What is Cinema?

Lecture outline Cinema’s ontology What is cinema (1955)? Course outline and practicalities

Ontology - a sub-field of metaphysics, ontology seeks to establish through observation and argument the elements that constitute the being of a thing (object or person)

Ontology is linked to medium specificity. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729 – 81) German philosopher ‘an artwork, in order to be successful, needs to adhere to the specific stylistic properties of its own medium’.

Ontology - Film theorists specializing in cinematic ontology: Noel Carroll, W.J.T.Mitchell, Vivian Sobchack and Rosalind Krauss

Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga Verton, 1929: USSR)

André Bazin (1918 - 1958)

Is film an ‘art’ if it is mechanically produced?

Why did it take 60 years for film to become a serious object of study and for film theorising to become a professional activity?

film was a new art

film was a new art film was (and is) a mechanical form

film was a new art film was (and is) a mechanical form film was (is film was a new art film was (and is) a mechanical form film was (is?) a mass culture

‘Photography does not create eternity as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption’. (Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, Film Quarterly, Volume 13/Number 4, 1960, translated by Hugh Gray pp.4-9).

What is cinema (2015)?

Goodbye Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-Liang, 2003: Taiwan)

Film’s indexicality Cinema as mass / collective culture The shift from celluloid to digital format created two particularly noteworthy changes: Film’s indexicality Cinema as mass / collective culture

Course outline Assessment Preparing for the course AQCI Seminars