ABCinema

Is cinema an art or entertainment, a craft, or a creative process?

When we watch a movie, we forget everything. Even the fact that there is only a play of light and shadow in front of us on the screen. We hardly think that it requires a whole factory or film studio, where people from more than 200 professions are involved in the work, to create that illusion.

In the material sense, cinema is thousands of kilometers of film, which are carefully stored in the FILM FUND of the Dovzhenko Center. Our acquaintance will begin with a tour of the former film copying factory.

We will find out when cinema was born and how old it is, how cinema went from black-and-white and silent to color and sound. Next, let’s focus on what is interesting about different types of cinema – fiction, documentary, popular science, and animation. We will also try to feel the mood created by films in different genres of cinema. In conclusion, let’s think about the special language of film art.

Cinema is impossible without an image. So, the principles of painting which relate to composition, light and shadow, color, and texture, apply here. However, unlike painting, the image in the cinema moves and develops over time. In essence, cinema is thousands of picture frames and their chains are combined into a single spatial and temporal whole. It happens with the help of montage. It is editing that makes cinema not just a set of individual images, but a real art.

The author of the program is Maryna Skyrda, chief art critic of the Dovzhenko Center Cinema Museum