Quotes about cinema

You should look straight at a film that's the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates.

A visit to a cinema is a little outing in itself. It breaks the monotony of an afternoon or evening; it gives a change from the surroundings of home, however pleasant.

That's what I like about film-it can be bizarre, classic, normal, romantic. Cinema is to me the most versatile thing.

American cinema tends to express a patriotic relationship to national identity on a regular basis.

Don't wake me for the end of the world unless it has very good special effects.

Gene [Siskel] often mentioned something François Truffaut once told him: the most beautiful sight in a movie theater is to walk down to the front, turn around, and look at the light from the screen reflected on the upturned faces of the members of the audience.

Usually when you see females in movies, they feel like they have these metallic structures around them, they are caged by male energy.

He sank back into his black-and-white world, his immobile world of inanimate drawings that had been granted the secret of motion, his death-world with its hidden gift of life. But that life was a deeply ambiguous life, a conjurer's trick, a crafty illusion based on an accidental property of the retina, which retained an image for a fraction of a second after the image was no longer present. On this frail fact was erected the entire structure of the cinema, that colossal confidence game. The anim

I look at the world and I see absurdity all around me. People do strange things constantly, to the point that, for the most part, we manage not to see it.

Reality is not art, but a realist art is one that can create an integral aesthetic of reality.

There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life.

Often interfaces are assumed to be synonymous with media itself. But what would it mean to say that “interface” and “media” are two names for the same thing? The answer is found in the remediation or layer model of media, broached already in the introduction, wherein media are essentially nothing but formal containers housing other pieces of media. This is a claim most clearly elaborated on the opening pages of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. McLuhan liked to articulate this claim in ter

I wouldn’t be a good wife, but I would be a wife in a way that was cinematically compelling.

Use filmmaking to eliminate racism – use to it terminate misogyny – use it to destroy homophobia and all other primitiveness.

The art of filmmaking is the most influential form of art that has ever existed throughout the history of human artistic endeavors.

Filmmaking has the power to fortify the feeble, unify the divided, raise the abandoned and inspire the ignorant.

A movie is not a movie, it is a potential nuclear furnace of inspiration, courage and conscience.

Make movies my friend – make nice, inspiring and bold movies that will penetrate the darkest corners of the human mind and illuminate the soul.

Give people films, they will forget after a few weeks, but give people ideas, they will assimilate them into their consciousness.

Make films that purify the soul with the flow of rational, vigorous and compassionate thinking.

Use filmmaking for a greater purpose, than to just entertain some drowsy minds. Wake the whole world up with your movies. It has been sleeping for long. Its eternal sleep has become its darkest nemesis. Now is the time to wake it up.

Take the clapper and become the alarm that the world so desperately needs.

Whatever genre you deem suitable for your taste – romance, comedy, action, mystery, sci-fi or anything else, make sure it has the plain everyday human kindness.

Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire.

That was horrible. Horrible. That poor little guy."Pex was unrepentant. "Yeah, well, he asked for it. Calling us ... all those things."But---buried alive! That's like in that horror movie. Y'know -- the one with all the horror."I think I saw that one. With all the words going up on the screen at the end?"Yeah, that was it. Tell you the truth, those words kinda ruined it for me.

...we’re not even really hiking,more like meandering in cinematic light.

The angel said, "I like black-and-white films more than color because they're more artificial. You have to work harder to overcome your disbelief. It's sort of like prayer.

No other art can compare with cinema in the force, precision, and starkness with which it conveys awareness of facts and aesthetic structures existing and changing within time.

A sex worker deserves a billion times more respect, than the mystical fraudsters of the society, such as astrologers, psychics and tarot card readers.

The Government set the stage economically by informing everyone that we were in a depression period, with very pointed allusions to the 1930s. The period just prior to our last 'good' war. ... Boiled down, our objective was to make killing and military life seem like adventurous fun, so for our inspiration we went back to the Thirties as well. It was pure serendipity. Inside one of the Scripter offices there was an old copy of Doc Smith's first LENSMAN space opera. It turned out that audiences i

In childhood we inhabit a world of wonderful contrasts that later we often come to see as bizarre and do our best to rearrange, with everything in its 'proper' place. Unusual juxtapositions we label surrealistic. Yet what is surrealism but a second childhood with Freudian overtones which we have to be re-educated to enjoy? -- part of the tragedy of growing up

A movie that gets closer to the life's reality of the society finds always more words of mouth publicity in entirety.

