So, on January 13, 2022 I decided to open a YouTube channel. It's nothing for anyone who's reading - the channel is in italian, my native language, so there's no reason you should check it. I decided to start analyzing cinema as a medium and as a language instead of talking about the content of this or that movie: I rather wanted to focus over the form. The reason is that I believe there is a lot of talk from the audience's perspective about what cinema is. But then, I started wondering about the question itself: is it correct to be trying to answer the question "What is cinema"?. I'm not going to go academic talking about this or that theorist and what he/she'd say cinema is. But I started wondering a lot, asking myself if the question was the right one: shouldn't I, instead, try to answer another question, "what cinema is for"?. When asked about cinema, people within the industry would give very different answers: just to name two big guys, there's people like sir Alfred Hitchcock, who would say during his interviews with François Truffaut that "cinema is not a slice of life, cinema is a slice of cake"; but then you have people like Martin Scorsese, for whom cinema is a sort of religion. So you really can't tell what cinema is with a short formula. But I deeply believe you should really try to understand what cinema is for. Is it for documenting history? Is it for leisure time? Is it for escaping reality? Is it for knowledge purpose?

I believe one of the most interesting answers comes from Hayao Miyazaki. While Miyazaki was making 'The Wind Rises' (2013), he wanted to tell the story of an engineer who failed at becoming an aviator because of a vision defect. During the documentary "The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness" (2013), Miyazaki started talking about his biggest passion, aviation. He said, no matter what, no matter if you put all of you energies in making beautiful dreams such airplanes, time will always make you a slave and an instrument. The same goes for animation. Animation, and movies, are cursed dreams. People's dreams are beautiful - he said - yet cursed. I do agree with him. We'll always have to cope with the fact that our dreams - whatever they are - will haunt us more than we're willing to believe. So what do we do? Do we keep dreaming? Shouldn't we instead awake from the sleep? What is dreaming for? *Vsauce music theme kicks in*

Dreaming is for analyzing reality. And that's what we're forced to do - there's no way out. We must analyze reality even though it's rough and tough. Even if it's cursed. That is what cinema is for. Not to dream, not to escape - at least not only: it is a powerful tool to analyze our world, trying to cope with good and bad dreams of ours. Yet we'll never stop asking the question "What is cinema for?". As Miyazaki then would say, "What do we know movies are really useful? Isn't making movies just a hobby? Maybe there was a time in which movies mattered, but now?".

But I believe we're forced to keep enduring, and make ourselves these questions. That's when we really know we're alive, when we do not take for granted what we have.