Introduction:
Reflecting on Reflections All Over Body And Soul
By Dilek Aydın (Turkey)

Through my university years, I was always working voluntarily at a place where every single person was related to cinema. Watching films is not only a joy but also a way of living. We attended film courses together that took up to ten hours a week because of discussions after the screenings. With the help of this formation that does not easily fall to everyone's share, I learnt many things, acquired new perspectives, got to know people similar to me and totally different, and talked to those people sharing things about cinema all the way. Many people within that group continued their relations with cinema; some of them kept on their master studies in film like me, writing on films at the same time. We learned the way to criticize a film through listening to other people, getting free from the only way of looking at the cinema which is everybody's own. Now it's easier for me to see the reflections of a film in myself as I'm embellished with many other ways of seeing. I feel really happy when I think of the background that I came from, and when I think that other people who want to be film critics may come from similar backgrounds. Under the present conditions also, Turkey has a quite young and promising group of film critics who are far away from any kind of dogmatism and who are really open to any film as a new experience.

For my own share, I know a film can resist or confirm life, or can begin a new epoch in the lives of others. It is probably really hard even futile to come up with a list of what a film can do to you. Cinema as a medium of expressing all kinds of feelings, moods, situations and experiences, is always open to be commented on or criticized just like other forms of art. But I have to admit that it is quite an alerting process starting with the first minute of the film ending, with the full stop that you put in your article. I always get naked from all my prejudices, value judgments before starting to watch a film; still, however you try to be an "object" in this process, you are also a body of emotions and experiences. With the film starting, you set off a journey through yourself. You get inside your brain with the flow of film; you begin discovering within your body and mind. To write on a film requires such a journey to the depths of yourself and a cumulative experience of cinema. When you define the cracks of the film you realize your own imperfections. That's probably why I want to be a film critic, in order to be always aware of myself, to meditate on cinema and feel it, always setting off journeys to myself as the smallest entity of humanity, passing through the world along with the societies and cultures. 

Dilek Aydin

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