There either is or is not, that’s the way things are. The colour of the day. The way it felt to be a child. The saltwater on your sunburnt legs. Sometimes the water is yellow, sometimes it’s red. But what colour it may be in memory, depends on the day. I’m not going to tell you the story the way it happened. I’m going to tell it the way I remember it.— Great Expectations (1998) directed by Alfonso Cuarón

Dying is not a solution.. I want to live with You..!

I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made film were magicians.

Everybody has something that chews them up and, for me, that thing was always loneliness. The cinema has the power to make you not feel lonely, even when you are.

Don't be a zombie for anyone, if your oppressor likes zombies, cinemas are not located in mars.

I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.

MINISTER: All he has done is to find some means of bewitching the intelligence. He has only induced a radical suspension of disbelief. As in the early days of the cinema, all the citizens are jumping through the screen to lay their hands on the naked lady in the bathtub!AMBASSADOR: And yet, in fact, their fingers touch flesh.MINISTER: They believe they do. Yet all they touch is substantial shadow.AMBASSADOR: And what a beautiful definition of flesh! You know I am only substantial shadow, Ministe

Merleau-Ponty's painting inhabits the same rhetoric as early cinema: it makes the invisible visible, or rather it makes visibility visible; it forms from the thresholds of the visible and invisible world, an order, mode, or aesthetic of visuality. Not only of the small or fast, but of visibility as such. The visuality of the visible and the invisible is found in the mixture of the body and its world, of your body and your world, all your worlds, all your bodies in this world and all those others

The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief—call it what you will—than any book ever written; it has emptied more churches than all the counterattractions of cinema, motor bicycle and golf course.

The projector's beam lay warm on Walt's neck, and he knew they'd all been plucked from danger and love, from another time, another place, and set back into this dark, sticky-floored theater, in the heart of nothing much that mattered.

Sometimes, watching a movie is a bit like being raped.

My dreams kind of came through when I went to see the cinema.

Cinema is a language. It can say things—big, abstract things. And I love that about it. I’m not always good with words. Some people are poets and have a beautiful way of saying things with words. But cinema is its own language. And with it you can say so many things, because you’ve got time and sequences. You’ve got dialogue. You’ve got music. You’ve got sound effects. You have so many tools. And you can express a feeling and a thought that can’t be conveyed any other way. Its a magical medium.

If California is a state of mind, Hollywood is where you take its temperature. There is a peculiar sense in which this city existing mainly on film and tape is our national capital, alas, and not just the capital of California. It's the place where our children learn how and what to dream and where everything happens just before, or just after, it happens to us.

Outside the cinema I had not yet learned to live, but within it I had most certainly learned to die. I could die for you in every way known to man, and in a few ways known only to scriptwriters. I could see now that provided that I remained fit, the future held many more deaths yet. I could only hope that they would serve some purpose, and that perhaps a reputation may come in the same way as a coral formation, which is made up of a deposit of countless tiny corpses.

People see a Macbeth film. They imagine they have seen Macbeth, and don't want to see it again; so when your Mr. Hackett or somebody comes round to act the play, he finds the house empty. That is what has happened to dozens of good plays whose authors have allowed them to be filmed. It shall not happen to mine if I can help it.

[Cinema]… obeys the laws of the mind rather than those of the outer world.

For such an advanced civilization as ours to be without images that are adequate to it is as serious a defect as being without memory.

Hey, I got an idea, let’s go to the movies. I wanna go to the movies, I want to take you all to the movies. Let’s go and experience the art of the cinema. Let’s begin with the Scream Of Fear, and we are going to haunt us for the rest of our lives. And then let’s go see The Great Escape, and spend our summer jumping our bikes, just like Steve McQueen over barb wire. And then let’s catch The Seven Samurai for some reason on PBS, and we’ll feel like we speak Japanese because we can read the subtitl

Far from being a pack of baying butchers,critics sometimes have a perverse habit of tending to the sick and wounded on the cinematic field of battle, rushing in where angels fear to tread, even when the patient is clearly without a pulse.

In all of its operations, cinema ceaselessly strives, and fails, to make present a world hopelessly beyond grasp. For this reason cinema is, in its very nature, a nihilistic medium.

