TO STUDY the process of how technological changes affect our lives is an interesting way of understanding very influential social habits experienced today across the world.
The invention of ‘Motion Pictures’, or cinema, at the beginning of the 20th Century signalled the arrival of a new art-form, which, for the first time combined all the other art-forms, and, like theatre (but more vast in its visual scope), relied on a certain amount of mimicry of human behaviour.

It is this quality of actual visual mimicry of humans and their physical world, imagined or not, that ‘Motion Pictures’, or cinema, managed to capture and project as human interests.

Effect of cinema
However, today, the original collective audience who first experienced movies as though they were attending exciting fairgrounds, where they felt emotions, received ideas, viewed scenes, etc, in close proximity to each other as individuals, where they could see the effect of what they were seeing on others around them, has now been reorganized, becoming a reduced mass of individuals and group spectators of television, possessing little knowledge of how each other feels about movies they watch on much smaller screens than the original large ones films were both intended and made for.
The emphasis here is on accessing the effect of films on audiences, which was a major attraction associated with attending films publicly, since their beginning as a fascinating collective experience. That experience is now a deflated reality, even though films shown on TV are, perhaps, seen by much more disconnected people than before at cinema shows.
Indeed, it is the very loss of seeing (and even discussing) the effect of a film we have just seen in a collective cinema environment, which, in turn, has come to affect the quality of a majority of films made and seen today, in comparison to the quality of most films  — especially American and European — made between the 1930s and 60s.

The TCM Channel
To get one of the best comprehensive, commercial-free channels of American Classic movies, mostly made and first seen between the 1930s and 60s in cinemas across Westernized nations globally, we can access the TCM television channel, an abbreviation for Turner Classic Movies, founded by Ted Turner, one of the outstanding American media tycoons for whom capital is not an end in itself, but an opportunity to exercise and employ the freedom of critical thought and art as a social priority.
TCM’s process of pre-taping and presenting films around the clock, night and day, with at least fifteen-minute breaks for trailers, discussions, and guest interviews by Chief Host, the knowledgeable and informative film buff, Robert Osborne, with interesting actresses such as the outstanding Kim Novak, Drew Barrymore, Cher, and others, has quite thankfully reestablished a vital necessity in contemporary society, which is to provide the proof of classic cinema’s both educational yet entertaining role in the memory  and upkeep of vital civilized values in the world today, via the best, carefully chosen classic movies.

TCM’s importance
We should ask ourselves why such a TV programme as TCM is important today? Especially beyond the USA, in societies that were educated with the help of classic American and European films in their practical everyday lifestyle, when the presence of such film classics in local cinemas had a subtle stabilizing social effect via their encouragement of the process of ‘cause and effect’, critical thought, and reasoning.
What TCM is doing now, via its vintage film selections, is reviving as best as possible an older process of film-viewing, when daily cinema programmes presented double-features chosen from the history of films decades old, and not simply reserved only for the most recent or current releases.
It is interesting to realise that this style of film programming transferred from past cinema presentations to a contemporary TV channel is not entirely based on the American film viewing process, where films were shown repeatedly during cinema hours, so that patrons could enter at any time and remain in their seats until the film was replayed, and they saw the previous scenes they had missed.
TCM’s changing list of films shown day and night is closer in style to cinema showings in foreign countries like British Guiana and Independent Guyana from the 1930s to the end of the 1970s, when cinemas in the capital of Georgetown and along the sprawling seacoast showed Hollywood, European, and Indian double-features 90% of the time.
Such films were chosen from thousands stored locally in foreign film vaults, representing RKO Pictures, Warner Bros, Universal International, Columbia Pictures, 20th Century Fox, MGM, Paramount Studios, United Artists, European studios like J. Arthur Rank Films, British Pathe, Cineriz, Gaumont, and Indian studios.
Even when just-released new films were shown on weekends, they were almost always featured with a classic film, sometimes stretching as far back as the 1930s, so that audiences received a balanced, comparative view of both classic and contemporary cinema.
Indeed, the breakdown and eventual closing of cinemas in Guyana, which began long before the introduction of public television, was set in motion when the above foreign film studios closed their vaults, collected and returned their films to the US and Europe primarily, leaving local cinemas to contend without the previous educational classics, and vulnerable to a barrage of shallow, merely sensational, and mostly ‘action’ films from various inexperienced commercial studios.
Though local cinema attendance continued, since at that time there was no other form of film viewing, the general popular interest, excitement, and obsessive contemplation of the best classic and contemporary filmmaking evaporated, never to return, because the quality of films that had spawned and sustained four generations of local civilian interest by their diverse everyday human topics (as opposed to only ‘action’ films) were nowhere to be seen publicly.

TCM’s relevant values
It is such a void that has now been filled, even in the USA, by the TCM channel. Actually, this semi-revived classic film viewing process, which was once attached to the cinema-going process in foreign places like English-speaking BG/Guyana (an attachment still ignored by American film studies), provided most of the profit and social relevance of Hollywood during the crucial World War II years, when violence destroyed most cinemas in Europe, and affected the transportation of films overseas, except in secure Canada, the Caribbean, and South America, whose foreign film-programme revenues kept Hollywood in production.