ABSTRACT
Cinema – artistic film or movies – was the great new art form of the twentieth century. In its struggle to establish its artistic credentials, cinema inherited the nineteenth-century debate about whether photography was an artistic medium. The question now was: could film, involving a process that mechanically recorded whatever was in front of the camera's lens, be recognized as a medium of artistic expression? Was there a distinctive medium that allowed an artist or artists to create a cinematic work of art? As a developing narrative form, often adapting established theatrical works, film also prompted theorists to clarify the differences between theater and cinema. Exactly how was the film medium different from that of theater? This concern about the distinctive nature of the cinematic medium was not a new theoretical enterprise. Theorists of the arts had been engaging in similar debates about other artistic media for centuries.
