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What Is Cinema?

Is it the same as a movie or film? Does it include digital video, broadcast content, streaming media?^[1] Is it a highbrow term reserved only for European and art house feature films? Or is it a catch-all for any time a series of still images run together to produce the illusion of movement, whether in a multiplex theater or the 5-inch screen of a smart phone?

Technically, the word itself derives from the ancient Greek, kinema, meaning movement. Historically, it’s a shortened version of the French cinematographe, an invention of two brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumiere, that combined kinema with another Greek root, graphien, meaning to write or record.

The “recording of movement” seems as good a place as any to begin an exploration of the moving image. And cinema seems broad (or vague) enough to capture the essence of the form, whether we use it specifically in reference to that art house film or to refer to the more commonplace production and consumption of movies, TV, streaming series, videos, interactive gaming, VR, AR, or whatever new technology mediates our experience of the moving image. Because ultimately that’s what all of the above have in common: the moving image. Cinema, in that sense, stands at the intersection of art and technology like nothing else. As an art form, cinema would not exist without the technology required to capture the moving image, but the mere ability to record a moving image would be meaningless without the art required to capture our imagination.

Cinema, however, is much more than the intersection of art and technology. It is also, and maybe more importantly, a powerful medium of communication. Like language itself, cinema is a surrounding and enveloping substance that carries with it what it means to be human in a specific time and place. That is to say, it mediates our experience of the world, helps us make sense of things, and, in doing so, often helps shape the world itself. It’s why we often find ourselves confronted by some extraordinary event and find the only way to describe it is: “It was like a movie.”

In fact, for more than a century filmmakers and audiences have collaborated on a massive, ongoing, largely unconscious social experiment: the development of a cinematic language, the fundamental and increasingly complex rules for how cinema communicates meaning. There is a syntax, a grammar, to cinema that has developed over time. And these rules, as with any language, are iterative; that is, they form and evolve through repetition, both within and between each generation. As children, we are socialized into ways of seeing through children’s programming, cartoons, and YouTube videos. As adults, we become more sophisticated in our understanding of the rules, able to innovate, recombine, become creative with the language. Every generation or so, moreover, we are confronted with great leaps forward in technology that reorient and often advance our understanding of how the language works.

Therein lies the critical difference between cinematic language and every other means of communication. The innovations and complexity of modern written languages have taken more than 5,000 years to develop. Multiply that by at least 10 for spoken language.

Cinematic language has taken just a little more than 100 years to come into its own.^[2]

It is odd to begin a book questioning what the discipline of the book is, but film is a diverse entity.^[3] Film was an invention mostly borne of the energies and technological sophistication of the twentieth century when technological activity and interest in new technologies were rampant. Of course, these technologies were mostly nascent and existed earlier in the nineteenth century, but it took the twentieth century’s zeal for technological discovery and the rampant explosion of capitalism to fuel the growth of this technology.

Film as Entertainment

Whether a brief scene of people leaving a factory (La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon, 1895) or a clip of a prankster stepping on a hose (L’Arroseur Arrosé , 1895), from its inception film has thrilled and entertained audiences. Movies can tell stories in a powerful, visceral way that offers audiences a way to escape from their lives–or reflect on their situations. Films can tap into an array of emotions and cause spectators to laugh, cry, or reel in fear. Audiences can cheer for heroes and boo at villains. They can recognize settings from their own lives, visit places they have only dreamed of, or be wowed by imaginative worlds set a long time ago in galaxies far, far away. For a few hours, viewers can “shut off their brains”–or contemplate Big Ideas in ways they never imagined. Individuals can join in the communal experience of watching a film on a big screen or pass their time alone viewing a movie on their phones. Audiences can experience the “comfort food” of a cinematic formula they’ve seen dozens of times or witness a genre-defying film unlike any other. They can take a film apart or go with the flow. Ultimately, films entertain with a diversity as vast as their audiences.

