From: Tom B Whiteside (email suppressed)
Date: Wed Jul 01 2009 - 07:48:01 PDT
Scott's absolutely correct on this, and it is interesting. "Cinema" seems
to be the most inclusive term these days for the seldom used "motion
pictures." Just a short while back cinema was defined more or less by its
location and social setting - it was cinema if you saw it in a theater
with other people. You might have seen the movie on videotape, but that
wasn't cinema. Beyond that, there was the need to differentiate between a
movie and a film, for example. Now this kind of distinction is absolutely
unnecessary, if not downright silly. "Cinema" seems to qualify, at this
point in history, as the term that envelops everything - film, movie,
video, television, documentary, celluloid, digital, photographed,
generated - under one useful and meaningful heading. Whatever the viewing
situation or duration or delivery device, the word "cinema" now describes
the form, pictures and sound (or not) in a temporal form. It's the ancient
Greek for "movies," right?
I'm sure that some will disagree, but as I say it's interesting. Libraries
will continue to file the books under "motion pictures," which is a fine
and useful heading. But people talk about "motion pictures" no more than
they talk about "photplays." We talk about cinema.
- Whiteside
>I think of all that as "cinema" in the broadest sense of the word.
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