Development of cinematograph studies: from “movie language” to “society language”

Movies are a specific type of material in which social and cultural values are embodied in the form that is the most simple and easy to understand. Mass availability and competent marketing company make a movie one of the most effective mechanisms for the dissemination of an idea in the society. Therefore, the cinematograph with a few exceptions waives artistic principles and becomes an ideological guide. The main goal of this paper is to identify those research values that have contributed to the cinema’s rejection of the art priorities in favor of social strategies. There are three groups of studies different from each other by the methods of analysis, interpretation of subject / object of the movie text and ideas of the movie’s functions. The first area includes the semiotic theories considering the movie-making as an independent, self-reliant way of expression. The second area includes a variety of sociological trends in the analysis of the movie text, for which screenplays and movie-making technologies are an integral part of the social reality, and changes in the movie texts are primarily related to the transformations in the structures of social relations. The third group of studies is carried out in the context of philosophical discourse, and the movie texts here are considered as specific metaphysical and epistemological projects that offer new ways of both existence (movie reality) and denotation (movie images). The movies, using their means of artistic expression, either reproduce social practices or replace cognitive processes.