Life in a can
Cinema seizes life and dresses it up, making it happen in a delimited space and time. I’m obsessed with the halo of mystery that surrounds it.
“The only jurisdiction to which a film should be subject concerns its style and its expressive power. The rest is a mystery and will always remain so”. We owe this thought to Jean Cocteau, and I constantly see myself in these words: I was always interested in mystery, all forms of mystery. I think my worship of cinema has its roots in the fact that we are all part of the maximum (despairing and yet overwhelming) expression of mystery: life.
Cinema seizes life and dresses it up, making it happen in a delimited space and time. I’m obsessed with the halo of mystery that surrounds it; I’m seduced by the impenetrable sphere that constitutes movies and turns them into a challenge every time I try to reflect about cinema. Films have the condition of the awaiting unknown and that connects them to my will of living through the pleasure of interpreting what surrounds me. In fact, I believe it was urged by that pleasure that I devoted myself to cinema when I was a child. And I also believe it was urged by that pleasure that I first started writing about movies.
In effect, the mystery of cinema connects us to the mystery of ourselves. Cocteau said that “beauty in all its forms drives us back into ourselves”, and cinema is a form of beauty (as is art). To us film lovers, movies are a basic need. Films constitute us mentally and materially, psychologically and physically. And to us, film critics, thinking and writing about cinema as an art is an inseparable and irrevocable consequence of our particular constitution.
In my case, even though there are few publications entirely dedicated to film criticism in Argentina, I thankfully could find a place to unravel that passion. Strangely, I think my studies in journalism and literature were, and are, (again) a way for me to feel close to mystery. And I believe it is also because of mystery that I write in the El Amante/Cine, a monthly Argentine magazine specialising in cinema. That publication makes space for polemics, movie analysis, different points of view and reflections about the past, present and future of cinema. Writing about films implies riflecting upon cinema, and thinking about ourselves from different perspectives. That way, movies take us to a world in which beauty exists wherever we can find it, build it or interpret it without any closure of meaning; a rare world, a world that remains a mystery… but yet exists, in the form of movie theatres.
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