This section contains ten examples of practitioners from the first half of the twentieth century, whose various systems and approaches are taken to address the question of the cinema as ontology, phenomenology and situated production of a physical ontology.

As articulated by film critic André Bazin, the very form of the question “What is cinema?” is ontological. That is, the question itself asks about the ways in which the cinema can bring together quite disparate parts, expressions, technologies and events and produce a whole unit: a film. Ontology is understood philosophically to be the study of being but, as with any study, different philosophers and theorists hold divergent positions on what ontology means for them, at particular times across history. The cinema can thus be considered a creative medium: a producer of new and different things. What governs, what drives, what produces this being are the issues that many film-theorists and film-philosophers articulate.

Film is also an unstable form. Film forms and products – cinema, television, computer games, online media industries that draw on the cinematic, that is, the film industry in its entirety – have reshaped knowledge of the world through various categorizations, genres, fields of enquiry, different methods of representation, intervention, provocation. Through its various assumptions and different purposes, film represents and questions the ways in which we think about things in the world, including the very nature of thinking as a perceptual activity that is entirely mediated in some form or another.