Quotes About Cinema

Most cinema is not about images but text. Why on earth have we based cinema on text? Why can't we break that umbilical cord? Why do we have to pollute cinema?

French cinema has always been very interesting, and it's still very powerful. I think it goes to show that it's great to still have a cinema that doesn't try to emulate, for example, American cinema.

I think that's true of all cinema, that's why cinema is the great humanistic art form. Whatever the film is, it doesn't matter what the film is about, or even whether it's a narrative or figurative film at all, it's an invitation to step into somebody else's shoes. Even if it's the filmmaker's shoes filming a landscape, you go into somebody else's shoes and you look out of their lens, you look out of their eyes and their imagination. That's what going to the pictures is all about.

The breakdown of the modern movement led to what later became known as postmodern-whatever the hell that means-referring to the mixture of people and backgrounds that became a common thing among artists in America. Many of the great artists in America, for example, came from Jewish families and backgrounds that fled all the way from Russia. It's remarkable, the great masters of American art and cinema who were coming from old roots in little villages there. And then Hollywood, and the haunting, hypnotic impact that American Cinema had throughout the world . . .

The structure of my novels has nothing to do with the narrative mode of cinema. My novels would be very difficult to film without ruining them completely. I think this is the area where writers need to place ourselves: from a position of absolute modernity and contemporaneity, creating a culture of objects which cinema cannot.

If you say one gets influenced watching a character, I think its foolish. Cinema reflects society; society rarely reflects cinema.

If there's one thing that can save the novel, it is to make it independent of cinema, to narrate in a way that cinema can never narrate, using to its benefit those particular characteristics which belong to writing.

I look at the human sciences as poetic sciences in which there is no objectivity, and I see film as not being objective, and cinema verite as a cinema of lies that depends on the art of telling yourself lies. If you’re a good storyteller then the lie is more true than reality, and if you’re a bad one, the truth is worse than a half lie.

I'm not hoping to see that day but I know that my cinema will reach Filipinos. I know that they will embrace it one day. It will happen. I'm very sure of that. I still have faith in cinema. I still believe it can affect change.

I was always intrigued with European cinema, and hated most American cinema. I didn't like the one, two, three - boom! style, with a neat and tidy ending. That was never my scene.

I'm not coming from film school, I learned cinema in the cinema watching films.

I hate political films that have one particular message that they're trying to convey. I think propaganda is very dangerous, and it's very easy for anything to slip into it. I also think that propaganda is something that defies the identity of cinema. I hate propaganda in cinema, even if it was promoting the political stance that I myself am allied with. I always say that the responsibility of a film is first and foremost: To be a film. It's not a manifesto, it's not an op-ed.

Let us start with the title of War and Cinema. The important part of the title is not War and Cinema.

American commercial cinema has long been dominated by men, but I don’t think there has ever been another time when women have been as underrepresented on screen as they are now. The biggest problem isn’t genuinely independent cinema, where lower budgets mean more opportunities for women in front of and behind the camera. The problem is the six major studios that dominate the box office, the entertainment chatter and the popular imagination. Their refusal to hire more female directors is immoral, maybe illegal, and has helped create and sustain a representational ghetto for women.

There's a difference between watching a film and watching a bit of cinema and enjoying a film as a piece of cinema.

We see ourselves as filmmakers and as storytellers. We want to make films that move people emotionally. The most effective thing that cinema can do is get into people's hearts and have them see a new perspective on life - step inside someone else's shoes and mind for 90 minutes and experience the world in that way.

Cinema is haute couture or, if that's a little too ambitious, at least it should approach that standard. Pathe Plus is just part of the business. We have to improve all our cinemas. In France, we're not looking to open many more screens, but rather to raise the standards of our current cinemas.

Cinema has reached a dead end.

There were Hollywood movies and then there were those aggressively anti-narrative films that they showed at the Collective for Living Cinema.

The beauty of life are women, no one loves them as much as me. I adore them all, the ugly, the beautiful, the cold, the sexy and especially those that are from cinema material, shadow and light.

