What is kino?

You may have heard the term ‘Kino’ before while browsing the net or looking for reviews of your favourite film and, if you have any sense of taste you can probably find a description of it which refers to it as ‘kino’. Kino is a German word referring to motion in cinema and was adopted later to simply refer to cinema across Europe. This little linguistic note in the history of film was picked up by online forums for discussion of cinema, namely that on 4Chan board /tv/ which centres around television and film discussion. The site generally regards kino as being exceptional and being something of a pinnacle of the form, which differentiates it from different terms used to describe the medium (joints, films, flicks and movie).

Now the term kino is used in a self-aware sense, denoting the user with a sense of pretension and unreasonably high standards for film. If a film defies expectations, launches a genre forward, is transformative and revolutionary, there’s a good chance someone online is off calling it kino and someone else has left a comment calling the first dude pretentious.

So who can tell you what is and isn’t kino? Kinosaw can.