What is Cinema? | Opinions on Cinema is being Underrated

I love movies, not like I love chicken. I love movies, as I love myself. I am connected to cinema with something that is more than just its quality of Escapism. Cinema is so beautiful. It is peaceful and revolutionary at the same time. I believe it’s an experience rather than just a storyline, acting ,cinematography or its other tangible aspects.

I believe that it is truly experienced and felt with its art rather than resources. I am not saying money or resources aren't useful. Of course, they are useful. But I don’t believe it always follows a linear proportional graphical relation with money. But I believe there should be a linear proportional graphical relation between its creative and commercial success which happens, but very rarely. I believe it’s due to lack of patience or lack of love for art which keeps declining (and it worries me). Movies on cheap thrills are being more addictive, favorable and available but I would never say loved. You can only love cinema.

Even the cheap thrills of reels, shorts etc are superficial and greedy. It’s based on taking, it’s based on gambling, it’s based on tiring you down. A cinema is based on sharing, it’s based on experiencing and it’s based on giving. And love is about giving. You give cinema a valuable portion of your patience, you give cinema a true unbiased mind, you give a chance for it to show/tell/convey whatever it wants and promise to accept it with open arms. And Cinema gives you lessons, laughs, and emotions. It changes things in you that could take even years to change if you were taught them in ‘schools’ (schools that are just there for money/survival and have forgotten their essence of existing) and let you live a life you would never experience. It dissolves the lines of your identity as you, your gender, background and beliefs, the you that is associated with your community and lets you live a life beyond. It makes us travel and fuels curiosity, love, tolerance that we take with us till our last breaths.
That is what cinema is.

Now, videos are called movies, perfections of clean recording, audios are called effective/impactful and a generation is being catered, who will hardly experience cinema. Forget cinema, the same is with all the other art forms and it ends up with people not finding peace that humanity has been finding in arts. It will make us disconnected to what being human is. Cinema isn’t only to make you escape. It’s to make you escape your things in life and put you right where you were before watching the movie with a new you. A good cinema actually changes lives. And has been doing so too.

Now, Cinema has been catering to people's traits that are nowhere to be found in the “experience" the cinema provides. Cinema is showing what’s harmful but it’s not what it’s doing wrong. It's spoon-feeding the harmful elements. It's adding them to our bloodline, it’s not making our mind travel. Cinema is doing cheap business. A business of intensity versus time. So many movies that are classic now weren’t recognized then. Finding the perfect audience is impossible. An act of trying to cater every person that can pay for the ticket takes off the creative freedom of filmmakers.

Cinema nowadays is eating itself, at least the ones I know. I am stating it because movies are never independent. It’s an event that molds the existing and future directors, producers, technicians, actors, audiences and everything associated with cinema. And cinema nowadays is molding itself in a way that it’s destroying its own essence. Cinema that begs just for easy money will follow the trend of what could be spoon fed and consumed/could be consumed easily and it turns out to be softcore porn as music videos, gender objectification, bodybuilders as actors, spoon feeding disguised as cinematic experience, superficial sets with realism and caption writers as script writers.

But Cinema isn’t dead. It never will be. Cinema can be forgotten but its experience can never be removed from existence. World cinema is still filled with cinema’s real beauty and its experience.

‘What is cinema?’ I don’t know like I don’t know what makes a poem a poem. But what isn’t cinema is something I believe most of us can easily point out.
Praise the cinema by experimenting with it, it’s not a job you are compelled to do or experience in a way. It’s art. it's something where you can push your limits even as an audience, where you can complicate things as you want, where you can live thousands of lives.

Experience what does/doesn’t make a great movie great. Try a cinema you wouldn’t watch or the ones which you are disputed to watch. Make cinemas yourself. In the end, love for cinema is what distinguishes a filmmaker and a viewer. Let cinema take you in your journey and I hope it makes you feel THE “Cinema”