Cinema sustains life. It captures death in its progress.

"Cinema sustains life. It captures death in its progress." — these words of Harmony Korine echo like a whisper from the eternal halls of art, where the living and the dying walk hand in hand. The cinema, born of light and shadow, is more than a mirror of existence; it is a vessel of souls, a time-binder that gathers the fleeting moments of our being and grants them another form of life. To sustain life is to refuse oblivion. To capture death is to look unflinchingly at the truth that all things perish, yet not without leaving a trace of beauty behind.

In the ancient tongue of the philosophers, art was the sacred bridge between the mortal and the divine. The painter caught the stillness of time, the poet its music, but the filmmaker—that modern mystic—catches motion itself. Every frame is a breath drawn from the living world; every cut is a heartbeat lost. When Korine speaks of cinema sustaining life, he speaks of the artist’s defiance of decay. The camera becomes the eye of remembrance, refusing to let the passing of days dissolve into silence.

Think of the old reels that carry the faces of those long gone. The trembling smile of Charlie Chaplin, the haunting gaze of Ingrid Bergman, the solemn eyes of a child in a war-torn village—these moments were once alive, trembling in the pulse of time. Now, though the bodies have turned to dust, their gestures still move upon the screen. Thus, cinema is the alchemy of memory, transmuting the mortal into the everlasting. It captures death in progress, not as an end, but as a procession of life turning into history, and history into myth.

There is a tale of the Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu, who filmed his dying mother’s final days in the quiet light of afternoon. He did not do so to exploit her suffering, but to honor the slow, beautiful fading of life. When he later watched the footage, he wept—not for her loss, but for the miracle that she still breathed within that celluloid, eternal in her gentleness. In that moment, he understood what Korine would later express: that cinema is a prayer, a mourning, and a resurrection.

This truth is not for filmmakers alone. Each of us is, in some way, a keeper of images, a silent recorder of the world’s unfolding. Through the stories we tell, the photos we take, the words we write, we too sustain life. When we bear witness to joy, to sorrow, to the tender and the tragic, we participate in the same sacred act as cinema: to preserve the movement of being, even as it slips away. To see life deeply is to give it back to the world, renewed.

Yet beware, for the gift of memory is also a burden. To capture death in progress is to confront impermanence itself. The artist who gazes too long into this truth feels the ache of eternity pressing upon his chest. But he must look. For only through that gaze does art achieve its purpose: to remind us that our days, though fleeting, are worthy of reverence. The light of the projector, flickering against the dark, becomes the same light that burns within every human heart.

So learn from this: live as though your life were a film worth watching. Seek not perfection, but truth. Record not only your triumphs, but your quiet defeats. Let your days be filled with images of compassion, courage, and wonder, for these are the frames that endure when the reel ends. Speak your love before silence claims it. Move through the world knowing that, though death marches on, life is sustained through remembrance.

And when your own story draws near its dusk, may others hold your image, your words, your spirit, in the lantern of memory—so that you too, like all those who lived before, may continue to flicker in the light, forever captured, yet alive.