by kleinbl00

Given the competition with commercial cinema, a director has a particular responsibility toward his audiences. I mean by this that because of cinema's unique power to affect an auditorium - in the identification of the screen with life - the most meaningless, unreal commercials film can have just the same kind of magical effect on the uncritical and uneducated cinema-goer as that derived by his discerning counterpart from a real film. The tragic and crucial difference that if art can stimulate emotions and ideas, mass-appeal cinema, because of its easy, irresistible effect, extinguishes all traces of thought and feeling irrevocably.

-Tarkovsky, Andrey. Sculpting in Time, First University of Texas, 1989, Pg. 179