Quotes about cinema

A collection of quotes on the topic of cinema, film, likeness, life.

Quotes about cinema

“Never stop. Never stop fighting. Never stop dreaming. And don’t be afraid of wearing your heart on your sleeve - in declaring the films that you love, the films that you want to make, the life that you’ve had, and the lives you can help reflect in cinema. For myself, for a long time… maybe I felt inauthentic or something, I felt like my voice wasn’t worth hearing, and I think everyone’s voice is worth hearing. So if you’ve got something to say, say it from the rooftops.”

Tom Hiddleston (1981) English actor, producer and musical performer

Time, Dreams, Help, Heart

“I believe that my dream has always been to become someone. To succeed in life, in the show, I did not know exactly what, but it was or singing or acting, or do cinema or theater… it was the show.”

Dalida (1933–1987) French singer, actress, model and beauty pageant titleholder

Source: http://dalidaideal.blogspot.com/2018/10/dalida-quotes.html

Singing, Life, Dreams

“The truth is often terrifying, which I think is one of the motifs of Larry and Andrew’s cinema. The cost of knowledge is an important theme. In the second and third films, they explore the consequences of Neo’s choice to know the truth. It’s a beautiful, beautiful story.”

Keanu Reeves (1964) Canadian actor, director, producer and musician

Knowledge, Truth, Beauty, Thinking

“My first job was in a movie theater. I worked at Cinema 6 in New City, New York. I was an usher. I sold popcorn.”

Sebastian Stan (1982) Romanian-American actor

Quote

“Film is not analysis, it is the agitation of mind; cinema comes from the country fair and the circus, not from art and academicism.”

Werner Herzog (1942) German film director, producer, screenwriter, actor and opera director

Herzog on Herzog (2002)

Art, Country

“(…) if you can change yourself you will find that no other change is needed. To change the picture you merely change the film, you do not attack the cinema screen! (…) Clarify your mind, purify your heart, sanctify your life – this is the quickest way to a change of your world.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Change
Source: I am That, P.129.

Life, World, Way, Change

“American capitalism finds its sharpest and most expressive reflection in the American cinema.”

Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948) Soviet filmmaker

Sergei Eisenstein (1957) Film form [and]: The film sense; two complete and unabridged works. p. 196

“I am distinctly opposed to visibly arrogant and arbitrary extremes of government—but this is simply because I wish the safety of an artistic and intellectual civilisation to be secure, not because I have any sympathy with the coarse-grained herd who would menace the civilisation if not placated by sops. Surely you can see the profound and abysmal difference between this emotional attitude and the attitude of the democratic reformer who becomes wildly excited over the "wrongs of the masses". This reformer has uppermost in his mind the welfare of those masses themselves—he feels with them, takes up a mental-emotional point of view as one of them, regards their advancement as his prime objective independently of anything else, and would willingly sacrifice the finest fruits of the civilisation for the sake of stuffing their bellies and giving them two cinema shows instead of one per day. I, on the other hand, don't give a hang about the masses except so far as I think deliberate cruelty is coarse and unaesthetic—be it towards horses, oxen, undeveloped men, dogs, negroes, or poultry. All that I care about is the civilisation—the state of development and organisation which is capable of gratifying the complex mental-emotional-aesthetic needs of highly evolved and acutely sensitive men. Any indignation I may feel in the whole matter is not for the woes of the downtrodden, but for the threat of social unrest to the traditional institutions of the civilisation. The reformer cares only for the masses, but may make concessions to the civilisation. I care only for the civilisation, but may make concessions to the masses. Do you not see the antipodal difference between the two positions? Both the reformer and I may unite in opposing an unworkably arrogant piece of legislation, but the motivating reasons will be absolutely antithetical. He wants to give the crowd as much as can be given them without wrecking all semblance of civilisation, whereas I want to give them only as much as can be given them without even slightly impairing the level of national culture. … He works for as democratic a government as possible; I for as aristocratic a one as possible.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

But both recognise the limitations of possibility.
Letter to Woodburn Harris (25 February-1 March 1929), in Selected Letters II, 1925-1929 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 289-290
Non-Fiction, Letters

Men, Dogs, Feeling, Motivation

“I find poetic links, the logic of poetry in cinema, extraordinarily pleasing. They seem to me perfectly appropriate to the potential of cinema as the most truthful and poetic of art forms. Certainly I am more at home with them than with traditional theatrical writing which links images through the linear rigid logical development of plot. That sort of fussily correct way of linking events usually involves arbitrarily forcing them into sequence in obedience to some abstract notion of order. And even when this is not so, even when the plot is governed by the characters, one finds that the links which hold it together rest on a facile interpretation of life's complexities.”

Andrei Tarkovsky book Sculpting in Time

Sculpting in Time (1986)

Life, Truth, Art, Way

“There are today an increasing number of people whose awareness is, in the strict sense of the phrase, without a focus; and the techniques which have transformed the framework of daily life for such people at such a prodigious pace – I am thinking particularly of the cinema and the radio – are making a most powerful contribution towards this defocalizing process. … The human creature under normal conditions finds his bearings in relation to other people, and also to physical objects, that are not only close to him in space but also linked to him by a feeling of intimacy. Of this feeling of intimacy, I would say that in itself it tends to create a focus for human awareness. One might go farther and speak of a kind of constellation, at once material and spiritual, which under normal conditions assembles itself around each human being. … This kind of constellation around the individual life is, in a great many countries, in process of dissolution.”

Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) French philosopher, playwright, music critic and leading Christian existentialist

Source: Man Against Mass Society (1952), pp. 146-147

Life, People, Feeling, Thinking

“I prefer ordinary girls - you know, college students, waitresses, that sort of thing. Most of the girls I go out with are just good friends. Just because I go out to the cinema with a girl, it doesn't mean we are dating.”

Leonardo DiCaprio (1974) American actor and film producer

http://www.flixster.com/actor/leonardo-di-caprio/leonardo-dicaprio-quotes

Girl

“The public has lost the habit of movie-going because the cinema no longer possesses the charm, the hypnotic charisma, the authority it once commanded. The image it once held for us all — that of a dream we dreamt with our eyes open — has disappeared. Is it still possible that one thousand people might group together in the dark and experience the dream that a single individual has directed?”

Federico Fellini (1920–1993) Italian filmmaker

"Decline of Cinema"
I'm a Born Liar (2003)

People, Dreams

“A great deal of work is sedentary, and most manual work exercises only a few specialized muscles. When crowds assemble in Trafalgar Square to cheer to the echo an announcement that the government has decided to have them killed, they would not do so if they had all walked twenty-five miles that day. This cure for bellicosity is, however, impracticable, and if the human race is to survive – a thing which is, perhaps, undesirable – other means must be found for securing an innocent outlet for the unused physical energy that produces love of excitement. This is a matter which has been too little considered, both by moralists and by social reformers. The social reformers are of the opinion that they have more serious things to consider. The moralists, on the other hand, are immensely impressed with the seriousness of all the permitted outlets of the love of excitement; the seriousness, however, in their minds, is that of Sin. Dance halls, cinemas, this age of jazz, are all, if we may believe our ears, gateways to Hell, and we should be better employed sitting at home contemplating our sins. I find myself unable to be in entire agreement with the grave men who utter these warnings. The devil has many forms, some designed to deceive the young, some designed to deceive the old and serious. If it is the devil that tempts the young to enjoy themselves, is it not, perhaps, the same personage that persuades the old to condemn their enjoyment? And is not condemnation perhaps merely a form of excitement appropriate to old age? And is it not, perhaps, a drug which – like opium – has to be taken in continually stronger doses to produce the desired effect? Is it not to be feared that, beginning with the wickedness of the cinema, we should be led step by step to condemn the opposite political party, dagoes, wops, Asiatics, and, in short, everybody except the fellow members of our club? And it is from just such condemnations, when widespread, that wars proceed. I have never heard of a war that proceeded from dance halls.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1950s, What Desires Are Politically Important? (1950)

Love, Men, War, Age

“Suddenly he saw them, the bottles of aguardiente, of anís, of jerez, of Highland Queen, the glasses, a babel of glasses—towering, like the smoke from the train that day—built to the sky, then falling, the glasses toppling and crashing, falling downhill from the Generalife Gardens, the bottles breaking, bottles of Oporto, tinto, blanco, bottles of Pernod, Oxygènée, absinthe, bottles smashing, bottles cast aside, falling with a thud on the ground in parks, under benches, beds, cinema seats, hidden in drawers at Consulates, bottles of Calvados dropped and broken, or bursting into smithereens, tossed into garbage heaps, flung into the sea, the Mediterranean, the Caspian, the Caribbean, bottles floating in the ocean, dead Scotchmen on the Atlantic highlands—and now he saw them, smelt them, all, from the very beginning—bottles, bottles, bottles, and glasses, glasses, glasses, of bitter, of Dubonnet, of Falstaff, Rye, Johnny Walker, Vieux Whiskey blanc Canadien, the apéritifs, the digestifs, the demis, the dobles, the noch ein Herr Obers, the et glas Araks, the tusen taks, the bottles, the bottles, the beautiful bottles of tequila, and the gourds, gourds, gourds, the millions of gourds of beautiful mescal...”

Malcolm Lowry book Under the Volcano

Source: Under the Volcano (1947), Ch. X (p. 292)

Beauty, Training, Sea, Dead

“We ought to be able to see more clearly just for what reason the mass-man is so easily turned into a fanatic. What I seem to myself to have grasped is this, that such permeability is due to the fact that man, that the individual, in order to belong to the mass, to be a mass-man, has had, as a preliminary, though without having had the least awareness of it, to divest himself of that substantial reality which was linked to his initial individuality or rather to the fact of his belonging to a small actual group. The incredibly sinister role of the press, the cinema, the radio, has consisted in passing that original reality through a pair of flattening rollers to substitute for it a superimposed pattern of ideas and images with no real roots in the deep being of the subject of this experiment.”

Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973) French philosopher, playwright, music critic and leading Christian existentialist

Source: Man Against Mass Society (1952), pp. 140-141

Idea, Reality

“Radio did not kill books and television did not kill radio or movies — what television did kill was cinema newsreel. TV does it much better because it can deliver it instantly. Who wants last week's news?”

Douglas Adams (1952–2001) English writer and humorist

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Future (2001)
Context: It's important to remember that the relationship between different media tends to be complementary. When new media arrive they don't necessarily replace or eradicate previous types. Though we should perhaps observe a half second silence for the eight-track. — There that's done. What usually happens is that older media have to shuffle about a bit to make space for the new one and its particular advantages. Radio did not kill books and television did not kill radio or movies — what television did kill was cinema newsreel. TV does it much better because it can deliver it instantly. Who wants last week's news?

Books

“Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second and you can hop from one place to another.”

Federico Fellini (1920–1993) Italian filmmaker

As quoted in Rolling Stone no. 421 (1984)
Context: Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second and you can hop from one place to another. It’s a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.

Dreams

“The cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake.”

Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) British filmmaker

Life

“There’s a lot of great writing, and characters, and stories being told in television nowadays. And much more than there used to be. The opportunities to tell stories, because of the opportunities to show content. And so it’s drawing actors from cinema, movie actors, actors to where there’s a lot of opportunities to where you can tell stories.”

Keanu Reeves (1964) Canadian actor, director, producer and musician

Drawing

“Watch the movie closely, and you’ll see how personal it is. Here’s a film in which cinema brings down the Nazi regime, metaphorically and literally. What could possibly be better than that? In this story, cinema changes the world, and I fucking love that idea!”

Quentin Tarantino (1963) American film director, screenwriter, producer, and actor

Source: Interview with The London Paper about Inglourious Basterds http://www.thelondonpaper.com/going-out/whats-new/quentin-tarantino-the-big-interview

Personality, World, Idea, Love

“Cinema is an old whore, like circus and variety, who knows how to give many kinds of pleasure. Besides, you can’t teach old fleas new dogs.”

Federico Fellini (1920–1993) Italian filmmaker

As quoted in in The Atlantic (December 1965)

Whore, Pleasure, Dogs

“On my way here I passed a local cinema and it turns out you were expecting me after all, for the billboards read: The Mummy Returns.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to Conservative Election Rally in Plymouth (22 May, 2001) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=108389 Post-Prime Ministerial

Way, Reading

“A paradox: The things you don’t need to live—books, art, cinema, wine, and so on—are the things you need to live.”

Matt Haig (1975) British writer

Source: The Humans

Books, Art, Wine

“Oh how Shakespeare would have loved cinema!”

Derek Jarman (1942–1994) British film director and artist

Source: Dancing Ledge

Love

“Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out”

Martin Scorsese (1942) American film director, screenwriter, producer and actor

“Cinema plus Psychoanalysis equals the Science of Ghosts.”

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) French philosopher (1930-2004)

Science

“The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires.”

André Bazin (1918–1958) French film critic

World

“After 100 years, films should be getting really complicated. The novel has been reborn about 400 times, but it's like cinema is stuck in the birth canal.”

Harmony Korine (1973) American film director and screenwriter

Birth, Time

“Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.”

Jean-Luc Godard (1930) French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic

Le Petit Soldat (film) (direction and screenplay, 1960).
[variation] Cinema is truth at twenty-four frames a second.

Truth, Time

“Is this really true? If we take an average day in the life of the average man we seem to see very little evidence of concern with the sciences and the arts. The average man gets up, goes to work, eats his meals, reads the newspapers, watches television, goes to the cinema, goes to bed, sleeps, wakes up, starts all over again. Unless we happen to be professional scientists, laboratory experiments and formulae have ceased to have any meaning for most of us; unless we happen to be poets or painters or musicians—or teachers of literature, painting, and music—the arts seem to us to be only the concern of schoolchildren. And yet people have said, and people still say, that the great glories of our civilisation are the scientists and artists. Ancient Greece is remembered because of mathematicians like Euclid and Pythagoras, because of poets like Homer and dramatists like Sophocles. In two thousand years all our generals and politicians may be forgotten, but Einstein and Madame Curie and Bernard Shaw and Stravinsky will keep the memory of our age alive.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, English Literature: A Survey for Students (1958, revised 1974)

Life, People, Age, Art

“We are talking here about the future: about the lives of people in the world without wars, without social oppression, without national inequality, without suppression of human’s abilities. In other word, it is about the future that we all call Communism. We strive to imagine (and show to the viewer) the reality of the 21st century - the life of future humans developing, solving their difficulties and problems but being already on the new levels of cognition and morality. But the foundation of that future is being laid now. We strive to represent the future people as vivid and free, in the unity of their joys and cares, poetry and prose of their life. We are in no way satisfied with the primitive and unconvincing image of "people of the future", which can be observed in some works of literature and cinema. At the same time, we consider our work to be polemical with the many books and movies produced by the bourgeois world, which tend to see the future in an apocalyptic or technocratic way, affirming a sort of disbelief in the strength and capabilities of a human being.”

Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986) Soviet and Russian film-maker, writer, film editor, film theorist, theatre and opera director

Letter to the central committee of the CPSU (Communist Party of Soviet Union) https://varjag2007su.livejournal.com/2591915.html?utm_source=fbsharing&utm_medium=social (20 October 1970).

Life, War, People, Books

“I live cinema. I chose the cinema when I was very young, sixteen years old, and from then on my memories virtually coincide with the history of the cinema … I'm not a director with a personal style, I am simply cinema. I have grown up with and through cinema; everything that I've had in the way of education has been through the cinema; insofar as I'm interested in images, in books, in music, it's all due to the cinema.”

Michael Powell (1905–1990) English film director

Midi-Minuit Fantastique, Oct. 1968

Books, Education, Music, Way

“Those who are susceptible to depravity do not need cinema or theatre to mislead them. There are numerous other factors which lead to immorality.”

Dadasaheb Phalke (1870–1944) Indian producer-director-screenwriter

In [Kaur, Raminder, Sinha, Ajay J, Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema Through A Transnational Lens, http://books.google.com/books?id=DGtNhQsLl7wC&pg=PA13, 13 July 2005, SAGE Publications, 978-0-7619-3321-2, 13]
Quote

“I think there's a side of me that's trying to compete with Lucas and Spielberg — I don't usually admit this publicly — because I tend to think that they only go so far, and their view of the world is rather simplistic. What I want to do is take whatever cinema is considered normal or successful at a particular time and play around with it — to use it as a way of luring audiences in.”

