In Defense of Cinema: An Initiation

Cinema - in the strict sense this book reclaims - is not the broad category of moving-image entertainment. It is an art form arrived at only through the thorough distillation of ideas down to their essences. Though every work deserving the title is also a movie, not every movie should be confused for cinema.

Across five parts and just over 100,000 words, In Defense of Cinema: An Initiation establishes what cinema is, traces the lineage it inherits, holds up thirteen witnesses - Tarkovsky, Bergman, Kubrick, Fellini, Kiarostami, Ray, Kieślowski, Campion, Iñárritu, Coppola, Arnold, Von Trier, Moodysson - who carried the form across its first century, diagnoses what has been done to it across its second, and names what is now required of the practitioner and the audience who would defend it.

Written by filmmaker, production technologist, and futurist Tom Thudiyanplackal - whose forty years in service of the medium run from Mumbai advertising through Prague Film School, Vinod Chopra Films, and USC's Entertainment Technology Center - this is not a study but a defense: a sermon delivered at a funeral by someone who actually loved the dead, sent into the world as a war cry for those who care to rise up in arms.

And for the creator staring down the AI era - the displaced professional, the artist told to feed the feed or disappear - the subtitle is meant literally. This book is an antidote: not a ban on the new tools and not a surrender to them, but a discipline for using them without becoming a generator and consumer of slop - so that minds built for the real work are not sacrificed to the machinery that profits from their imitation.