Cinema is a way of watching, not only a length of story

The argument

This position begins by refusing the terms of the comparison. Proponents argue that cinema is not simply a container for narrative which television has now outgrown; it is a set of conditions under which a work is experienced. The audience arrives at a fixed time, sits in the dark among strangers, cannot pause, cannot look away without missing something, and sees an image large enough that composition and scale operate physically. Films are made for those conditions: the pacing assumes uninterrupted attention, the sound is mixed for a room built for it, and shots are composed for a frame that fills the field of vision. Proponents argue that a work made for domestic viewing is made for something else, and reasonably so. It has to survive interruption, hold a viewer who can stop at any moment, and read on a small screen with ambient light and ambient noise. Those requirements produce different choices about dialogue, coverage, image and rhythm, and the result is a different form rather than the same form relocated. The conclusion is that the question answers itself once the premise is dropped. Serial television may be the more important narrative form at a given moment, may attract the most ambitious writers and may produce the work people most want to discuss, and none of that makes it cinema, because cinema names a way of presenting work rather than a level of ambition. Proponents argue that the claim is a compliment paid in the wrong currency: it praises television by calling it something else, when what the form has achieved is better described in its own terms.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that this defines cinema by its exhibition arrangements and then treats the definition as a discovery. On the same reasoning a film watched at home would not be cinema either, which few people believe, and much of what is admired in film survives the small screen intact. They add that the conditions described are not as fixed as the premise suggests, since films are now made in the knowledge that most of their audience will see them at home, while serials are increasingly made with the scale and the image of features. On that view the two sets of conditions are converging, and a definition drawn from the auditorium is a definition of a venue rather than of an art.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Defining cinema by the auditorium makes a film watched at home something other than cinema, which almost nobody accepts, so the definition is too narrow for the work asked of it. [Rejecting P2] Films are now made in the knowledge that most viewers will see them at home, so the contrast between work made for a cinema and work made for a room is weaker than the premise claims. [Rejecting P3] Serial television is increasingly made with the scale, image and sound of features, so the conditions are converging rather than dividing the forms. [Rejecting C] At most it follows that exhibition conditions differ, not that television has failed to take over the role cinema held.