This is often what great films do. They take what is available in reality and distill it down so viewers can understand it the first time. When you make a copy of a copy, things get blurry, more difficult to decipher. Films often do the exact opposite with elements of culture. They reduce present reality and essential past experiences into distilled intertextual products—mediated messages that combine various types of text into one.
- Films simplify reality Great films don’t try to show all of real life as it is. Reality is complex, messy, and full of details. Instead, filmmakers select and simplify certain parts of reality so that viewers can quickly grasp the meaning or emotion the filmmaker wants to communicate. It’s like taking a rich soup and boiling it down into a flavorful sauce — the essence remains, but it’s more concentrated and easier to take in.
- Copies of copies get blurry When you make a copy of a copy (for example, photocopying a photocopy), each generation becomes less clear — details are lost. This metaphor means that when cultural ideas get repeated without care, they can become blurry or watered down, harder for audiences to understand or connect with.
- Films do the opposite Rather than making ideas blurrier, films often clarify them. They take complex cultural experiences or histories — things that might be confusing or vast in real life — and distill them into clear, emotionally powerful scenes, symbols, or stories.
- Intertextuality: blending many “texts” When the passage says films produce “intertextual products,” it means that movies mix together many forms of expression — visual art, literature, music, news, myths, history, advertising, etc. Each of these is a kind of “text.” A film is thus a mediated message — a carefully crafted combination of many cultural materials that reflect and reshape reality in a form audiences can immediately relate to.