What is Cinema?

chacun son cinema(to each his cinema)

Cinema,movie,film,whatever you call it,this young art form made us all crazy about it.Have you ever thought of the question:What is Cinema?  Well,you might have heard of the name of a book by the great Andre Bazin,but have you really given a deep thought about the essence of the art you almost appreciate everyday? This might be the biggest and toughest question for any film buffs to answer,a thousand people might have a thousand answers since everyone’s film experience is quite different.

In 2007,to celebrate the 60th birthday of Cannes Festival,the organizing committee invited 35 director who had won certain award here before to each shoot a 3-minute short,the subject is exactly “What is Cinema“.It is easily to find familiar names here in the director list but the real value of this short is how every filmmaker view cinema in their own perspective and express it in their personal way,and it is really interesting to watch how those masters manage to tell a story in such limited time.

 This film is called Chacun son cinéma(To Each His Own Cinema) ,I will present some screen shots from the film in the form of slideshow and try to give you guys a general sense of how this film looks like.This is my favorite shorts collage film,hope you guys will enjoy it too!!

Here is a whole list of the names of the shorts and directors:

Theodoros Angelopoulos (segment “Trois Minutes”) (as Théo Angelopoulos)
Olivier Assayas (segment “Recrudescence”)
Bille August (segment “The Last Dating Show”)
Jane Campion (segment “The Lady Bug”)
Youssef Chahine (segment “47 Ans Après”)
Kaige Chen (segment “Zhanxiou Village”)
Michael Cimino (segment “No Translation Needed”)
Ethan Coen (segment “World Cinema”)
Joel Coen (segment “World Cinema”)
David Cronenberg (segment “At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema in the World”)
Jean-Pierre Dardenne (segment “Dans l’Obscurité”)
Luc Dardenne (segment “Dans l’Obscurité”)
Manoel de Oliveira (segment “Rencontre Unique”)
Raymond Depardon (segment “Cinéma d’Eté”)
Atom Egoyan (segment “Artaud Double Bill”)
Amos Gitai (segment “Le Dibbouk de Haifa”)
Alejandro González Iñárritu (segment “Anna”)
Hsiao-hsien Hou (segment “The Electric Princess House”)
Aki Kaurismäki (segment “La Fonderie”)
Abbas Kiarostami (segment “Where is my Romeo?”)
Takeshi Kitano (segment “One Fine Day”)
Andrey Konchalovskiy (segment “Dans le Noir”) (as Andrei Konchalovsky)
Claude Lelouch (segment “Cinéma de Boulevard”)
Ken Loach (segment “Happy Ending”)
David Lynch (segment “Absurda”) (special edition)
Nanni Moretti (segment “Diaro di uno Spettatore”)
Roman Polanski (segment “Cinéma Erotique”)
Raoul Ruiz (segment “Le Don”)
Walter Salles (segment “A 8 944 km de Cannes”)
Elia Suleiman (segment “Irtebak”)
Ming-liang Tsai (segment “It’s a Dream”)
Gus Van Sant (segment “First Kiss”)
Lars von Trier (segment “Occupations”)
Wim Wenders (segment “War in Peace”)
Kar Wai Wong (segment “I Travelled 9000 km To Give It To You”)
Yimou Zhang (segment “En Regardant le Film”)

You can find it here on youtube if you are interested.

OK,so WHAT IS CINEMA in your sense?