What Is Cinema?

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.