Film is.

It was the famous film critic and theoretician André Bazin who asked the question "What is cinema?" in his legendary essays of the 1950’s and 1960’s. The answer to that question is something a lot of filmmakers and theoreticians have written and speculated about. Eisenstein, Brakhage, Godard, Deren: they have all tried to formulate what it exactly is that constitutes the medium film. Gustav Deutsch examines exactly the same thing in his film cycle Film ist. His "answer": film is. Period. It exists and can take on many forms and meanings. His film is not so much of an answer to the question what film is, but more several examples of the various shapes it can take on. 

Deutsch structures his film cycle around various chapters, twelve so far. Those chapters have titles such as Movement and Time, Light and Darkness, A Mirror, Magic, Emotions and Passion and so on. All of them give an example of what film can be. Deutsch made it very clear that this film can never have a definitive form, simply because there is no definitive definition of what film is. He started to work on this film in 1996, when he made the first six chapters. From 1999 to 2002, he worked on the subsequent six chapters, 7-12. So far, these 12 chapters constitute the whole of Film ist. but it’s very likely there will be more chapters in the future. (...) (Maikel Arts)