What Is Cinema?

5 ideas

1. Photograph shares being with its subject

   A photograph is not a likeness someone made but an imprint mechanically taken from the object by light, like a fingerprint or a death mask. Because no human hand intervenes in its formation, the viewer grants the image a credibility no painting can earn: we accept it as a transfer of the thing's reality, not a representation of it. Bazin roots this in a 'mummy complex', the old human urge to preserve bodies against time, which photography finally satisfies by embalming the moment.

2. When editing a scene is forbidden

   Bazin's rule of 'forbidden montage': when the essence of an event depends on two or more factors being present at the same moment, the film must show them together in one shot, not cut between them. Editing can suggest that the elements shared a space without proving it, and that drains the scene of its truth. Once spatial unity has been shown, the filmmaker may cut again for rhythm or detail.

3. Chaplin's lion cage and Nanook's seal

   In Chaplin's 'The Circus', the gag of the tramp trapped in a cage with a real lion works because comedian and lion stay in the same frame, so the audience knows the danger is physically real. In Flaherty's 'Nanook of the North', the Inuit hunter, the breathing hole in the ice and the struggling seal are all held in one continuous shot, so the long wait and the fight carry real duration and risk. If either scene had been assembled from separate shots, it would have become a trick instead of an event.

4. Deep focus returns choice to viewer

   Montage breaks a scene into close-ups chosen by the director and so dictates, shot by shot, what the viewer must notice and what it means, as the Kuleshov effect shows. Deep focus and the long take, as in Welles's 'Citizen Kane' and Wyler's 'The Little Foxes', keep foreground and background sharp at once. The spectator then has to scan the frame and decide what matters, which restores the ambiguity of real perception and makes the viewer an active participant rather than someone being led.

5. Faith in image versus faith in reality

   Filmmakers can be sorted by where they place meaning. Those who 'put their faith in the image' add meaning through composition, lighting and editing, which is the expressionist and Soviet-montage tradition. Those who 'put their faith in reality' use the camera to reveal what is already present in the world, as Italian neorealism does with nonprofessional actors and real streets in 'Bicycle Thieves'. The question to ask of any film is whether it constructs its meaning or uncovers it.

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