The Cinema - The Art and Technology of Moving Pictures

The term cinema encompasses the art and technology of moving pictures. A film can be created by photographing actual scenes using a motion-picture camera or by drawing and photographing the drawings on a flat surface or by means of computer animation and other visual effects. It can also be constructed by combining photographs with sound and with a performance of a script or story. The word cinema comes from the Greek words for "sight" and "image."

By the 1920s, the invention of sound film had enabled motion picture directors to tell stories with the use of a single continuous shot. The evolution of cinematic language continued as montage became more sophisticated, and techniques such as sweeping aerial shots were developed. By the 1950s, the cinematic language had become complex enough that a theory of film aesthetics could be articulated.

As the century progressed, the popularity of films featuring narrative story lines grew to the point that the industry became dominated by Hollywood and its factory-like production of discrete 90-minute narrative feature films. The technological revolution of the 1970s brought us television programming with serialized story-telling, and the internet era at the end of the 20th century gave rise to online streaming services with everything from binge-worthy series lasting years on end to one-minute videos on social media platforms like TikTok.

In his essay on the evolution of cinematic language, one of the key essays wisely preserved in this volume of the Cahiers du Cinema, Bazin characterized pre-war film style as being derived from an attitude toward meaning or signification that inhered not so much in the image as such or in the event filmed but rather in the manner in which it was articulated through montage or editing. This is a remarkably insightful assessment of the fundamental character of cinema, and even in our era of multiplexes and high-tech home entertainment it still holds true.