The longing for improvement and the fear of waste and worse - it is a pattern still with us, and maybe it speaks to the medium's essential marriage of light and dark, or as Mary Pickford put it in her autobiography (published in 1955), Sunshine and Shadow. Light and dark were the elements of film, and they had their chemistry in film's emulsion. They had a moral meaning, too. But not everyone appreciated that prospect, or credited how it might make your fortune.

Just watch any husband arguing with his wife about something insignificant; listen to what they say and watch how their residual emotions manifest when the fight is over. It’s so formulaic and unsurprising that you wouldn’t dare re-create it in a movie. All the critics would mock it. They’d all say the screenwriter was a hack who didn’t even try. This is why movies have less value than we like to pretend — movies can’t show reality, because honest depictions of reality offend intelligent people.

In this business, until you're known as a monster, you're not a star

Her first really great role, the one that cemented the “Jean Arthur character,” was as the wisecracking big-city reporter who eventually melts for country rube Gary Cooper in Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936). It was the first of three terrific films for Capra: Jean played the down-to-earth daughter of an annoyingly wacky family in Capra’s rendition of Kaufman and Hart’s You Can’t Take It With You (1938), and she was another hard-boiled city gal won over by a starry-eyed yokel in Mr. S

Stahl trailed him upstairs, across a mezzanine, and out into the darkness of the sloping balcony. Tom gave the aisle his torch so his guest could see. On the screen below a woman's head was wavering, two or three times larger than life. A metallic voice clanged out, echoing sepulchrally all over the house, like a modern Delphic Oracle. 'Go back, go back!' she said. 'This is no place for you!'Her big luminous eyes seemed to be looking right at Lew Stahl as she spoke. Her finger came out and point

I submit that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch's Laura's muddy bothness is that it required of us an empathetic confrontation with the exact same muddy bothness in ourselves and our intimates that makes the real world of moral selves so tense and uncomfortable, a bothness we go to the movies to get a couple hours' fucking relief from.

For the casual viewer, Kurosawa’s films can be an exercise in endurance.

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

When less than everything has been said about a subject, you can still think on further. The alternative is for the audience to be presented with a final deduction (...) no effort on their part.What can it mean to them when they have not shared with the author the misery and joy of bringing an image into being?

Am I in the wrong place here, or in the wrong life? Did I not recognize, as I sat in a train that raced past a station and did not stop, that I was on the wrong train, and did I not learn from the conductor that the train would not stop at the next station, either, a hundred kilometers away, and did he not also admit to me, whispering with his hand shielding his mouth, that the train would not stop again at all?

R means under 18 accompanied by an adult. Therefore all corporately funded films in the US must be made with the concept that those under the age of 18 are able to view the film. This means all corporately funded films in the US are made for the eyes of children.

Avoid the tyranny of the reasonable voice...it will guarantee a complacency of never trying anything adventurous...

In my experience there are billions of dollars available for pieces of shit. As soon as the material distinguishes itself by something interesting, financing becomes a problem.

Hollywood's Studio Era was part of a Golden Age because it didn't need profanity (unlike reality-television today)

The body lay outside an abandoned, boarded-up theater. The theater had started as a first-run movie house, many years back when the neighborhood had still been fashionable. As the neighborhood began rotting, the theater began showing second-run films, and then old movies, and finally foreign-language films.

[Luchino] Visconti came from the Milanese branch of one of Europe’s oldest families, whose roots can be traced back to the early 13th century. He might have appeared as a character in one of his own films about the aristocracy, such as Senso or The Leopard – that’s the life he was born into. But at a certain point in the 1930s, his passion for theatre, opera and the cinema set him on a radically different path.(...)He has often been referred to as a great political artist, but that’s too limitin

Dreams rise in the darkness and catch fire from the mirage of moving light. What happens on the screen isn't quite real; it leaves open a vague cloudy space for the poor, for dreams and the dead. Hurry hurry, cram yourself full of dreams to carry you through the life that's waiting for you outside, when you leave here, to help you last a few days more in that nightmare of things and people. Among the dreams, choose the ones most likely to warm your soul.

Filmmaking isn’t if you can just strap on a camera onto an actor, and steadicam, and point it at their face, and follow them through the movie, that is not what moviemaking is, that is not what it’s about. It’s not just about getting a performance. It’s also about the psychology of the cinematic moment, and the psychology of the presentation of that, of that window.

