When we ask the question "What is cinema?", one initial response is that it is the experience of watching a film. But even so simple a response evokes a seemingly unending roll of questions. What, for example, is considered part of this experience? (just the watching? or the conversations afterwards? is remembering a film part of the cinematic experience? are the emotional responses to a film part of cinema? is it the entire film, or just parts of it? etc.); what is it to watch? (what are the pluralities of spectatorships involved across audiences, and even within the individual who watches the same film more than once?); does watching a film mean something different from watching other things, and if so what are the differences and how are they formed? How much a part of cinema are cultural contexts? or individual histories? or the force of the images? And each of these such questions elicits even more questions. In part, just recognising such issues formulates cinema itself. The capacity of film, and its theories, to actually provoke a questioning of what it does, and how it does this, and how we recognise it, all forms part of the cinematic experience. The aim in positing, and considering, such questions is not necessarily to resolve them, or even to move towards a sort of eidetic reduction of cinema (to grasp "cinemaness' as the phenomenologists might say), but we do gain a great deal in foregrounding them.