Terry Gilliam (1940) American-born British screenwriter, film director, animator, actor and member of the Monty Python comedy troupe

IMDB profile http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000416/bio#quotes

World, Way, Thinking, Time

“Cinema returns us to anima, religion of matter, which gives each thing its special divinity and sees gods in all things and beings. Cinema, heir of alchemy, last of an erotic science.”

Jim Morrison (1943–1971) lead singer of The Doors

The Lords and the New Creatures: Poems (1969), The Lords: Notes on Vision

God, Religion, Science

“Radio and cinema are daily playing a more and more important part, not only in the amusements of the twentieth-century man but also in the visible formation of his character.”

Georges Duhamel (1884–1966) French writer

Source: Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters] (1937), p. 20

Parting

“The only thing as bad as bad comedy is bad action. Bad Boys II has plenty of both. In fact, those two things are all it has, unless you count the small helping of bad drama. When it comes to this movie, the word "bad" initially seems highly appropriate. But Bad Boys II isn't just bad — it's a catastrophic violation of every aspect of cinema that I as a film critic hold dear. It seems to have been constructed with terms like "unwatchable" and "godawful" as its slogans. There are motion picture failures every year — the resumes of Hollywood players are littered with them. But, when something this big — a would-be blockbuster with recognizable names in the cast and crew — collapses in such a spectacular fashion, it's worth taking note. Think of how many starving children could have been fed with the money that was poured into [director] Michael Bay's latest sinkhole.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=293 of Bad Boys II (2002). Half-star reviews

Money, Children, Boy, Fashion

“(We are) the herpes of American cinema (because) we aren't going anywhere…”

Lloyd Kaufman (1945) American film director

Dork Shelf http://dorkshelf.com/2014/03/17/interview-lloyd-kaufman/ March 17, 2014 2014

“There are only two subjects that matters, one is sex and the other is death, what else we could talk about it. And most the cinema talks all the time about sex and death. And my cinema deals with sex and death so… ¿what's the problem?”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Interview with El Tiempo in Bogotá, Colombia. October 2008 http://www.eltiempo.com/media/produccion/greenaway/#4 Interviews

Death, Sex, Problem, Time

“The cinema is about other things than storytelling. What you remember from a good film -- and let's only talk about good films -- is not the story, but a particular and hopefully unique experience that is about atmosphere, ambience, performance, style, an emotional attitude, gestures, singular events, a particular audio-visual experience that does not rely on the story.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

"105 Years of Illustrated Text" in the Zoetrope All-Story, Vol. 5 No. 1.
105 Years of Illustrated Text

“You are known among us as a protector of the arts so you must remember that, of all the arts, for us the cinema is the most important.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Из всех искусств важнейшим для нас является кино.
Conversation with A.V.Lunacharsky (April 1919); also quoted in A Concise History of the Cinema: Before 1940 (1971) by Peter Cowie, p. 137, Complete Works of V.I.Lenin - 5th Edition - Vol. 44. - p. 579.
1910s

Art

“Perhaps, sadly, in the end, cinema is only a translator's art, and you know what they say about translators: traitors all.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

"105 Years of Illustrated Text" in the Zoetrope All-Story, Vol. 5 No. 1.
105 Years of Illustrated Text

Art

“These new means [in the modern film, 1920's] have given us a new mentality. We want to see clearly, we want to understand mechanisms, functions, motors, down to their subtlest details. Composite wholes are no longer enough for us – we want to feel and grasp the details of those wholes – and we realise that these details, these fragments, if seen in isolation, have a complete and particular life of their own... Close-ups in the cinema are a consecration of this new vision... A shoe as beautiful as a picture. A picture as beautiful as an X-ray machine.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Quote from: 'Actualités, Fernand Léger', in 'Varietés nr. 1', 1928, pp. 522-23
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1920's

Life, Beauty, Shoe, Feeling

“Voulagris asked me to find film funding for what was to be the last but unfinished film project of Elia Kazan, a personal friend of Voulgaris. The subject of the film was the immigration of the Kazan family from the beleaguered Greek minority communities under Turkish rule in Asia Minor to the safe haven of the USA where the Kazan family settled. I arranged a meeting between Elia Kazan and the London based film financier Frixos Constantini of Poseidon Films at the Grand Bretagne Hotel in Athens. What followed from this meeting is that Mr Constantini put Elia Kazan in touch with Martin Scorsese a personal friend of Mr Constantini and who also runs the production company Cappa films. And so it was that these two giants of US cinema met for the first time.”

Angelique Rockas South African actress and founder of Internationalist Theatre, London

Interview on Helenism .net (September 2011)

Family, Communication, Time, Personality

“In the 8th Grade I found I had a voice for opera, so I followed that path a little, but my impulse has always been an actor, I have always liked cinema, and let's face it, opera singers are just bad actors! I didn't want to translate myself in that direction. My heroes were people like Spencer Tracy, Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Marvin, Richardson, Caine, all those sort.”

Robert Davi (1953) American actor and jazz singer

People

“The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema.”

Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) British filmmaker

As quoted in Hitchcock (1967) by François Truffaut

“One of the most influential figures in Philippine cinema, Da King touched the lives of many people even before running for the presidency in 2004. A prolific and outstanding actor who won the most best actor awards from FAMAS, he would not need his acting skills in 2004--as his genuine concern for Filipinos of all walks of life was apparent as he went around the country to campaign against a government that was as crooked and menacing as the villains he faced in his movies.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2009, Statement: Remembering the King

Life, People, Country

“People here always want to grab a simple camera and a table light, get their cousin and shoot a movie. You can’t say that’s wrong, but it’s not cinema.”

