A CALL TO CINEMATICALISM
To be a Cinematicalist is to enter a compact of care. We would describe the terms of that compact as:
Watch movies with an undistracted and open mind.
Be open to loving all kinds of cinema without snootiness.
Learn about the craft, the history, the industry, et cetera. Humbly.
Question the larger discourses around Film & TV, academic and popular alike, without contempt.
Welcome others without gatekeeping or arrogance.
Honour those who make cinema, in its entirety, possible. Artists, workers, audiences, teachers, critics, archivists, et cetera.
Support access, exhibition, education, criticism, preservation, and fair labour, where and when you can.
Protect what might otherwise disappear. Be it films themselves, skills that make them, or history that surrounds them.
Resist the flattening of cinema into blasé content.
Defend cinema as a human-centred art form supported by a labour ecosystem.
Pass forward what you were lucky enough to receive and learn.
PREAMBLE
WHY A MANIFESTO?
Film history is, at least in part, a history of manifestos. Some written, others not. Whenever cinema has found itself transformed (either by new technologies, new economies, or new audiences), it has been the duty of filmmakers, critics, artists, and movements to answer. Not only with films, but with the issuance of declarations. A manifesto is written when affection alone is insufficient. It is written when a medium must be defended, redirected, or called back to its highest possibilities.
Historically, many film manifestos have directed themselves toward the supply side of cinema. Toward filmmakers, movements, methods, and the conditions under which works are made. This manifesto doesn’t reject that tradition. It does, however, widen its frame. Cinema is not sustained by makers alone. It is sustained by those who watch it, teach it, preserve it, and argue about it. It exists within a larger stakeholder ecosystem.
INTRODUCTION
WHAT IS CINEMATICALISM?
We are not
NOT a cult of cinema.
The body of audiovisual storytelling, we collectively and reverently refer to as cinema, across all formats and lengths, is vitally and enduringly worthwhile. From this conviction emerges the doctrine of Cinematicalism.
Cinematicalism
● PROPER NOUN formal
A doctrine or belief system defined by an unpretentious, fanatical appreciation of film and television—one that equally values highbrow and lowbrow, A-movies and B-movies, domestic and foreign, independent and commercial, dramatic and genre, and cult and mainstream works. It holds that all are worthy of scrutiny and recognition as part of a larger creative ecosystem.
In practice, Cinematicalism appears as deliberate watching, participation, and advocacy for cinema. Recognizing it as equal parts artistic medium, industry comprised of human beings, and a cultural inheritance to be passed from one generation to the next. This doctrine is elaborated upon in the pages that follow and from that doctrine, follows an absolute responsibility to those who heed its call to be a Cinematicalist:
Cinematicalist
● PROPER NOUN formal
An adherent or advocate of cinematicalism—one who embraces the belief that all forms of cinema merit equal respect, curiosity, and critical engagement.
FIVE REASONS IT MATTERS
THE CASE FOR CINEMA
1.
CINEMA IS AN EMPATHY MACHINE:
The late American Pulitzer Prize winning film critic Roger Ebert, put it plainly:
“For me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy.”
Now, it is not unreasonable to argue that one of the highest callings of human civilization is the establishment, propagation, and protection of human rights and the human spirit. And that these aims are inseparably bound to humanity’s collective capacity for empathy. Therefore, any world order that is just, and worth upholding, would necessarily be awash with empathy. That is to say, human society is absolutely constructed upon a foundation of empathy. And, as such, benefits greatly from an abundance of empathy machines (i.e. movies).
Within this understanding of humanity, one where empathy is foundational to civilization. Cinema reveals its absolute significance and power. It transmits personal and collective experiences through time, place, and space. It endures as a uniquely versatile, accessible, and historically persistent turbocharged motor of empathy. One that merits sustained engagement, analysis, and protection.
Cinema is singular in its capacity to stand at the intersection of other artforms such as painting, dance, music, literature, and theatre. Inheriting, synthesizing, and transcending the limits of its constituent forms. Empathies stacked upon empathies. Each successive form refining and concentrating what lies within it.
2.
CINEMA IS A SOURCE OF ENTERTAINMENT AND SPECTACLE:
Perhaps not exclusively but at least occasionally, the human experience can be described as a monotonous slog through absurdity, indignity, and humdrumery. That is to say, life can, at times, be soul-crushing. This recurring condition of human life demands reprieve. And cinema offers that. Reprieve in the form of both entertainment and spectacle. Gloriously so.
