Today we can say that at last the director writes the film. The image--its plastic composition and the way it is set in time, because it is founded on a much higher degree of realism--has at its disposal more means of manipulating reality and of modifying it from within. The film-maker is no longer the competitor of the painter and the playwright, he is, at last the equal of the novelist

All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence. Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an inseparable part of their beauty.

All films are born free and equal.

[The photograph] is the object itself... [It] shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model.

The 'Western' is the only genre whose origins are almost identical with those of the cinema itself.

Photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness.

Every image is to be seen as an object and every object as an image.