Film as Process

Some films are not about enjoyment or even as an explicit ideology but often test our anxieties about the medium.^[5] In the early sixties, Andy Warhol challenged our perceptions of film with a series of art house projects that questioned what a film was about. Empire (1965) was an eight-hour still camera shot of the Empire State Building. Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) was a short exploration of cinema motifs and philosophical issues that climaxed in an explosive way of seeing film. Clerks (1994) was a comedy set in a convenience store by Kevin Smith in which people’ comings and goings was the subject and comedy of the film. Several people had conversations during these transitory passing’s.

Some feature films have successfully engaged this investigation of process such as Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog (2021) in which a dull and brutal man wrestling with his personal identity slowly (the operative word in this whole film) tries to forge an identity and make relationships with people around him. Some films like Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) spend much of their time didactically commenting on the film, using meta-references and inside humor to comment on form and film style. As insular as Anderson’s style is, his films are still remarkable for their quixotic sense of life and self-directed humor. Paul Thomas Anderson’s largely misanthropic output (Boogie Nights [1997], There Will Be Blood [2007]) mostly discusses anti-social and negative characters in society to mostly disastrous effect but often with revealing quirks about human nature. Lars Von Trier’s hypnotic expressions of society and apocalypse often teeter on the brink of nihilism but express an oddly redeeming humanity (Anti-Christ [2009], Breaking the Waves [1996], Melancholia [2011]).

Whatever its manifestations, as expression, as entertainment, as process, as artifact, as ideology, as business, as technology, as world culture, film is fundamentally important to people, their emotions, and their way of seeing the world, and relating to that larger macro-world. People may like films about New York, or the Holocaust, or a haunted house, or a dangerous violent Old West community, or a depressing hospital facility, but often when films take us to such a region, drop us in that milieu, and involve us in characters within that culture, they give us the option to escape that world at the end of the film and return to our normal world for better or worse.^[6]

Below, Martin Scorsese, often considered one of the premier American directors, shares his thoughts on what makes cinema memorable.

As you approach film analysis, you will need to consider some of the challenges you will face and make a conscious effort to overcome them. Some Viewer-Centered Challenges are: Categorical Rejection, Mistaking Part for the Whole, Great Expectations, Excess of Expertise, and Influence of External Factors.

Categorical Rejection occurs when a viewer rejects a film because of its type (a black and white film, a silent film, a horror film, a film starring Sylvester Stallone, a film by Tim Burton, a foreign film, etc.) and refuses to consider that the film may have something worthwhile for them to experience. To overcome this challenge, the viewer should keep an open mind to the storyline and give the film a chance to affect them.

Mistaking a Part for the Whole occurs when a viewer focuses too much on just one aspect of the film (hating it because you thought the music didn’t fit the tone, loving it only because it showcased your favorite actor, etc.). This closemindedness doesn’t allow you to get the full experience. To move past this, the viewer should allow each “part” of the film to contribute to the big picture of what the film is trying to do. You want to consider the overall effect the film has on you, not just one aspect.

Great Expectations can sometimes ruin a viewer’s response to a film. Have you ever heard so much “hype” via movie trailers, celebrity interviews, and internet buzz before a film is released that by the time you see it, there is no way it could possibly live up to everything you’re being told it will be? That can certainly be a challenge. Viewers should try to approach their first viewing as somewhat of a blank slate, just letting the film be what it is, and limiting the amount of pressure they put on the film to be great. By doing so, they take away expectations and can experience the story as-is, without trying to turn it into the best film ever made.

Excess of Expertise that a viewer possesses in a given area could also pose a challenge. Let’s say that you have knowledge about a subject or an aspect of a film, and that knowledge causes you to be distracted by small inaccuracies in the film. For example, you play violin and notice that the actor is holding the instrument incorrectly, or you are an historian and you see some detail that was not portrayed perfectly. As a viewer, you should try to move past those details and allow yourself to take in other points of the story, letting go of the minutiae.

Influence of External Factors can also cause problems. Often times, you cannot control the environment in which you view a film, and thus you may be distracted by the surroundings: a talking neighbor, the glare of someone’s phone, feeling ill, the temperature of the room, etc. These factors truly can hinder your ability to enjoy the film. To overcome this challenge, consider holding off judgment of the film’s success or failure until you’re able to view it again, or if that’s not an option, be sure that you are analyzing the choices of the filmmaker and not blaming the film for something you experienced while watching it. Sometimes you may have to push through an unfortunate situation to really try to keep your focus on the film and not on a distraction nearby. There are also some more tips below about controlling your environment when watching films.