A particular variety of draining malaise life inflicts upon us is the tedious sameness of the day-to-day. No matter one’s vocation or circumstances. Life can at times feel like an endless repetition of only subtly distinguishable days. Life may offer incredible opportunities for novel experience, but seldom are those experiences as accessible and steadfastly available as the glowing boxes in our living rooms or local multiplexes.
Film and television almost universally contains within itself elements of entertainment. Depending on the execution of the particular work, entertainment may appear as a light seasoning atop high art or as the central, potent ingredient baked into an extreme manifestation of genre fare. Regardless of its proportion within a specific work, that warm blanket of entertainment can cradle us after yet another day of repetition, exhaustion, and vapid effrontery.
Another way life vexes us, beyond the sameness of experience, is through aesthetic monotony. Our visual world, in many ways, is largely constrained by where we live. Whether we find ourselves as residents of La Serenissima, enjoying the Venetian Gothic architecture built upon the canals, or perched in a mountain town nestled in the North American Rocky Mountains, that sameness, day after day, can become flat.
One of the most potent remedies to this visual homogeneity, perhaps even its antithesis, is spectacle. Whether in a dance number from the golden age of Western musicals or contemporary Bollywood, the echoing thrum of fighter jets and car chases, or simply the witnessing of human beings made godlike through projection on a silver screen, cinema offers spectacle in abundance. All for the price of a cheap ticket on Tuesday or a free rental from a local public library.
Bread, circus, and opiate of the masses? Perhaps. However, sometimes people are simply hungry, bored, and in pain. Keep your cake. Let them have movies, TV, and comfort watches therein.
3.
CINEMA IS A SHARED LANGUAGE AND ART:
Overly simplified definitions of human language and art may be stated thusly: language is the direct communication of thoughts, feelings, and ideas between human beings, while art is the indirect communication of thoughts, feelings, and ideas via the novel application of craft between a human sender and a human receiver. Cinema, paradoxically, exists between these two modes while belonging to both categories at once. A bridge between speech and dream.
The text of cinema is composed of images, sounds, captured gestures, cuts, and created rhythms. Therefore, it is a language with a distinct vernacular, grammar, and syntax. A language that reaches grandly toward internationality and universality. Granted, regional and historical trends and flourishes exist. However, the foundational grammar of this language such as master-coverage, shot-reverse-shot, montage, motif, character, et cetera, et cetera, persist globally. If cinema’s spoken language may require translation, its formal language often does not. As Academy Award-winning South Korean director Bong Joon Ho observed:
“Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.”
If cinema functions as language through its shared grammar, it functions as art through our simplified definition of the term (the indirect communication of thoughts, feelings, and ideas via the novel application of craft between a human sender and a human receiver). Cinema, however, doesn’t rely upon a single craft. It is built upon the convergence of many such as writing, performance, photography, sound, and editing to name a few. It is art compounded by art; craft stacked upon craft, each carrying meaning of their own, each intensified by the whole.
For these reasons, cinema must be understood as an essential communicative form. Global in scope and appreciation. Speaking in images and dreams. It translates experience not only from one language to another, but from one mind to another, one culture to another, one life to another. Telepathy via celluloid or digital recording. Through it, what is spoken, seen, made, and felt is carried farther than any one life could carry it alone. A reality which, upon pausing and reflecting, feels basically like a fucking miracle.
4.
CINEMA IS CULTURAL MEMORY AND A MEANS OF EXPERIENTIAL TRANSMISSION:
As powerful as individual memory may be, it lacks fidelity and is constrained by inherent subjectivity. Admittedly, anything created or preserved by human beings contains elements of bias. However, cinema offers something memory alone cannot. The persistence of moving photographs, recorded voices, captured physicalities, and vanished places. When such fragments endure beyond their original moment, they cease to belong only to the individuals who made or witnessed them. They become cultural memory. A record of how human life looked, sounded, moved, imagined itself, and was felt. Through this preservation, cinema becomes a means of experiential transmission, carrying something of the experience of having lived within the past, not just information about it. A sort of widely accessible time machine that consumes considerably less electricity than Doctor Emmett Brown’s required 1.21 gigawatts.
