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The magazine UniversalCinema was founded with a simple goal: Making film writing accessible to all who love the movies. What has long distinguished cinema from other arts is its intimate connection with modern technology and mass production. It is uniquely able to speak to masses of people. Not for nothing did Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin call it “the most important of all the arts.” We intend to write about movies in a language understood by people. For us, this isn’t to “simplify” cinema but to capture its essence, as art in the age of mass production. We are unapologetically engaged in social and political critique and our writings on cinema aim to bring this critique to a large number of people.Alas, much current writing on cinema values obtuse and obscurant language. Hard to find are critics such as the legendary American writers Roger Ebert or Pauline Kael whose reviews were read by people in their hundreds of thousands. In a vicious circle, many critics now write for a small number of festival-goers about films that, in turn, sometimes care only about these small circles. We want to take back cinema to where it belongs: the masses. We are intellectuals who wish to speak to people not ourselves. UniversalCinema was founded for this express goal: Writing about cinema for all, in a language accessible to all. We understand the utopian and problematic aspects of such a goal but that doesn’t diminish our enthusiasm only furthers it.
