Reflecting To Roberta Pearson's Menace Of The Movies

Cinema has taken a long route to be perceived as a form of art. As any emerging concept, cinema undermined the established norms and received ambiguous feedback from viewers and critiques. The majority argued the status of cinema as a form of art. Various pundits and stakeholders raised concerns that the innovation ever had the right to exist. Nonetheless, others accepted the novelty as the new form of expression. Reflecting to Roberta Pearson’s “Menace of the Movies” and examples of early films, the essay will review the historical aspects and both sides of criticism that accompanied the process of establishment of cinema as the art form.
In the inception, cinematography encountered adverse criticism. At the time when cinema was trying to

The critics denied cinema as an art form being unable to sustain the live performance. Despite the attempts to attract the viewers by inviting theater actors to star in the first movies, the interest to motion pictures did not rise. Theater long remained the primary form of art where staging was valued and appreciated by the audience and critics. The next criterion which cinema also failed to meet was the ability to freely express self in realism (Johns 80). The hostile audience blamed cinema for incapability of communicating strong emotions to build connections with the viewers. Regarding this criterion, a cinema critics Walter Prichard Eaton disapproved of cinema and denied that cinema deserved to be classified as an art form. He asserted that motion pictures produced a sense of cruel realism, deadening the imagination. The critic concluded that cinema had an illusory and destructive nature in contrast to theater having romantic nature of art.
Apart from the cinema’s failure to meet the basic criteria of theater, the innovation lacked the aspect of cultural representation. The cultural tastes were long established, making cinema unable to rival cultural prestige portrayed by theater as a form of art. The mechanical