Cinema does all this with remarkable density. Faces, accents, rooms, streets, weather, costumes, et cetera, et cetera. Ways of flirting, fighting, grieving, waiting. It turns the felt atmosphere of human life into a rich material and unusually stable material as it is, under the correct conditions, reproducible, portable, restorable, archivable, and discoverable. It allows cultural ghosts and spirits from the past to haunt or comfort us, and cultural memory to circulate through public life, private memory, and social imagination over time. Through cinema, generations are transported with immediacy into lives, places, and experiences they could never otherwise inhabit physically or emotionally.
Therefore, if cinema carries cultural memory and lived experience, then neglecting it is not neutral. Every lost work, decayed format, inaccessible archive is another puncture and gouge of the metaphorical orbitoclast in a collective cultural lobotomy. A psychic-civilizational owie. Similarly, every restricted access point, buried catalogue, old work left to disappear beneath the algorithmic present is another severed connection in the collective mind. A damming of the flow of humanity's communal creative juices. Piece by piece, image by image, voice by voice, a society forgets what it was. Collective amnesia, civilizational dementia. Memory impaired into stagnation, decline, and death. Egads, woe is us.
5.
CINEMA IS A SOURCE OF CRAFT AND LABOUR:
A seemingly continuous and inalienable truth of human history is that economic systems, of all sorts, are deeply and repeatedly unfair and inequitable. This is particularly true at the time of this writing, amid long-term trends of income inequality, compounding affordability crises, and the increasing precarity of working life. Film and television production, and its associated industries, are by no means perfect employers. They are marked by imbalances of power, burnout, employment instability, gatekeeping, and uneven access to opportunity. However, across the grand spectrum of employment options, and when at their best, film and television production can provide work of exceptional substance and meaning.
Cinema, in its current manifestation, is an amalgam of collective craft. Directors, performers, producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors… yes. But also carpenters, painters, makeup artists, lighting technicians, camera crews, caterers, drivers, and on and on. Moreover, although not universally and depending on the jurisdiction, these roles are frequently unionized. Admittedly, those contracts are not perfect. But the industry remains a bastion of organized labour and collective worker action. To defend cinema, then, is also to defend the workers whose hands make it possible.
At its best, the industry provides skilled workers with dignified, collaborative work rooted in professional trust and community. It offers the chance to master a craft, contribute to a shared vision, and participate in a temporary society built around competence, coordination, and care. It offers purpose, belonging, and pride. All with a side of free doughnuts and coffee at craft services.
Cinema is an art of images, stories, and stars. It is also an art of hands, trades, unions, crews, and call sheets. It is imagination conjured into material through labour. To love cinema without honouring that labour is to mistake the light on the screen for the entirety of the whole of the thing. And to fundamentally ignore the blood, sweat, tears, late nights, and disappointed partners of all those names in the credits when the theatre goes dark.
THE THREAT AND THE CALL
Cinema has persisted for more than a century. In that time, it has endured technological upheavals, economic shocks, cultural realignments, format wars (VHS v. Betamax, HD DVD v. Bluray, et cetera), and repeated declarations of its own demise, surviving only through the devotion of those who love it. Threats to the medium and industry are not new; however, the nature and severity of the threats cinema currently faces are:
- Cinema is threatened by reduction; art, entertainment, and spectacle are optimized into an endless torrent of content. The audiovisual by firehose.
- Cinema is threatened by disappearance; archives decay, works become paywalled, and access narrows. RIP MTV NEWS and the 1914 Lubin vault.
- Cinema is threatened by consolidation; fewer entities exert greater control over what is made, distributed, promoted, and seen. Until only 4 companies, 2 families, and a mouse own all of media.
- Cinema is threatened by atomization; fragmented audiences lose shared language, shared reference points, and shared experience. As we become echo chambers of one.
- Cinema is threatened by dehumanization; labour, craft, criticism, and spectatorship are stripped of care, agency, and authorship. Brainrot and Skynet shaking hands like Carl Weathers and Arnold Schwarzenegger in a 1980s jungle set alien flick.
An undisputed fact of cinema is that it is the sum total of considerable human effort, toil, and attention. It is willed and worked into existence. Perhaps more than ever, that fact persists. That is without question. The only question that remains is whether you will heed the call to protect it.