Have you ever thought about exactly why it is that people sometimes come to completely opposite opinions about a film?^[7]

A big part of this reason has to do with our own personal filters.  Think of a filter as literally a set of uniquely personal eyeglasses that you are wearing when you see a film.  Those are made up of the combination of factors related to your age, education, relationship experiences, gender, race, economic status and more.  Quite often, these play a major role in whether we decide to even view a film at all after we read something about it.^[8]

Another influencing factor is how well you relate to a film is how closely you may identify with one of the main characters.^[9] The converse is also true – if you hate all of the characters in a film, chances are you are not going to have a high overall opinion of the film itself.

Think about some screen characters you have particularly identified with.  What do you think they have in common?  Did they face similar obstacles, and overcome them?  Did they persevere, and win the love of their romantic interests?  Are they some kind of superhero, with powers that you wish that you have?

This even extends to animated characters.  Many people lobbied Disney for years to create female characters who were brave, strong, and independent, as opposed to always being just “pretty” and extremely dependent on, and deferential to, the princes and other male characters in their films.  They wanted these to serve as role models for their daughters in a society that has equal numbers of men and women in the workplace.

A particular film of Disney’s that inspired a lot of public backlash was The Little Mermaid (1989).  Ariel (the mermaid) falls in love with the human Prince Eric; she makes an agreement with the evil Sea Witch Ursula to give up her voice (!) in exchange for a three-day period where she will get human legs. Eric has to kiss her within the three days for them to be together.  All of this played into stereotypes of older women getting fat, ugly, and conniving – and of young women waiting for nothing more than a kiss from Prince Charming. This was not the message many wanted girls to hear.

Disney did finally respond – and thus eventually produced films like Brave (2012), The Princess and the Frog (2009), Mulan (1998), and Frozen (2013). These depicted heroines who were strong and independent.^[10]

Recognizing our personal filters can help us appreciate–and even enjoy–films that we might not ordinarily select for ourselves. Common filters include biases against particular genres (such as musicals or action films), eras (for instance, the silent era or the “New Hollywood” films of the 1970s), styles (e.g., CGI-dependent movies or dialogue-driven films), actors, sad endings, international cinema, and black and white films, to name but a few.

Watching films with an open mind can also help us hone our own critical skills and interpretive criteria, resulting  in more self-awareness regarding why we do or do not appreciate certain films, themes, actors, styles, and the like. Pushing past our “comfort zone,” moreover, may result in some pleasant surprises, and it can also help us to understand why others may enjoy films that we do not like.

Since taste is subjective, it’s especially important to support our opinions with evidence. An unsupported “I hated this film” is far less likely to convince an enthusiastic friend than is a well-thought-out analysis of a film’s weak script or wooden acting backed by clear examples.

The Film-Viewing Environment

While Thomson may be lamenting the demise of communal viewing–a phenomenon that certainly impacts how an audience reacts to a movie–his observation contains implications far beyond the effects of shared laughter or tears. The way that we watch a film can affect our response to it in numerous ways, some positive and some negative.

Many of us are tempted to “multitask” in the false belief that we can successfully perform two or more actions at once. While we may be able to complete these tasks at the same time, scientific research unequivocally demonstrates that our performance suffers accordingly. As we divide our attention, our brains slow down. A simple test can illustrate the concept. First, time yourself as you recite the alphabet backwards (z, y, x) and then count backwards from 26 (26, 25, 24). Next, time yourself as you alternate between reciting the alphabet backwards and counting backwards from 26 (z, 26, y, 25, x, 24). If you are like the overwhelming majority of people, your time will be significantly slower using the alternating method, and you may make some mistakes as well. Although we might have the illusion of efficiency when we multitask, when we add complexity to the actions, our time and mistakes will increase. All of this is to say that if we try to watch a film while we do something else, we may have a general idea of the plot, but we will likely miss the nuance.

