This book does not pretend to be a history of the cinema-hardly even a history of that particularly urgent quarter of the cinema`s total existence contained in the tranquillity, at least at some distance from the event; and the starting-point of this survey is the confused, exciting, stimulating, and essentially paradoxical situation of the cinema today. More people now watch more film, in the cinema and on television, than ever before. About half the population of this country never actually center a cinema; yet they accept film, in one form or another, as on unquestioned part of their lives. The fight for peacefull co-existence with television has undeniably weakened Western cinemas industrially. And, at the same time, there have been few periods in film history of greater creative excitement, creater opportunities for artists who want to use the screen for personal statement. Television, it could be argued, is in the proccess of liberating the cinema. //yn
