Culture, civilisation, art : comment les médias de masse et le cinéma ont-ils (re)façonné ces concepts ?
Culture, civilization, art: how did the mass media and cinema (re) shape these concepts?

Summary/Abstract: It is obvious that mass-media and the artistic production realized by industrial means, at the beginning of modernity, radically changed the content of some major concepts of western thought, such as “civilization”, “culture”, “art”, “artist”, “ethics”. The present paper tries to underline some transformations of these concepts, to see the mechanisms of such transformations, to circumscribe the strategies of recuperation and recycling of archaic mentalities – put nowadays in new (mediatic) shapes. The characteristics of contemporary – trans-national, globalized – civilization will be described here, taking as a starting point the preponderance – beginning with the first decades of the 19th century – of media in the transmission of cultural content (information, ideology, moral values, esthetical standards, ethical patterns). Because of that, an interrogation on the human being/humanity/humanism is necessary in this world where the planetary diffusion of media seems to create a hostile environment for such concepts. In this paper, the figure of the journalist will be analyzed in opposition to the artist’s (even if both of them have a strange relation with moral values), with an emphasis on their cinematographic avatars.

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