Usama Mukwaya (1989) Ugandan screenwriter

Source: " camera, action: Uganda’s film scene http://www.bahighlife.com/articles/uganda-africa-s-film-capital/:Lights," at British Airways Highlife Magazine. 08 June 2015 written by Elizabeth Mcsheffrey

People, Light

“… this refined language of Indian modernity – an Indian language that was actually first used as a first language by a home-grown cosmopolitan elite – enough to say, with or without humour, ‘Ami tomake bhalobashi’ (‘I love you’) or ‘Apni kothai thhaken?’ (‘Where do you live?). These stray statements performed an incantatory ‘open sesame’ – into the bounded, charmed, small-scale world of ‘Bengaliness’. The ‘honorary’ Bengali might be myopic; might be an aficionado of art-house cinema; might be politically left wing; might have taste for lyric poetry; a tendency towards the autobiographical; an appetite for fish; or display none of these traits.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

citation needed
On Modernity

Love, World, Art, Home

“At the Everyman Cinema there is a season of Satyajit Ray. He watches the Apu trilogy on successive nights in a state of rapt absorption. In Apu's bitter, trapped mother, his engaging, feckless father he recognizes, with a pang of guilt, his own parents. But it is the music above all that grips him, dizzyingly complex interplays between drums and stringed instruments, long arias on the flute whose scale or mode — he does not know enough about music theory to be sure which — catches at his heart, sending him into a mood of sensual melancholy that last long after the film has ended.”

J.M. Coetzee (1940) South African writer

Youth (2002)

Music, Mood, Parent, Success

“The cinema is a place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art.”

Alain Badiou (1937) French writer and philosopher

From Considérations sur l'état actuel du cinéma (1999), translated as Philosophy and Cinema in Infinite Thought: truth and the return of philosophy. London: Continuum, 2003. ISBN 0826467245.

Art

“One day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jew swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you lived in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.”

Milton Mayer (1908–1986) American journalist

They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-35 (1955)

God, Hate, People, World

“All of my films constitute a reaction against mainstream cinema. Every serious form of art sees the receiver as a partner in the undertaking. In fact, that's one of the preconditions of humanistic thought. In cinema, this fact, which should be self-evident, has been overlooked and replaced by an emphasis on the commercial aspects of the medium.”

Michael Haneke (1942) Austrian film director and screenwriter

In response to the question, "You're well known for not wanting to impose interpretations on your films. Is this because you believe that audiences have become accustomed to being spoon-fed and told what to think?"
as interviewed by Richard Porton, "Collective Guilt and Individual Responsibility: An Interview with Michael Haneke," Cineaste, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Winter 2005), pp. 50-51

Art

“I believe that cinema picks up ideas from society and not the other way round.”

Amitabh Bachchan (1942) Indian actor

Reported in Cinema in India‎ (1991), p. 37.

Way, Idea

“A lot of times in cinema today the women are overly sentimental, so I constantly try to do the opposite. I like strident women.”

Keira Knightley (1985) British actress

Interview in Allure magazine (October 2007)

Women, Time

“Spanish for, Ask me to talk about Mexican cinema? is like requesting my autobiography, what i have not lived, what i have not seen, and in how many different ways have you seen me? without going any further tender as in "La gallina clueca", tearful as in "Cuando los hijos se van", sweet as in "El baisano Jalil", and energetic and dominant and at the same time affectionate as in "Los tres García" you have seen me very alive and very dead”

Sara García (1895–1980) Mexican actress

Pedirme a mi que hable del cine Mexicano? es como solicitar mi autobiografía, que no habré vivido, que no habré visto, y de cuantas maneras distintas me han visto a mi? sin ir mas lejos tierna como en "La gallina clueca", llorosa como en "Cuando los hijos se van", dulce como en "El baisano Jalil", y enérgica y dominante y al mismo tiempo cariñosa como en "Los tres García" me han visto muy viva y muy muerta. Sara answering when she was told to talk about Mexican cinema. Doña Sara Garcia habla del Cine Mexicano https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXlz7AznYxA

Way, Tear, Time, Dead

“So many roles, so many trends, so many kinds of cinema and so many stories…I have projected different images during different decades, voiced different concerns –sometimes as a daughter, sometimes as a wife and mother- but often I ask myself if things have really changed. I am not sure.”

Hema Malini (1948) Indian actress, dancer and politician

Page=1979
MOTHER MAIDEN MISTRESS

Change, Daughters

“Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.”

Werner Herzog (1942) German film director, producer, screenwriter, actor and opera director

Minnesota declaration (1999)

“…as the cinema shows us, they are much more accessible and, for that matter, much more wanton than our own women”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Time for a Tiger (1956)

Women

“Relating a person to the whole world: that is the meaning of cinema.”

Andrei Tarkovsky book Sculpting in Time

Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 66

World, Personality

“It's a great opportunity to be together apart from celebrating Indian cinema.”

Amitabh Bachchan (1942) Indian actor

Quotable quotes by Amitabh Bachchan.

“To amuse is not to teach. The object of teaching is to erect a framework of knowledge in a child's mind and gradually to bring the child as near as may be to the average level of intelligence. Later in life the facts taught by experience and new discoveries will add themselves to this framework. It is wrong to attempt to upset this natural order and to appeal to a child's mind by diverting it with the spectacle of modern life. Teaching by means of pictures, radio, and the cinema is in itself ineffective; these methods must not be used unless they involve (and this is possible) some effort or special enthusiasm. That which is learned without difficulty is soon forgotten, and for the same reason, oral instruction which does not require the pupil's personal participation is almost always rather useless. Eloquence slides in and out of young minds. To listen is not to work.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Naturally this does not apply to the teaching of modern languages.
Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Working

Life, Intelligence, Nature, Knowledge

“Bala is unique in many ways. The way he changed Tamil cinema's character was commendable. Awards are not just reflections on the cinematic qualities but also the ability to change other filmmakers.”

