You could ask most anyone what a film is and they could tell you. At least, they could offer one of several answers. It is a story told in moving images, usually with characters, dialogue, and/or spectacle. It is that thing we watch when we’re bored or sad or happy or at the movie theater. It is an art form. It is a mass entertainment experience. It is what one does after work. It is a photochemical process where light is absorbed by a camera aperture, creating an image that can be placed in a succession of other images at twenty-four frames per second, such that our minds perceive the illusion of continuity between the images, and thus movement. It is, like most things now, a series of ones and zeros that a computer interprets and a projector throws on screen. The end result though is always the same: images in time.
But what a film is, ultimately, is different than what it is. What I mean here is not that the specific nature of its contents shift but that each film is its own distinct organization of images and sounds and narrative elements and characters. What I mean is that the experience of watching a film is more than just the process of its production or exhibition. These things are how watching a film becomes possible. But they are not the essence of the cinematic experience, just its explanation. It doesn’t tell you what is happening when you sit and watch a film, any film.
So what is film? The answers are many and varied. Some turn to the history of art, some to psychology, some to philosophy to try and explain it. For example, André Bazin said film was the final satisfaction of art’s desire to manifest the real, to immortalize it. That it freed all the other arts to their true selves because it is, in fact, reality, now bound in the image. Gilles Deleuze figured it as an act of philosophy, that its collection of elements amounted to a richness of thought, even argument. It is a consciousness of its own, thinking and conjecturing. On the other hand, theorists like Viven Sobchak and Jennifer Lynde Barker argue that film is a body, that we experience it with all of our non-divisible, physical sensing ability, that we reach out towards it and it reaches back, and somewhere in the communication of two bodies meaning is made, the experience is had and felt and understood as a kind of contact.
Recently I’ve been wondering if these three answers aren’t exclusive to each other. If, perhaps, film is best understood not as either a body or a mind or a capturing of reality, but as all three; maybe a film is a person. Someone we converse with and listen to and touch and feel the presence of and watch express and emote and perceive and think. What if film isn’t just a technical feat, a collection of data, an entertainment experience, a pick-me-up, background noise—what if it’s an opportunity to meet someone new? To see the world as they do? What happens if you continue spending time with them, if you watch that movie again and again? Is it like getting to know someone more intimately? What if the characters and places and music and sound effects and cutting are more like little thoughts or sentences that they say to you, gestures or laughs or looks as if from across the table, moments that can become inside jokes or reference points in later conversations, in trace recollections?
Can a film be your friend?
Kipp De Man graduated from Calvin University in 2023, having majored in film and media studies. He is currently working towards a master’s degree in the same discipline at Washington University in St. Louis. He enjoys reading and writing poetry, rock climbing, and Coke Zero.
