A Love Letter to Cinema

Dear Cinema, I look around at my peers and regard an otherworldly pasion for you, a commitment tantamount to religiosity, and have no choice but to wonder what has conjured this obsession - this gluttonous drive to create and consume. It seems to me on a level of psychological attachment that has become unavoidably divorced from any of your literal definitions; it becomes inevitably emotional, satiating a philosophical and ardent inner hunger to be understood, to be seen - and I find that I share in this. I must admit that you have always occupied a space in my life that I have found quite difficult to articulate - both as a tangible and recognisable international industry, and as an artistic movement that has always felt so personal and intimate to me, a conceptual being that constructs the metaphorical bridge traversing reality and the fantastical. I often wonder, in this case, if there is in fact a religious element to our collective appreciation here, a cosmic wonder to the knowledge that you alone hold over one century of diverse and opposing human experience. Indeed, why should a being as all-powerful as that not be regarded as a deity? There is a comfort to the knowledge that I am but one piece in a clouded echo of history, a sweet surrender to the fact that there is merely a piece of you inside me, but that the entirety of myself and all of my earthly experiences reside in you. There is something almost Neoplatonian in this satisfaction - a perceived relinquishment of the carnality of human eroticism in favour of a more ‘civilised’ appreciation of art deeply into the fantastical, and an abandonment of the earthly emotions that lead us to cre ate art and of a higher power. But the continuation of this religious comparison is not one that sits quite right with me. It is a delve too deeply into the fantastical, and an abandonment of the earthly emotions that lead us to create art in the first place. My love for you cannot be divorced from my earthly life because what is an expression of love with no humanity? It is an anaemic love with no desire, devoid of heat or longing. Your beauty is one of understanding the interconnectedness of pain and euphoria, the balanced imperfection of human affection. Cinema, I love you, but I am not in love with you. To be in love is to yearn, to be in pain, to amputate half of your soul. You have not recreated this phenomenon for me, but rather, you have reflected it. The love I feel for you is largely born of your intimate recognition of the intricate beauty of human experience - that to be in love is not kinetic but katastematic, a longing for adventure is not reckless but bold, a yearning for understanding is not infantile but universal. My love for you is not expressed through self-flagellation, but through enjoyment, entertainment, opportunity. A love for you is a social one, an appreciation for the talent among us and within ourselves. Although there can be no you without life, so too does life’s greatest qualities become enhanced by your presence. And, in this respect, you will find me where you have always found me: On the bridge that separates reality from fantasy,

Cat Earley.