So what had the cinema meant to me in this context? I suppose: distance. It satisfied a need for distance, for an expansion of the boundaries of the real, for seeing immeasurable dimensions open up all around me, abstract as geometric entities, yet concrete too, crammed full of faces and situations and settings, which established an (abstract) network of relationships with the world of direct experience.
Since the war, cinema has been seen, discussed, made, in a completely different way. ... We no longer have one world within the brightly lit screen in the darkened theatre, and another heterogeneous world outside, the two being divided by a clean break, an ocean or abyss. The darkened theatre disappears, the screen becomes a magnifying glass placed on the routine world outside, forcing us to focus our attention on what the naked eye tends to skim over without settling on. This function has -- can have -- its usefulness, marginal, more substantial or occasionally very considerable. But it does not satisfy that anthropological and social need for distance.
- Italo Calvino, "A Cinema-Goer's Autobiography" pp. 60-61, The Road to San Giovanni.

...and it's pointless my trying to kindle a halo of feeling behind it with these words of commentary: all remains as it was then, those baskets were already dead then and I knew it, ghosts of a concreteness that had already disappeared, and I was already what I am, a citizen of cities and of history -- still without either city or history and suffering for it -- a consumer-- and victim - -of industrial products -- a candidate for consumerism, a freshly designated victim -- and already the lots were cast, all the lots, our own and everybody else's, yet what was this morning fury of my childhood, the fury that still persists in these not entirely sincere pages? Could everything perhaps have been different-- not very different but just enough to make the difference...? Might everything that is happening now perhaps have taken a different slant, in the world, in the history of civilization -- the losses not have been so absolute, the gains so uncertain?

- Italo Calvino, "The Road to San Giovanni" pp. 29-30, The Road to San Giovanni.