Cinema has persisted for more than a century. In that time, it has endured technological upheavals, economic shocks, cultural realignments, format wars (VHS v. Betamax, HD DVD v. Bluray, et cetera), and repeated declarations of its own demise, surviving only through the devotion of those who love it. Threats to the medium and industry are not new; however, the nature and severity of the threats cinema currently faces are:
- Cinema is threatened by reduction; art, entertainment, and spectacle are optimized into an endless torrent of content. The audiovisual by firehose.
- Cinema is threatened by disappearance; archives decay, works become paywalled, and access narrows. RIP MTV NEWS and the 1914 Lubin vault.
- Cinema is threatened by consolidation; fewer entities exert greater control over what is made, distributed, promoted, and seen. Until only 4 companies, 2 families, and a mouse own all of media.
- Cinema is threatened by atomization; fragmented audiences lose shared language, shared reference points, and shared experience. As we become echo chambers of one.
- Cinema is threatened by dehumanization; labour, craft, criticism, and spectatorship are stripped of care, agency, and authorship. Brainrot and Skynet shaking hands like Carl Weathers and Arnold Schwarzenegger in a 1980s jungle set alien flick.
An undisputed fact of cinema is that it is the sum total of considerable human effort, toil, and attention. It is willed and worked into existence. Perhaps more than ever, that fact persists. That is without question. The only question that remains is whether you will heed the call to protect it.
THE PRACTICE
EIGHT SPECIFIC MANIFESTATIONS OF CINEMATICALISM
As Cinematicalism develops, there will undoubtedly be refinements and iterations of best practices, effective tactics, and winning strategies. However, it is critical that this document leaves the reader with more than belief. It must also offer a beginning. A set of practical commitments through which Cinematicalism may be lived, practiced, and advanced.
1.
THE CINEMATICALIST IN GENERAL OUGHT TO:
- Approach cinema with equal parts love, curiosity, and seriousness.
- Reject the false hierarchy between highbrow and lowbrow, commercial and independent, domestic and foreign, genre and drama, cult and canonical works.
- Recognize cinema as art, entertainment, labour, language, and memory. Never, ever just content.
- Remain human-aware in all encounters with cinema by being attentive to everyone who sustains it both on and off set.
- Seek context before judgment. Understanding before dismissal.
- Be enthusiastic without being a snob. Criticize without being cruel. Have conviction without contempt.
- Support the conditions that allow cinema to be made, seen, and preserved.
- Carry cinema forward through attention and conversation, in a way that welcomes people regardless of what they already know. Or haven’t yet discovered.
- Never forget that being a Cinematicalist doesn’t require proximity to the industry or formal education. Just an eagerness to care for cinema.
2.
THE CINEMATICALIST AS AN AUDIENCE MEMBER OUGHT TO:
- Watch widely across genres, eras, national cinemas, budgets, and languages.
- Balance comfort viewing with movies that unsettle, expand, and challenge your taste.
- Seek out context around what you watch. Ask questions like… who made it? When was it made? How was it received upon release? Now? What traditions, techniques, and eras does it speak to?
- Support cinema materially where circumstances allow. Go to theatres. Purchase physical media. Rent from libraries. Attend festivals. Buy tickets from your local indie theatre. And understand that for many, affordability, geography, and access shape how many people are able to do all of this.
- Choose with intention. Don’t hand the whole decision to a recommendation engine. “Because You Liked” and the “Most Popular On” sections of your favourite streaming service aren’t the only place to discover your next watch.
- Discuss cinema with courteousness. Make room for disagreement that might stem from unique lived experiences, values, or dispositions.
- Treat viewership as an active relationship with the medium and the people who make it, while remembering that comfort watching, rest, and reprieve are also valid and necessary parts of loving cinema.
- Never forget the movies are only as strong as their audiences.
3.
THE CINEMATICALIST AS A FILMMAKER OUGHT TO:
- Make with intention, discipline, and respect for the audience and the medium.
- Honour the labour of collaborators by fostering sets and rooms rooted in respect, safety, and professional trust.
- Recognize that every department is a source of craft and authorship.
- Study widely beyond your immediate influences, market category, national tradition, or preferred genre. Try to push the medium forward through novel iteration filtered by personal experience and point of view.