Bala (1966) Indian film director

Way, Change

“Cinema: An illusion that can only satisfactorily happen in the dark.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Rosa: The Death of a Composer

“The film has written and spoken dialogue in twenty-five languages-English, French, Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Latin, Hebrew, necrotic Egyptian … and it has written calligraphic text on paper, wood, and flesh, on flat and curved surfaces, vertically and horizontally, on both living and dead flesh, in neon, on screens, in projection, as sub-title, inter-title, and sur-title, as High Art and low art, as advertisement and banker's check and registration plate, on photograph, on blackboard, as letter correspondence, as photocopy facsimile, and spoken, chanted, and sung, with and without music … a mocking challenge. You want text? Cinema wants text? Cinema pretends to eschew text? Then we can give you text to mock that smug suggestion that cinema thinks it is pictures.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

"105 Years of Illustrated Text" in the Zoetrope All-Story, Vol. 5 No. 1.
105 Years of Illustrated Text

Art, Music, Thinking, Dead

“I went out the other night for the first time in ages, just because I'd been so busy. As I came out of the cinema, I ran down the street to get cigarettes, and 30 guys followed me with cameras and shouted at me. It's all so strange. It's not a life I really live or understand.”

Sienna Guillory (1975) British actress

Sienna Guillory Interview http://community.livejournal.com/siennagfan/20449.html#cutid1. Vanity Fair. December 2001.

Life, Age, Guy, Understanding

“You go through different arcs in your career. I think when I was younger, I was very into the performing side of the industry. I came to acting through that way, and then having gone to university and studied cinema studies and watching tons of films and understanding film theory and making a conscious choice of working with auteur director marks a new chapter in my development as an artist.”

Sarah Gadon (1987) Canadian actress

Way, Understanding, Thinking, Study

“I don't want to go to another roller-coaster ride of a movie. If I want that, I'll go to Magic Mountain. I'm really interested in the young directors that are doing different things in cinema. I think the movies people will hold onto are the Rushmores and the Being John Malkoviches. Those are the kind of films I want to do; that's what I'm passionate about.”

Zooey Deschanel (1980) American actress, musician, and singer-songwriter

Mean magazine http://www.fedge.net/~zdeschanel/articles/index.html (April 2001).

People, Mountain, Thinking, Passion

“But Hitler didn't strive for the annihilation of the Jews - he stressed that fact in public life and in the newspapers. Hitler merely said at the beginning that Jewish influence was too great, that of all the lawyers in Berlin, eighty percent were Jewish. Hitler thought that a small percentage of the people, the Jews, should not be allowed to control the theater, cinema, radio, et cetera.”

Franz von Papen (1879–1969) German chancellor

To Leon Goldensohn (30 March 1946). Quoted in "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004.
1940s

Life, People

“On the changing face of Indian cinema "At one time I wondered if I was doing the right films, today I know I have made the right choices. Indian cinema is changing, not step by step but by leaps. New blood is coming in, mindsets are changing and our exposure to the world is ever-increasing. I am glad these positive changes are happening when I am in the industry and not ten years from now.”

Preity Zinta (1975) film actress

Famous quotes

World, Change, Time

“I think it’s important for anyone who takes cinema seriously not to limit yourself to just optimistic or happy movies. I think that’s a problem. You’ve got to be willing to let the art of cinema take you into some darker places if you’re going to make full use of it. There are some people who shouldn’t watch horror films, and I’m all right with that. It’s not about putting something evil in the world. It’s about reckoning with evil. We don’t need any more evil in the world. We need a lot more reckoning with it.”

Scott Derrickson (1966) American screenwriter and film director

Interview: Filmmaker Scott Derrickson on Horror, Faith, Chesterton and His New Movie http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/interview-scott-derrickson (July 1, 2014)

People, World, Art, Problem

“I am capable of projecting myself into my little inner cinema... I free myself through a secret exit from the attempts to encircle my soul.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1971 - 1980, Comment on deviant Dali, les aveux inavouables de Salvador Dali, p. unknown

Secret, Soul

“It seems to me that the comprehension and enjoyment of the reader, as opposed to the viewer, is best served in printing this version rather than a slavish definitive transcription. Besides, what film is truly definitive? By the time you see the film it may very well be sub-titled, re-edited, shortened, even censored, and every film is viewed at the discretion of the projectionist, the cinema manager, the architect of the cinema, the comfort of your seat and the attention of your neighbour.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

From the Author's Note to the published script.
A Zed and Two Noughts

Time

“It is wrong to celebrate 100 years of cinema with just India. It is 100 years of cinema for Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka. All these places saw Indian cinema as it was produced in Lahore, Mumbai, Chennai — it went all the way. It is 100 years of cinema of what used to be my India, my Pakistan, my Afghanistan and my Sri Lanka. That’s how an artist looks at it and it’ll soon be my world. It is the governments and political interests that create borders.”

Kamal Haasan (1954) Indian actor

About celebrating 100 years of Indian cinema.
Kamal Hassan: A universal legend

World, Way

“Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater.”

