The question “What is cinema?” has been one of the central concerns of film theorists and aestheticians of film since the beginnings of cinema. No one has done more to show us how this question has been used than Noël Carroll. In his essay, “Defining the Moving Image,”[1] Carroll attempts to go beyond a critique of classical film theory for its essentialism by developing an answer to this question that is non-essentialist in various senses of that term.

In this paper, I shall consider Carroll’s proposed definition of the moving image. After considering whether his five necessary conditions for an object’s being a moving image are an accurate characterization of the concept, I will turn to the broader question of whether Carroll has evaded the essentialism of classical film theory. My conclusion will be that he has not and that the project of film theory needs to be rethought in a manner that is more deeply anti-essentialist than that proposed by Carroll.

Carroll develops his account of the moving image[2] in a dialectical strategy in which he first looks at two problematic views that have dominated philosophical theories of the moving image. The first such view is medium essentialism, the assumption that there is a single medium that determines the nature of an art form. Against this assumption Carroll argues that art forms generally have more than one medium and that, even if this were not so, there is no reason to see an art’s medium as determining appropriate ways for that art form to develop. Carroll’s claim is that this entails that defining the nature of an art form cannot have normative consequences for the future development of that art. As a result, Carroll concludes, one important goal of medium essentialism has to be seen as a mistaken one.