What Is Cinema?

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

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.

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.

Chuck Workman--the man who gave us THE "100 Years of Movies" TCM short, and invented the Great Moments Oscar Montage--is so smitten with Bold, Artistic Experimental Film in this one, he literally tries to snub 100 years of movies in the process.

Problem is, Workman has never made a classic movie look bad in his life, and I don't think he would even know how to if he tried--And he's trying to here: In the scenes where he tries to contrast the experimental directors by showing montages of all the "brain-dead" and "commercialized" Hollywood 00's product, he makes Twilight, Titanic and Return of the King clips look like new classics, and in a montage of how "chauvinistic" and "anti-feminist" old Hollywood was compared to indie lesbian filmmakers, he shows Clark Gable sweeping Vivian Leigh up the stairs...These are BAD things?? :blink:

It might help if the experimental filmmakers didn't have their art-festival heads up their hinders talking about "Rules must be broken" as they give us nonsensical and pretentious wastes of camera, and then Michael Moore shows up--If you're going to do a movie about bold, experimental film, it's not a good result if all it makes us do is want to go back and watch Gone With the Wind. (In the opening where we watch David Lynch transfixed by "North by Northwest", all we want to do is slap him and say "Now, why the heck couldn't YOU do that??")

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.