1. What is Cinema?

2. Lecture outline Cinema’s ontology What is cinema (1955)?
Course outline and practicalities

3. Ontology -
a sub-field of metaphysics, ontology seeks to establish through observation and argument the elements that constitute the being of a thing (object or person)

4. Ontology is linked to medium specificity.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729 – 81)
German philosopher
‘an artwork, in order to be successful, needs to adhere to the specific stylistic properties of its own medium’.

5. Ontology - Film theorists specializing in cinematic ontology:
Noel Carroll, W.J.T.Mitchell, Vivian Sobchack and Rosalind Krauss

6. Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga Verton, 1929: USSR)

7. André Bazin ( )

9. Is film an ‘art’ if it is mechanically produced?

10. Why did it take 60 years for film to become a serious object of study and for film theorising to become a professional activity?

11. film was a new art

12. film was a new art film was (and is) a mechanical form

13. film was a new art film was (and is) a mechanical form film was (is
film was a new art film was (and is) a mechanical form film was (is?) a mass culture

14. ‘Photography does not create eternity as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption’.
(Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, Film Quarterly, Volume 13/Number 4, 1960, translated by Hugh Gray pp.4-9).

15. What is cinema (2015)?

16. Goodbye Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-Liang, 2003: Taiwan)

18. Film’s indexicality Cinema as mass / collective culture
The shift from celluloid to digital format created two particularly noteworthy changes:
Film’s indexicality
Cinema as mass / collective culture

19. Course outline Assessment Preparing for the course AQCI Seminars