The so-called opposition between 'mainstream' and 'alternative' cinema production and reception becomes the untenable designation for reactionary and revolutionary practice. On one hand, some of Hollywood cinemas reflect complex and contradictory social relations and as such, in the context of ideological critique, should not be dismissed only on the grounds of their corporate roots. At the same time, the celebrating of 'alternative' cinematic visions, in an offensively uncritical way, has led to the canonization of the films that deserve more thoughtful critical intervention.

In other words, contemporary cinema needs rethinking in terms of hegemonic structures, while new forms of ideological critiques should be focused on complex ways in which films make their appeals to their viewers in various, multiple and specific places in which they, as social subjects, incorporate film in the practice of everyday life. And as much as one, apparently dominant and homogenized commodity – corporate produced film – can be found and sustained within smaller almost sub-cultural alternative or resistant readings, it is likewise important what kinds of political responses are being produced by recent emphasis on 'independent' film, whose mimicing the formal, economic and political strategies demands at least healthy suspicion.

Also, the well-known fact that no commodity (including that of a cinema) cannot be entirely finished until it reaches the hands (eyes or ears) of a consumer, who shares the responsibility for film production with a film producer himself, reveals the urgent need for focusing and problematizing the relationship between the spheres of film production and film reception. [See the texts of Eric Smoodin, 'Mr Smith Goes to Hollywood' and Toby Miller, 'Cinema Studies Doesn't Matter', Prelom 6/7] In other words, to gather a fuller understanding of how cinema's meanings are forged in a daily life, it is necessary to discover the mechanisms of contemporary forms of film production. And so, as much as the forms of star journalism should not be disregarded or scorned, as they may bear the potential to represent what the corporate cinema wishes its recipients to think about films, those forms should also be framed in a larger matrix of social relations needed to make films, a matrix that the film industry itself could hardly reproduce in its self-generated reportage.

If we put the mutual co-constitution of film production and reception in a broader historical perspective, we may find ourselves in a more complex path in which the analysis of the rise of film noir, being the cinematic triumph of the Hollywood Left [See the text of Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, 'Politics and Mythology of Film Art – The Noir Era', Prelom 6/7], and the ideological resistance from Communist aesthetic reductionism, find their symptomatic place within not only contemporary American cinema, but the World cinema of 20th and 21th century as well.