The public is seldom remembered in cinema history, and even less in the theory of moving images. The producer – or rather, the producing company -, and later the scriptwriter or the director, were the supposed sole authors of films. And film, traditionally, is to be understood in its inner relations, as a language of signs or as a discourse from a mysterious and powerful source. Or as a physiological cognitive process, or psychoanalytic experience of an abstract spectator. This spectator is an specter never found in reality – although its main characteristics usually coincide with white, christian, occidental middle class.
Spectator, as the word reveals, is someone supposed to do not participate, but only endure and accept what is presented to him. Spectatorship, the spectator posture is the main result of a clear struggle that marked the beginning of movies and the establishment of an hegemonic model of literary, linear, and spectatorial cinema. Spectator is the abstract attitude, public is the concrete context.
Context only appeared in film studies in the late half of the past century. Reception was “discovered” in Cultural Studies in the seventies, and the public, or different publics, a little later, in feminist and genre approaches of cinema. At that same time, some Italian cineclubists, mainly Filippo de Sanctis and Fabio Masala, and the movement resisting military dictatorship in Brazil formulated, for the first time, the concept of cineclubs as organizations of the public.
This idea was further developed by The Chart of the Rights of the Public, and adopted by all country members of the International Federation of Film Societies, in the 1987 IFFS General Assembly, in Tabor, in the Czech Republic.
Since those times, this conception points to the study, critic, recovery and construction of a vision of cinema –and a vision of the world, a Weltanschauung –where the public, contextualized historically, socially and politically, is the main, decisive element (not film semiology, nor the abstract and passive spectator) for understanding cinema as a social relation. An art that only produces meaning through the dialogue with the public. And where cineclubism is a worldly social and cultural movement, whose roots and presence can be found since the beginning of cinema and in the vast majority of countries in the world. A movement dedicated to represent the public interests, devoted to change an unilateral, alienating and oppressive discourse, and committed to promote democracy of access to audiovisual contents and freedom and diversity of its expressions.
Cineclubs –or whatever name is used to label public’s audiovisual organizations all over the world– are building this vision in a daily basis. In a contradictory manner, often ephemeral, uneven. But with a fertility that no other cinema institution –or even cultural institution– can match.
The inexhaustible diversity of organizational forms within a movement that is a social and legal institution, as well as a concept; its adaptability to different moments in history, different social and cultural circumstances, and different technological apparatuses –inside capitalism and modernity– reveals the public as the fundamental force for transformation of a condition where information, knowledge and entertainment became central tools and means of communication between all persons and peoples, and simultaneously, of social control.
The Cineclub’s Review has the ambition of becoming an instrument for developing this ideas through the exchange of reflections and experiences of cineclubs all over the planet. Through debate and creativity. Through the recovery and promotion of the memory of the public’s role in cinema and audiovisual history, in each and every country, and in History itself.
That will only be achieved with the contribution of our readers, participants not spectators.

Because we are the public.