Roman Polanski (1933) Polish-French film director, producer, writer, actor, and rapist

As quoted in Values of the Wise : Aspiring to "The Life of Value" (2004) by Jason Merchey, p. 330

Forgetting

“Without once compromising his artistic integrity, Fellini imagined a body of work -- as opposed to a suite of spin-offs, remakes, potboilers and so on -- where each production can be ranked as among the finest of experimental films ever to reach and influence an international public. There is a breathtaking scope to that achievement and great courage in the process: surmounting unbelievable resistance from producers, enemies of all kinds and jealous colleagues, career reversals, and poor health, Fellini held true to his own vision of cinema forged in the smithy of his soul.”

Damian Pettigrew Canadian filmmaker

On Fellini's artistic integrity, in Indiewire (April, 2003)

Health, Soul, Imagination, Courage

“Modern 3D cinema technology works by ensuring your left eye sees one image while your right sees another. But they could, presumably, issue one pair of specs comprising two left-eye lenses (for children to wear), and another with two right-eye lenses (for adults). This would make it possible for parents to take their offspring to the cinema and watch two entirely different films at the same time. So while the kiddywinks are being placated by an animated CGI doodle about rabbits entering the Winter Olympics or something, their parents will be bearing witness to some apocalyptically degrading pornography. The tricky thing would be making the soundtracks match. Those cartoon rabbits would have to spend a lot of time slapping their bellies and moaning.”

Charlie Brooker (1971) journalist, broadcaster and writer from England

The Guardian 15 February 2010. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/15/charlie-brooker-ebook-convert Guardian columns

Children, Parent, Winter, Time

“To minimize my guilt at going to the pictures — to call this wanton pursuit of an effete pleasure by another name — I needed movie companions as drunkards need drinking partners. If I entered a cinema alone, God might plunge his arm through the roof of the auditorium booming in a stereophonic voice, "And you, Crisp, what are you doing here?" I would never have dared reply, "I’m just enjoying myself, Lord." I remembered too well what happened to Mr and Mrs Adam. A commissionaire with a flaming sword came and asked them to leave.”

Quentin Crisp book The Naked Civil Servant

Source: The Naked Civil Servant (1968), Ch. 27

God, Pleasure, Drink

“Art is not like other culture because its success is not made by its audience. The public fill concert halls and cinemas everyday, we read novels by the millions, and buy records by the billions. 'We the people' affect the making and quality of most of our culture, but not our art.”

Banksy pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, and painter

Wall and Piece (2007)

People, Art, Reading, Success

“Cinema is dead. I can give you a date - it died on the 31st of September, 1983, when the zapper or the remote control was introduced to the livings rooms of the world. Bang! That's the end.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

NoTV Interview with Peter Greenaway on VJ-ing http://www.petergreenaway.info/content/view/125/68/ Interviews

World, Dead

“The Fairie Queene makes cinema out of the west's primary principle: to see is to know; to know is to control. The Spenserian eye cuts, wounds, rapes.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 173

“The principle behind the cinema, like that behind all the arts, rests on a choice. It is, in Camus' words, "the revolt of the artist against the real."
If one holds to this principle, what difference can it make by what means reality is revealed? Whether the author of a film seizes on the real in a novel, in a newspaper story or in his own imagination, what counts is the way he isolates it, stylizes it, makes it his own.”

Michelangelo Antonioni (1912–2007) Italian film director and screenwriter

Cahiers du Cinema (1960)

Art, Way, Imagination, Reality

“[Mi manca] il calore delle persone [italiane]: c’è una grande facilità nella comunicazione, mentre i francesi non sono così estroversi. D’altra parte, in Francia c’è una grande vivacità nel mondo del cinema: si producono almeno duecento film all’anno e le occasioni di lavoro sono moltissime. Purtroppo non c’è paragone col cinema italiano.”

Alessandra Martines (1963) Italian dancer and actor

Parting, Personality

“If Coca-Cola accidentally created 100 million cans of faulty Coke, you know for sure the entire 100 million cans would be dropped in the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean, without a second thought and irrespective of what that did to the year's profits. What do we do with a crappy movie? We double its advertising budget and hope for a big opening weekend. What have we done for the audience as they walk out of the cinema? We've alienated them. We've sold audiences a piece of junk; we just took twelve dollars away from a couple and we think we've done ourselves no long-term damage.”

David Puttnam (1941) British film producer

GQ magazine, April 1987

Hope, Thinking

“It seems to me that dominant cinema seems to require an empathy or a sympathy between the film and the audience which is basically to do with the manipulation of the emotions and it seems to me again -- and this is a very subjective position -- that most cinema seems to trivialise the emotions, sentimentalising or romanticising them.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

From an interview in Art and Design, no. 49
Interviews

“As absurd as it might sound, there's a strange synergy between very bad movies and very good ones. That's because films on either extreme of the quality scale have the ability to burrow deep into the subconscious, with unpredictable and occasionally remarkable results. Great works of art can cause euphoria, touch a deep emotional chord, or, in rare cases, affect fundamental changes in a person's outlook on life. Conversely, viewing unwatchable tripe can be damaging, possibly resulting in psychotic episodes, an appreciation of '70s fashion, or leaping to the defense of Pauly Shore. There's something almost profound about enduring a horrifically inept piece of cinema, and Coyote Ugly, living up to every letter in its name, offers the opportunity for such an experience.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=1611 of Coyote Ugly (2000). One-star reviews

Life, Art, Fashion, Change

“Goebbels…now made an applauded entrance. He was no man to improvise a word or two of greeting; he had typewritten sheets…. He spoke of the cinema as the popular voice of the state…those products, themselves a means of cleansing the world film market through their purity and excellence of the regrettable decadent ordures excreted by international Jewry….”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Earthly Powers (1980)

World

“A literary work can only be received through symbols, through concepts — for that is what words are; but cinema, like music, allows for utterly direct, emotional, sensuous perception of the work.”

