What Is Cinema?

Using the words and ideas of great filmmakers, from archival interviews with Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Bresson to new interviews with Mike Leigh, David Lynch, and Jonas Mekas, Oscar-winning filmmaker Chuck Workman shows what these filmmakers and others do that can't be expressed in words - but only in cinema.

Thank you for talking with David Lynch, who says "it can be like a dream" when watching cinema. In a way, this is sort of the point. It is trying to bring us in, get an emotional response, tell a story... make the false true and the fake real. If you can make fantasy a reality, you have succeeded.

There seems to be a growing number of "documentaries" that just show film clips and talk over them. Most are garbage. This one is okay. Not great, but okay. There are enough moments of directors talking about the films that influenced them to really be helpful, and enough footage from lesser-known films to really spark someone to add to their watch-list.

A documentary looking somewhat randomly at film making through the views of many film makers, some very famous and others who operate on independent, zero budget pieces with apparently niche audiences.

Unremarkable, but for film fans a pleasure to see the views of so many experts, although in fairness some seem a tad pretentious.

Pros: Glad to see experimental films that haven't been seen in a while alongside the usual international fare; saw Chuck's previous works (Precious Images & The Source); understood the "outside the mainstream" perspective Cons: I'm not as militant on cinema as some on this doc

I started to watch this documentary and found it rather difficult not to say pointless to work out what the theme is.I gave it about 15 minutes then deleted it.

With a relaxed and pensive pace, this didactic doc manages to cover in a fairly random way a good deal of this massive topic with grace and colour in 90mins. I'm quite shocked to find how few people have reviewed this on ImDb. I caught it on Talking Pictures UK freeview TV. Of course the answer to the titular question is not the point - to me cinema is really everything - our dreams, our reality, an exploration of our very our consciousness as human beings. The film intellectual Bazin's thoughts are weaved through the narrative. It does manage to disrupt the commercial functional intention of cinema and allows an obscure peek at familiar and some really weird clips. I loved Hitchcock saying about the content of film that one shouldn't care about whether the painter's apple included in a picture tasted sour or sweet - that it was way the way it was portrayed and the emotion that the whole composition evoked that mattered. But cinema is so varied, so we have more direct content-mongers like Michael Moore here too...truly thought-provoking stuff.