might be the breakdown of pop culture into industrial, cultural and aesthetic factors that Tyson and Williams both referred to. Maybe these are the areas that a film must succeed in to be considered popular cinema? The immediate thought in my mind was the recent superhero films; box-office successes, they have not only individually gained fans but collectively created a fictional world and comic-book-to-film aesthetic that has captured minds. The superhero genre is almost a sub-culture of its own – is that what we call popular cinema, and popular culture?