It’s hard to explain the fun to be found in seeing the right kind of bad movie.

Don't you go to the movies?""Mostly just to eat popcorn in the dark.

‏@BretEastonEllis 31 MarAfter watching the delirious Room 237 I realized that the worst thing happening to movies was the empowerment of the viewer via technology.

In New York I'd go to the movies three or four times a week. Here I've upped it to six or seven, mainly because I'm too lazy to do anything else. Fortunately, going to the movies seems to suddenly qualify as an intellectual accomplishment, on a par with reading a book or devoting time to serious thought. It's not that the movies have gotten any more strenuous, it's just that a lot of people are as lazy as I am, and together we've agreed to lower the bar.

We didn't need sex. We had Tyrone Power.

How speak about an art which no one recognizes as an art? I know that a great deal has already been written about the "art of the cinema". One can read about it most every day in the newspapers & the magazines. But it is not the art of the cinema which you will find discussed therein--it is rather dire, botched embryo as it now stands revealed before our eyes, the still-birth which was mangled in the womb by the obstetricians of art.

Moving provides meaning for our humble (if still vicious) life of four-dimensional existence. Four-dimensional existence makes the frightening fox hunt into an entertainment, or war into a pastime or a sport. Even when evil is dull and monotonous, there tends to be a lot of movement, action and entertainment involved. Maybe movies are evil.

To get noticed, I had to take my films in a space which was much more democratic in terms of cinema - the international film festivals.

I foresee no possibility of venturing into themes showing a closer view of reality for a long time to come. The public itself will not have it. What it wants is a gun and a girl.

That spring was the start of everything, for me. Before then, I might have been half-asleep, drifting through life.

All you need for a movie is a gun and a cat.

Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing

Some stories, some visions, demand celluloid film and what it can deliver.

To Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider... To all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to all men who act and become women, to all the people who want to be mothers. To my mother. - Dedication, Todo Sobre Mi Madre

Well, as I was saying, it costs a lot to be authentic, madam. And one can't be stingy with these things, because you are more authentic the more you resemble what you've dreamed you are. - Agrado from "Todo Sobre Mi Madre

Franklin knew that the truth lay with the winter night: the world was silent and black-and-white.

I am easily moved to tears and rarely survive a visit to the cinema without shedding them, racked, as I am, by the most perfunctory, meretricious or even callously sentimental attempts at poignancy (something about the exterior of the human face, so vast and palpable, with the eyes and the lips: it is all writ too large for me, too immediate for me.)

Oh how Shakespeare would have loved cinema!

A Film has the potential to kindle such a spark of inspiration in an individual that it can alter the course of human progress.

Entertain, but also, give the viewer something to think about.

Healthy entertainment does not evoke raw emotions in the mind of a viewer only to make them wreak havoc, rather it guides those emotions in a healthy direction.

Healthy entertainment is a beautiful blend of stimuli that can connect with the viewer at a sentimental level, then sow the seeds of a certain idea or feed the mind with inspiration and courage. In short, healthy entertainment does not evoke raw emotions in the mind of a viewer only to make them wreak havoc, rather it guides those emotions in a healthy direction. This leads to not only an entertained viewer, but also an inspired soul. And that should be the purpose of film-making, and indeed the

In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call 'photographs of people talking.' When we tell a story in cinema we should resort to dialogue only when it's impossible to do otherwise. I always try to tell a story in the cinematic way, through a succession of shots and bits of film in between.

The cinema is an invention without any future.

But this is the ultimate contradiction of cinema. It's a medium BORN of technology, AFRAID of technology and evolving towards the future BECAUSE OF technology.

Today cinema can place all its talent, all its technology in the service of reanimating what it itself contributed to liquidating. It only resurrects ghosts, and it itself is lost therein.

Bette Davis lived long enough to hear the Kim Carnes song, 'Bette Davis Eyes'. The lyrics to that song were not very interesting. But the fact of the song was the proof of an acknowledgement that in the twentieth century we lived through an age of immense romantic personalities larger than life, yet models for it, too - for good or ill. Like twin moons, promising a struggle and an embrace, the Davis eyes would survive her - and us. Kim Carnes has hardly had a consistent career, but that one song

An artist is a provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one. It’s this in-between that I’m calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one. That is the realm of the artist.