What is Cinema?: The Possibilities of Film
This post was written by DOC NYC blogger Katie Lewin
Tuesday evening saw the DOC NYC screening of director Chuck Workman’s new film WHAT IS CINEMA? Workman has had a long career in the film industry, making documentaries about avant-garde filmmakers such as Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas. But he has also worked in Hollywood, most famously creating the In Memoriam segment of the Oscars awards show. Thom Powers, artistic director of DOC NYC, introduced the event and invited Workman to say a few words before the film started. Workman was clearly in good spirits for the screening and spoke about how well received the film has been from the few screenings it has had, noting that famous The Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy had given him “one of the great review quotes that I’ve ever gotten, which was, ‘not uninteresting.’” This light-hearted quip set the playful tone of the film that was to follow.
The film is a collection of interviews, quotes and excerpts of films that are all illustrative of the question, “what is cinema?” Workman has collated a number of different ideas and philosophies about the meaning and nature of film to create a sweeping journey through the possibilities that the medium contains. There are interviews from present day filmmakers such as Mike Leigh and David Lynch, as well as contemporary interviews from Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Altman. The film also contains a good deal of archival footage from films of various periods as a way to illustrate Workman’s own view of what constitutes great artistic cinema.
After the screening of the film, Powers asked Workman to discuss his reasons for making the film. Workman answered that he had always been interested in the avant-garde cinema, although he had made his living in Hollywood. He said, “I really didn’t know exactly what I was looking for, except I really wanted to delve into the filmmakers, and the films, and images and ideas about cinema.” When an audience member asked about how he had chosen this footage, Workman said that he had picked films that he liked, and that he considered “these filmmakers as artists.”
