THE US film director, Alan J. Pakula, warned there was a dangerous "easy cynicism" both in the US film industry and US politics today.
Because of the huge money involved, Hollywood had become more conservative, protective and dependent on "huge stars, huge gimmicks and extraordinary visual and sound technology".
He said the great pioneers of film - the Warners and the Meyers - only had their own finances to think about and were proud of having their names on their films. Now, with so many Hollywood companies owned by international conglomerates like Rupert Murdoch's chain, "their headquarters are far from Hollywood and all that counts is the profit and loss statement".
Many younger directors were learning all about technique and skill in film school but "not enough about humanity". He said it was time "to return to who we are as a people, as members of humanity".
For his next film, he was returning to the 1940s, and the leadership of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as a symbol of a society in which "there was an American dream that people still believed in, with all its flaws". It was, to use a now-dirty word, a more "idealistic" time.
Mr Pakula traced the development of US cinema through the 1960s and 1970s - when his films like All the President's Men and The Parallax View examined the paranoia about US democracy brought on by Watergate and the Vietnam War - to the 1990s, which he called "glib and exploitative".
He expressed concern that the "enormous separation between the political system and people's lives" and the resulting "easy cynicism" about politics "can endanger the democracy we live in".
The colloquium was also addressed by Frank McCourt, the Limerick-raised author of the Pulitzer Prize winning memoir Angela's Ashes.
The US ambassador, Mrs Jean Kennedy Smith, also announced six new Fulbright scholarships, worth same field as each of the speakers at yesterday's colloquium: the Fulbright McCourt scholarship for literature; the Fulbright Miller scholarship for drama; the Fulbright Mitchell scholarship for peace studies; the Fulbright Pakula scholarship for film; the Fulbright Schlesinger scholarship for history; and the Fulbright Boyer scholarship for education, named in honour of a deceased friend of US Education Secretary, Mr Richard Riley.