Today, cinema is everywhere. It shapes our ways of seeing, feeling, and inhabiting time. And yet, what constitutes it most deeply — its language — remains largely invisible. We inherit forms without questioning them. We reproduce rhythms without naming them. We accept conventions as self-evident, as if cinema were a natural flow, rather than a constructed, oriented, and historically situated language. This invisibility is not neutral. It is the site of a silent power.
What organises perception without being named escapes critique. What governs the gaze without being seen cannot be discussed, nor transformed. In the face of the acceleration of images, the standardisation of narratives, and the growing delegation of creative processes to automated systems, it becomes necessary to reclaim cinema — not in order to possess it, but to reclaim responsibility for perception.
To reclaim cinema is to recognise that it cannot be reduced to stories to be told, but that it engages bodies, rhythms, durations, and memories. It is to affirm that every form is a choice, and that every formal choice is already political, because it orients how we see, feel, and understand the world. This reclaiming is not a rejection of technology. It is a refusal of automatism. It does not oppose artificial intelligence, but refuses to grant it perceptual or creative authority. AI may analyse, illuminate, and reveal; it may function as a reflexive organ, but it must never determine meaning nor substitute for human responsibility.
A politics of perception requires that we make visible the structures that shape the gaze. It requires slowing down, naming, and unfolding what usually operates under the regime of evidence. It requires considering each film as a singular body, with its own internal coherence and respiration, its organic motion, rather than as the application of a dominant model.
This call is addressed to those who film, teach, analyse, and transmit. To those who refuse to let cinema become a perceptual automatism. To those who consider that the freedom of forms depends on awareness of their effects. To reclaim cinema today is to reclaim our capacity to see. It is to affirm that perception is not a given, but a field of responsibility. It is to keep the cinematic language open — embodied, conscious, and alive.
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