Details are quite important to film analysis. When examining how a film works at the narrative and technical levels, we need to concentrate on each shot, scene, and sequence. We need to view a film more than once and may need to watch certain scenes several times so that we may focus on different elements such as editing, sound, or acting. Consequently, we should try to watch in as distraction-free an environment as possible.

Try, moreover, to view a movie you are analyzing on as large a screen as possible. Although we may be perfectly able to keep up with a film’s plot on our phone, we may not be able to notice small details that would be more obvious on a large screen. A scene that contains a lot of visual information will be much harder to decipher on a tiny screen, particularly given that most cinematographers shoot their films with technology specifically geared for the big screen. Even close-ups are more impactful on a larger screen since the contrast with a medium or long shot is intensified.

Indeed, some films are repackaged using the misnomer “fullscreen” format, a technique that actually eliminates some of the original visual information through panning and scanning so that it will “fit” on a television or small screen. “Widescreen” format, in contrast, will have “black bars” on the top and bottom of the screen, but it will include all of the visual information that the director intended the audience to see. Widescreen format will capture the original aspect ratio (proportional relationship of width to height.)

Here is a dramatic comparison of the widescreen and fullscreen versions of Blade Runner:

Clearly, viewers miss a lot of visual information when watching a fullscreen “pan and scan” version of a movie.

A film’s sound will also likely be compromised when viewers listen on a phone. The speakers on most phones produce highly compressed audio that flattens tones and subtleties. In contrast, films listened to in a theater or on a more robust home system can create a more immersive audio experience.

Deepening Our Responses to Film

From the time we watch our first movie, most of us are passive viewers. Being a passive viewer doesn’t mean that we don’t respond emotionally to the action on the screen. For most of us, it would be nearly impossible to compartmentalize our emotions so that we didn’t feel tense during the climactic moments of Get Out or sad during the ending of Old Yeller (1957.) Rather, a passive viewer is one who does not investigate how successful films are able to manipulate our responses. In contrast, an active viewer will start to explore the various cinematic tricks that lie beneath the story itself. It is the act of analysis that can help us explain why two films with nearly identical plots can leave us with dramatically different reactions.

Cinematic Language

Like any language, we can break cinematic language down to its most fundamental elements. Before grammar and syntax can shape meaning by arranging words or phrases in a particular order, the words themselves must be built up from letters, characters, or symbols.^[11]  The basic building blocks. In cinema, those basic building blocks are shots. A shot is one continuous capture of a span of action by a motion picture camera. It could last minutes (or even hours), or could last less than a second. Basically, a shot is everything that happens within the frame of the camera – that is, the visible border of the captured image – from the moment the director calls “Action!” to the moment she calls “Cut!”

These discrete shots rarely mean much in isolation. They are full of potential and may be quite interesting to look at on their own, but cinema is built up from the juxtaposition of these shots, dozens or hundreds of them, arranged in a particular order – a cinematic syntax – that renders a story with a collectively discernible meaning. We have a word for that too: editing. Editing arranges shots into patterns that make up scenes, sequences and acts to tell a story, just like other forms of language communicate through words, sentences and paragraphs.

BBP Reel Insights on the distinction between shot, scene, and sequence

From these basic building blocks, we have developed a cinematic language, a set of rules and conventions by which cinema communicates meaning to the viewer. And by “we” we mean all of us, filmmakers and audiences alike, from the earliest motion picture to the latest VR experience. Cinematic language – just like any other language – is an organic, constantly evolving shared form of communication. It is an iterative process, one that is refined each time a filmmaker builds a story through a discrete number of shots, and each time an audience responds to that iteration, accepting or rejecting, but always engaging in the process. Together, we have developed a visual lexicon. A lexicon describes the shared set of meaningful units in any language. Think of it as the list of all available words and parts of words in a language we carry around in our heads.  A visual lexicon is likewise the shared set of meaningful units in our collective cinematic language: images, angles, transitions and camera moves that we all understand mean something when employed in a motion picture.

