Includes bibliographical references and index.

Prologue: the target of film theory -- The camera searching in the world -- Is a camera essential? -- The Cahiers axiom -- Tracing Bazin's trace -- Images contested today -- The editor's discovery of form -- Bazin's forerunners -- Documentaries in the cauldron of history -- The Cahiers line -- Pursuing cinema in the twenty-first century -- The projector as spectator's searchlight -- The power of projection -- Opening the screen's dimensions -- Frame as threshold -- Writing out of the frame -- The evolution of the subjects of cinema -- Modern film: between classic and avant-garde -- The ontogeny of cinema -- Credits and auteurs: an ecology of adaptation -- Fidelity: the economy of adaptation.

What Cinema Is! offers an engaging answer to Andre Bazin'sfamous question, exploring his 'idea of cinema' with a sweepinglook back at the near century of Cinema's phenomenal ascendancy.