- Refuse aesthetic laziness and exploitative production habits.
- To the extent that bandwidth allows, mentor those who show aptitude and commitment, especially when access, knowledge, or opportunity may otherwise be withheld.
- Leave behind records, materials, knowledge, and practices that allow the work, and the labour behind it, to be understood, preserved, and carried forward.
- Never forget everyone on the callsheet or aspiring to appear on one is a filmmaker of sorts.
4.
THE CINEMATICALIST AS A STUDENT OUGHT TO:
- Study cinema with humility and openness.
- Watch beyond the limits of your personal comfort, inherited taste, and algorithmic recommendations.
- Learn the language and theory of cinema. Or at least, as much of it as you can.
- Confusion and boredom are invitations to ask a better question.
- Build taste without hardening into snobbery or contempt for the taste of others.
- Seek out the teachers, texts, and screenings that deepen understanding of the medium.
- Share knowledge forward to anyone who is open to receiving it. The medium and industry thrives when the most amount of people possible are as deeply engaged with it as possible. Knowledge is the foundation of that engagement.
- Never forget you are always still a student.
5.
THE CINEMATICALIST AS A TEACHER OUGHT TO:
- Teach cinema with clarity and generosity, at every level of familiarity, with anyone who is open to receive.
- Provide historical and formal context without reducing works to trivia or moral lessons.
- Broaden the canon, and explain why certain works have endured.
- Make room for the unique experiences and perspectives of others, while also guiding them toward historical context, formal attention, and possible interpretations. Always respectfully.
- Be curious and rigorous without being cruel or dismissive.
- Connect cinema to craft and labour, so those who might learn from you understand not only what appears on screen but also, the human work that made it possible.
- Cultivate active viewers who can watch, question, and champion the importance of the motion picture.
- Never forget anyone who knows more than the person next to them, regardless of professional, academic, or casual context, is a teacher.
6.
THE CINEMATICALIST AS AN ARCHIVIST OUGHT TO:
- Treat cinema as cultural memory worthy of documentation, restoration, and care.
- Resist disappearance by protecting the works, formats, records, ephemera, and production knowledge that might otherwise be lost.
- Preserve context alongside objects, including provenance, authorship, labour, reception, and exhibition history.
- Expand access where possible, while respecting legal, ethical, cultural, and material constraints.
- Value the regional, the low-budget, the amateur, and the non-canonical alongside the officially celebrated.
- Restore and present works with humility, avoiding unnecessary alteration, erasure, or false modernization.
- Understand preservation as an active commitment to keeping cinema visible, legible, and alive. Storage alone is not preservation.
- Never forget that anyone who owns a piece of physical media is an archivist of sorts.
7.
THE CINEMATICALIST AS AN ADVOCATE OUGHT TO:
- Defend cinema as a public good worthy of funding, access, education, and cultural attention.
- Support policies, institutions, organizations, and spaces that allow cinema to be made, exhibited, restored, and discussed.
- Advocate for safe conditions, sustainable careers, and real protections for the workers whose labour makes cinema possible.
- Resist censorship, algorithmic burial, and monopolistic control.
- Promote access to a wider range of works across genre, era, country, language, and budget.
- Speak about cinema in ways that invite others in rather than using knowledge, taste, or terminology as a gatekeeping weapon.
- Advocating is a sustained commitment to the medium, the industry, and the communities that keep it alive.
- Never forget that advocacy takes all forms. Big, small, formal, and informal.
8.
THE CINEMATICALIST AS A STALWART OUGHT TO:
- Stay devoted without becoming rigid, nostalgic, or hostile to change.
- Keep watching, studying, and defending cinema even when attention, markets, and popular culture move elsewhere.
- Hold fast to the belief that cinema remains worthwhile.
- Protect enthusiasm from bitterness, criticism from contempt, and conviction from dogma.
- Remember that care for cinema is cumulative. One screening, one conversation, one restoration, one act of attention at a time.
- Pass cinema to those who arrive later, know less, or see it differently. Be a bulwark against gatekeeping.
- Refuse both despair and denial. Seeing the threats against cinema clearly, while meeting them with patience, imagination, and community.
- Never forget that cinema persists because generations of people made the decision that it mattered and acted accordingly before you arrived.