But here’s the trick: in traditional filmmaking, we’re not supposed to notice any of it. The visual lexicon that underpins our cinematic language is invisible, or at least, it is meant to recede into the background of our comprehension. Cinema can’t communicate without it, but if we pay too much attention to it, we’ll miss what it all means: a nifty little paradox. It’s not so strange or unfamiliar when you think about it, though. It’s precisely the same with any other language. As you read these characters, words, sentences, and paragraphs, you are not stopping to parse each unit of meaning, analyze the syntax, or double-check the sentence structure. All those rules fade to the background of your own fluency and the meaning communicated becomes clear (or at least we sure hope it does). And that goes double for spoken language. We speak and comprehend in a fluent flow of grammar and syntax, never pausing over the rules that have become second nature, invisible and unnoticed.

So, what are some of those meaningful units of our cinematic language? Perhaps not surprisingly, a lot of them are based on how we experience the world in our everyday lives. Camera placement, for example, can subtly orient our perspective on a character or situation. Place the camera mere inches from a character’s face – known as a close-up– and we’ll feel more intimately connected to their experience than if the camera were further away, as in a medium shot or long shot. Place the camera below the eyeline of a character, pointing up – known as a low-angle shot – and that character will feel dominant, powerful, worthy of respect. We are literally looking up to them. Place the camera at eye level, we feel like equals. Let the camera hover above a character or situation – known as a high-angle shot – and we feel like gods, looking down on everyone and everything. Each choice effects how we see and interpret the shot, scene and story.

We can say the same about transitions from shot to shot. Think of them as conjunctions in grammar, words meant to connect ideas seamlessly. The more obvious examples, like fade-ins and fade-outs or long dissolves, are still drawn from our experience. Think of a slow fade-out, where the screen drifts into blackness, as an echo of our experience of falling asleep, drifting out of consciousness. In fact, fade-outs are most often used in cinema to indicate the close of an act or segment of story, much like the end of a long day. And dissolves are not unlike the way we remember events from our own experience, one moment bleeding into and overlapping with another in our memory.

Perhaps the most common and least noticed transition, by design, is a hard cut that bridges some physical action on screen. It’s called cutting on action, and it’s a critical part of our visual lexicon, enabling filmmakers to join shots, often from radically different angles and positions, while remaining largely invisible to the viewer. The concept is simple: whenever a filmmaker wants to cut from one shot to the next for a new angle on a scene, she ends the first shot in the middle of some on-screen action, opening a door or setting down a glass, then begins the next shot in the middle of that same action. The viewer’s eye is drawn to the action on screen and not the cut itself, rendering the transition relatively seamless, if not invisible to the viewer.

Camera placement and transitions, along with camera movement, lighting style, color palette, and a host of other elements make up the visual lexicon of cinematic language, all of which we will explore in the chapters to follow. In the hands of a gifted filmmaker, these subtle adjustments work together to create a coherent whole that communicates effectively (and invisibly). In the hands of not-so-gifted filmmakers, these choices can feel haphazard, unmotivated, or perhaps worse, “showy” – all style and no substance – creating a dissonant, ineffective cinematic experience. But even then, the techniques themselves remain largely invisible. We are simply left with the feeling that it was a “bad” movie, even if we can’t quite explain why.

For a general overview of the concepts involved in studying film, please watch Simon Hunter’s video guide:

Simon Hunter on how to analyze a film

As we become more attuned to the various tools and techniques that filmmakers use to communicate their ideas, we will be able to better analyze their effectiveness. We’ll be able to see what was once invisible, a kind of magic trick in itself. As we tried to make clear from the beginning, however, our goal is not to focus solely on form, to dissect cinema into its constituent parts and lose sight of its overall power. Cinema, like any art form, is more than the sum of its parts, and it should be clear already that form and content go hand in hand. Pure form, all technique and no substance, is virtually meaningless. Pure content, all story and no style, can be didactic and, frankly, boring. How the story is told is as important as what the story is about.

However, just as we can analyze technique, the formal properties of cinema, to better understand how a story is communicated, we can also analyze content, that is, what stories are communicating to better understand how they fit into the wider cultural context. Cinema,  like literature, can represent valuable cultural documents, reflecting our own ideas, values, and morals back to us as filmmakers and audiences.

In the following chapters, we will look at a variety of film elements that will help you begin to deepen your response to film.^[12]