Andrei Tarkovsky book Sculpting in Time

Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 176

Music

“It's all been a bad joke that just ran out of control. I got into food for fun but the business got a mind of its own. Now — my good Lord — look where it has gotten me. My products are on supermarket shelves, in cinemas, in the theater. And they say show business is odd.”

Paul Newman (1925–2008) American actor and film director

Quoted in "Saint Paul," interview with John Aldridge, The Guardian (2005-04-10)

Food, Business

“Catholic priests know where the shoe pinches. But their day is done, and they know it. They are far too intelligent not to see that, and to enter upon a hopeless battle. But if they do, I shall certainly not make martyrs of them. We shall brand them as ordinary criminals. I shall tear the mask of honesty from their faces. And if that is not enough, I shall make them appear ridiculous and contemptible. I shall order films to be made about them. We shall show the history of the monks on the cinema. Let the whole mass of nonsense, selfishness, repression and deceit be revealed: how they drained the money out of the country, how they haggled with the Jews for the world, how they committed incest.”

Hermann Rauschning (1887–1982) German politician

Source: The Voice of Destruction (1940), pp. 52-53

Money, World, Shoe, History

“I suppose my mega heroes are the films of Michael Powell and Sam Peckinpah. I would have loved to have looked over their shoulder. I’m a bit of a cinephile. I love cinema. It’s an amazing medium. I can go and watch anything from very, very arty films to huge Hollywood spectaculars and everything in between.”

Olly Blackburn Film director and screenwriter

[IndieLondon, Donkey Punch - Olly Blackburn interview, http://www.indielondon.co.uk/Film-Review/donkey-punch-olly-blackburn-interview, www.indielondon.co.uk, 23 February 2012, 2008]

Love

“If a chemical drug like Viagra is accepted by society and by the world to ignite desire, then what is the problem with my audio-visual drug called cinema which ignites desire? Both are basically doing the same thing!”

Mallika Sherawat (1976) Indian actress

Cine Blitz magazine (May 2006)

World, Problem

“It's its own form of cinema, it's its own entity. I think Chekhov would like Before Sunset because it's all about nuance. Any decent screen-writing school would throw that script out. There's no beginning, middle and end, it's completely fluid, just chasing the nuance of life, and kind of believing whatever God is lives in this kind of energy that flows between all of us. I kind of live for that, for that chance that you might get another opportunity to be a part of something like that.”

Ethan Hawke (1970) American actor and writer

The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/may/16/ethan-hawke-cherry-orchard-old-vic-mendes (2009-05-16) 2005&ndash;2009

Life, God, School, Thinking

“Seventy years ago there were men like D. W. Griffith and seventy years later - now - there are not many men like Martin Scorsese. But so long as there is one there will be others, and the art of the cinema will survive.”

Michael Powell (1905–1990) English film director

Attributed

Men, Art

“These [RAF] airmen were my fellow countrymen, and I was proud to be of their race. I knew the essential decency which was the bedrock of their character, their humour, stubbornness, and self-reliance. I knew that if called upon they could adapt themselves to any kind of life, in the desert, in the jungle, in mountains or on the sea, and that in many respects no race in the world was their equal. But the things that interested them bored me. They belonged to an age of machines; they were fascinated by cars and aeroplanes, and found their relaxation in the cinema and the wireless. I knew that I stood apart from them and would never find contentment among them, whereas I could find it among the Bedu, although I should never be one of them.”

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p.168.

Life, Age, World, Cars

“… the cinema and the radio and the effect they have had in weakening the impulse to spiritual effort”

Georges Duhamel (1884–1966) French writer

Source: Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters] (1937), p. 24

Effort

“In those days the heroes and heroines had to play characters, which were essentially good. Now there is no such compulsion. And it is a good thing. I like the choices Vidya Balan has made. People say mine was the golden age of cinema. I think we are on the threshold of another golden period.”

Waheeda Rehman (1938) Indian actress

Quote, Queen of hearts

People, Age, Thinking

“I am not a nationalist, I am a Wolfe Tone Republican. In pursuit of that ideal I have been forced to continually shift positions, much like a man in a cinema who keeps changing his seat, but only so he can get a clean view of the same film. And the title of the film, of which I never tire, is The Future Irish Republic.”

Eoghan Harris (1943) Irish journalist

Contrary to opinion, I am politically consistent, Eoghan Harris, Irish Independent http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/contrary-to-opinion-i-am-politically-consistent-1056982.html,

Wolf, Change, Future

“Americans don't understand what metaphor in cinema is about. They're extremely good at making straightforward, linear narrative movies, which entertain superbly. But they very rarely do anything else.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

In an interview in Film Comment, May/June 1990
Interviews

Understanding

“War is men killing each other, often at close quarters, and doing their damnedest to stay alive. And until you have done that, against a capable enemy, you don't have any idea of what it's like, honestly. Mr Spielberg may splash the screen with gore, and publicists may declare: "You are there!", but you're not. You're snug in a cinema watching a load of crap performed by actors. Hand-to-hand fighting is different, and it's no place for a woman.”

George MacDonald Fraser (1925–2008) English-born author of Scottish descent

It's no place for anyone, including me, but for a woman least of all.
The Defeat of the British Army. p. 182.
The Light's On At Signpost (2002)

Men, War, Idea, Fight