MATT'S EDITORIAL #1 - Rediscovering the true meaning of the word 'cinema'

You say goodbye and I say hello. To celebrate the refurbishing of my website CineCola.com, due to the numbers on the rise, I have decided to start a trend of writing up some short weekly editorial pieces with my musings on cinema. They will mostly be random, though I will try to be influenced by whatever recent happening may be on at the time of writing.

Whoever might have been following my festival reports on FRED Film Radio and right here on CineCola (thank you very much, by the way!), I have recently been on a very invigorating three in a row, covering the Edinburgh International Film Festival, Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna and the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

In Edinburgh one of the films I watched was Life May Be by Mark Cousins and Mania Akbari. The plot is very simple. The two send each other video letters, where they express their thoughts and feelings quite freely and yet with great depth. The film is mostly shot in guerrilla filmmaking style, a style which makes it all the more personal and rewarding.

The impact it had on me was instant. In fact, from the very first few minutes I realised that there had been a need in me that I had never been able to fulfill and yet have always really wanted to. I believe that unhappiness exists when people fail to find a proper way to express themselves. The happiest people on earth may be the ones who have found a way to release this tension that might build up inside them. Some may take up a sport, others may learn to play an instrument and then there's those who paint.

For those restless souls, such as myself, this need is hard to fulfill in just one way. Therefore I have always needed to release this tension through writing and through music. Yet, cinema is still my favoured art form and the frustration mounted because I had never been able to fulfill a need to express myself through it. Despite having gone to film school - quite a depressing experience at the time - and despite writing about film virtually every single day, I never actually interacted with this art form in a direct way.

So, how did Life May Be influence me? Well, in the last while, I have been travelling a lot. It has been wonderful, but it gets quite lonely and tiresome. Nevertheless, it certainly broadens your mind. On top of that, with travelling comes this need to film, to remember, to capture the essence of the nature of whatever place you might have seen.

This is an extremely cinematic necessity. Let us recall that early cinema was obsessed with filming travelogues, and for the first time people would see a version of far away distant places. These, it must be said, were subjective visions that laid down the foundations for what would become cinematic stereotypes (that are still very much in use to this day). And that is exactly my point - cinema is subjective, therefore whoever films is providing us with his POV whether he or she knows it or not. It has always been like this, and it's like this whether we talk fiction or documentary, whether we speak of Fellini or dad's old summer holiday video.

Somehow, Life May Be has made me realise a very simple thing, an idea that was always buzzing in my head but never quite hit me as hard as Mark Cousin and Mania Akbari's work did. The word cinema has been misleadingly identified with Oscars, glamour and red carpet for much too long. However, the etymology of the world cinema reveals that the bulk of it comes from the greek word kinima for movement. Cinema is the art of capturing mobility, and through its very nature it is also the perfect and most universal way of capturing memory.

So, a couple of days after watching it, I bought a very simple camera and started shooting. And despite the fact that I have no grand aim for the footage I shoot, it has been pretty exciting!