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What Is A Film?JNU ASC

26th November 2010

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Film Studies rests on three basic questions

What is a film?What kind of appeal does it have for its

viewer?How does it appeal to its viewers?

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Today, we shall address only the first question, namely,

What Is A Film ?

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It is obvious that film is an audio visual moving image that travels in a sequence so as to tell a story with a beginning, middle and end.

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In a film we see everything moving

Objects, people, time, distance to create events..

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So in many ways we can say that a film is a movement of time to

create events

Cinema may very well be a theory of events, or a logic of events..also a theory

of history, or a philosophy of what happens, a mythology, cosmogony..

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If this is so, then how is a film different from epic, myth, ballad, novel, poetry, painting, music or even theatre

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Except history, which is a derived story based upon facts

The rest are created out of imagined situations and their logical outcomes.

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These stories are therefore

Model building exercises to express the logic of interconnectedness of events.. Painting,

poetry included…

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The purpose of these stories is to find

The logic of events…

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Then how is the film different?

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The uniqueness of filmIt has movement, which means that it must

align its pace with that of its time.Because of its movement, it ,must have a

stable or a fixed point of view, which means that it must have a lead protagonist.

Since the protagonist must move against the backdrop of the real world in general, there is always a tension between the individual and the world.

The cinema becomes a story of the individual and the world.

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Even for a documentary film

Often the theme, or the subject is the protagonist.

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Cinema despite its technology is also an art form with its distinct politics. In countries where a certain kind of politics exist one can make films..