It's true that there are younger people making films, and there are different kinds of films. This has created some attention in what's coming out of Greece, and people like to find a way to name this new ethnic cinema. It's not like there's a movement, or a common philosophy in making these films. They're just things that happened, and now people are paying attention to it.

I'm at peace with myself. My film just may please audiences. At any rate, it's already a great prize to be part of just 16 films among all of the world cinema out there. I'm tranquil and satisfied.

I'm a professional and I'll do anything - a poetry reading, television, cinema, anything that allows me to act.

I'm curious and you know, I really think cinema is strong medium that allows you to go to so many different mental countries, not just geographical countries. As far as it allows me to express something of my own truth, it's fine for me. I can go to the moon.

The idea that boxing lends itself to cinema so well is because it's usually a morality play - good against evil, insecurity and triumph, fear strikes out, so the audience can really get drawn into the drama of it. Also, it was sensual and very primal. I think subliminaly we do two things - life is a fight, life is a struggle and we understand that from our early, early, early ancestors, and life is a race.

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

Cinema is dominated by stars you like from the get go.

Music is one of the important things for me in cinema.

Cinema plus Psychoanalysis equals the Science of Ghosts.

I would argue that something dark is lurking between the sexes, and that it is seeping out into cinema.

The first 50 years of the cinema were absolutely great years. Original minds were at work establishing the ways to tell a story. And what is happening now is a copying, a pastiche-ing of what was done by great men.

To the documentary director the appearance of things and people is only superficial. It is the meaning behind the thing and the significance underlying the person that occupy his attention... Documentary approach to cinema differs from that of story-film not in its disregard for craftsman-ship, but in the purpose to which that craftsmanship is put. Documentary is a trade just as carpentry or pot-making. The pot-maker makes pots, and the documentarian documentaries.

People associate me with a time when movies were pleasant, when women wore pretty dresses in films and you heard beautiful music. I always love it when people write me and and say 'I was having a rotten time, and I walked into a cinema and saw one of your movies, and it made such a difference.'

A book is a book, but a movie is a movie. The more faithful you are, the more you'll come up with Harry Potter #1 and #2, which are like filmed books on tape. They're so petrified of turning off the readers that they make no concessions to the fact that they're trying to make a piece of cinema.

I do feel like my music, in some weird way, is probably better suited for cinema than for anything else - I can't really explain, other than I think that music has been mostly inspired often by soundtracks.

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

I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology.... Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called 'education.' Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part.... It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment.

Oh how Shakespeare would have loved cinema!

I really wanted to take the viewer to the 'here and now' regarding the exterminations, and communicate directly in a visceral way. The art of cinema can communicate that way, and that's why I wanted to do it that way.

Sometimes I go to the cinema and I see a movie where the directors or the filmmakers are telling me what to think, what to feel. They are giving me all the answers, and I'm like, "What am I doing here?" I try to have an active audience that are thinking and feeling for themselves.

So what'll happen is there'll be some very good cinema experiences are going to see 3D where you have to pay more. And there'll be some bad experiences of going to see movies in 3D. And I just hope that this kind of gold rush mentality doesn't kill what could actually be something that really, really benefits the industry.

I really have problems with horror movies. I don't watch them. It's a feeling I don't want to have in cinema. I'm too reactive. It's too draining to watch that kind of movie.

I think that is what you want to do as a cinemagoer - to experience something fully. Some things don't let you experience them fully. It may be your own preordained prejudice where you can't experience them fully. But when you come out of the cinema having felt, thought, and experienced your way through two hours, that is a really cool thing.

I would not like to have a homogeneous type of film. I wanted to go to many different kinds of ways of making cinema and telling stories and watching the country.

I think it's very important that films like Bad Hurt don't get lost in the mix of the sci-fi-kill-everything-on-the-screen-blood-dripping-down-the-walls sort of the world of the cinema that we live in.

During the war, I saw many films that made me fall in love with the cinema.

For example, in painting the form arises from abstract elements of line and color, while in cinema the material concreteness of the image within the frame presents - as an element - the greatest difficulty in manipulation.

Cinema is gambling. It is better to gamble on a unique film even if it seems like suicide.