cinema
/ˈsɪnəmə/ nounMotion pictures collectively — as an art form, a medium of expression, and an industry; also, chiefly in British use, a venue where films are shown.
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Art The art and practice of making motion pictures, regarded as a distinct medium with its own language, conventions, and history.
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Industry The film industry: the economic system by which motion pictures are financed, produced, distributed, and exhibited.
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chiefly British A theater or venue in which films are shown to an audience. a neighborhood cinema
Branches
- genre A category of film defined by shared conventions, themes, and iconography, such as the western, film noir, horror, the musical, science fiction, or documentary; genre operates at once as an industrial and marketing category and as a framework for interpretation.
- film history The chronological development of the moving image as a medium, from the optical toys that preceded projection through the silent, sound, color, and digital eras.
- filmmaking The collaborative process of creating a motion picture, spanning development, pre-production, production, and post-production, and involving specialized creative and technical roles.
- post-production The stage of filmmaking that follows shooting, in which recorded picture and sound are assembled and finished — through picture editing, visual effects, color grading, sound editing and mixing, and final mastering and delivery.
- film industry The commercial and economic system through which motion pictures are financed, produced, distributed, and exhibited, together with the companies, labor, and organizations that sustain it.
- film studies The academic discipline that studies film as an art form and cultural practice, encompassing its history, theory, criticism, and preservation, and distinguished from journalistic reviewing by its scholarly and analytical methods.
- animation A mode of the moving image in which the illusion of motion is produced from a sequence of individually made images — drawings, painted cels, puppets or models, or computer renders — rather than by continuously recording live action.
- documentary A mode of film that presents itself as a treatment of actuality — of real people, places, and events — as distinct from fiction; the term is conventionally credited to John Grierson, who defined it as the creative treatment of actuality.
- mise-en-scène Everything arranged before the camera and contained within the frame — setting, lighting, costume and makeup, and the placement and movement of actors — together with its composition; the substance of a director's staging.
Where motion picture names the individual work, cinema names the whole — the medium as an art, the apparatus of an industry, and the room in which the result meets an audience. The word records its own origin: from the Lumières’ cinématographe, “movement-writing.”
This branch gathers everything that treats film as a cultural and economic object rather than a physical one: its history and movements, its theory and criticism, its genres and narrative forms, and the industry of studios, financing, distribution, and exhibition.
See also
- motion picture— A work made of many still images shown in rapid succession, producing the impression of continuous movement.
Sources
- Oxford English Dictionary, “cinema, n.”
- Online Etymology Dictionary, “cinema”
Last revised: September 18, 2026