Roller coasters of vain pleasure. Cultural industry, legislation and national cinema

Abstract

After ten years of approving the first law of cinema in Ecuador the view on the place that national cinemas occupy inside the global cultural industry faces realities and naivetés of the process. The international division of labour of the symbolic work, often in an implicit and indirect way, establishes specific roles to be accomplished for the emergent cinematography among which is included the condition of creative stock to feed, eventually, the voracious hegemonic cultural industry. Beyond that, thanks to the laws of promotion and protection issued by States around the world, which constitutes a symptom of social development, the national cinemas express the cultural diversity and contain the historical memory of the people.