Film theory debates the essence of the cinema and provides conceptual frameworks for understanding film's relationship to reality, the other arts, individual viewers, and society at large. This term is not to be confused with film analysis, a way of analyzing film, which may draw upon ideas from film theory. As the new art form of the twentieth century, film immediately and continuously invited theoretical attempts to define its nature and function.

Mostly as a result of film's own inferiority complex as the youngest of the arts, the impetus for much of early film theory was to gain a degree of respectability. In some respects, French philosopher Henri Bergson's Matter and Memory anticipated the development of film theory at a time that the cinema was just being born as a new medium. He commented on the need for new ways of thinking about movement, and coined the terms "the movement-image" and "the time-image".

However, in his 1906 essay L'illusion cinématographique (in L'évolution créatrice), he rejects film as an exemplification of what he had in mind. Nonetheless, decades later, in Cinéma I and Cinema II (1983-1985), the philosopher Gilles Deleuze took Matter and Memory as the basis of his philosophy of film and revisited Bergson's concepts, combining them with the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce.

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