Quotes About Cinema

I'm inspired heavily by film influences - David Lynch's Blue Velvet, Federico Fellini, Alfred Hitchcock, Pedro Almodóvar, and what I see in the cinema - so there is a linking, an interweaving between memory, cinema and contemporary life, which the women in my pictures encapsulate.

In cinema we have all kinds of ways of communicating: cinematography, lighting, character performance. If you pay attention to silent era movie actors, they are big about postures and really exaggerated expressions so you can understand how they feel. We use all kinds of techniques from cinema to help communicate emotion.

The director [Elfar Adalsteins] came to me through my agent and I had a read of the script [of the "Sailcloth]. I thought immediately this is someone who is writing for the cinema. Not having to go through the tedious business of taking something from literature and making that awful leap that is so difficult to make anyway, from literature to cinema. It's refreshing to be able to deal with a subject like that, to be written where the driving force is the image on screen and you don't need any words. The more that we can do that [in film], the better.

I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas.

I first came to cinema as a passionate filmgoer, when I was a child. Then, when I was a very young man, I became a film critic precisely because of my knowledge of cinema. I did better than others because of this. Then I moved on to screenwriting. I wrote a film with Sergio Leone, 'Once Upon a Time in the West.' And then I moved to directing.

My films are intended as polemical statements against the American 'barrel down' cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus.

The movies I like are always movies where cinema is reinvented like if it was the beginning of cinema.

Here was opportunity to make an audience walk and move, be sociable in a way never dreamed of by the rigors of cinema-watching, in circumstances where many different perspectives could be brought to bear on a series of phenomena associated with the topics under consideration. Yet all the time it was a subjective creation under the auspices of light and sound, dealing with a large slice of cinema's vocabulary.

I also wanted to express the strength of cinema to hide reality, while being entertaining. Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.

I'm a huge fan of world cinema, because each country uses cinema in a very individual way.

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

I am still associated with a heroic period in French cinema, and my name remains linked to this period.

Sometimes I have better relationships with my barber then with people who are into cinema from an upper class.

Cinema informed my painting by the sheer geography - on locations, there is so much downtime. And when you're spending all this time creating art by committee, the concept of the singular voice is a pleasant antidote.

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

I wanted to make a cinema of ideas, not plots, and to use the same aesthetics as painting, which has always paid great attention to formal devices of structure, composition and framing.

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

I'm a big fan of British cinema; I think we make some unbelievably brilliant films, but they can quite often have a dark feel.

Sitting in the darkness of the cinema, I got to see another world. This imaginary world was a refuge for many of us. Of course, the films were controlled and censored by the regime. But I still thought, around this time, that maybe making films would be good for me. I thought of expressing myself through this medium, and of doing something for the Kurds. The options were clear: either I'd work as a lawyer under the Baath regime or make movies independently.

I do indeed think that cinema is mortal. There is a lot of evidence already that it is dying on its feet.

An art form requires genius. People of genius are always troublemakers, meaning they start from scratch, demolish accepted norms and rebuild a new world. The problem with cinema today is the dearth of troublemakers. There’s not a rabble-rouser in sight. There was still one, but he went beyond troublemaker to court jester. He clobbered the status quo. That’s Godard. We’re fresh out of ‘bad students.’ You’ll find students masquerading as bad ones, but you won’t find the real article, because a genuine bad student upends everything.

I love these kind of movies as a kind of cinema-going geek myself. Those characters, you want to be like those characters when you go to the movies. You know, when you see a movie with a guy who's really cool and the killing's slick and easy. I don't know. There's something intoxicating about it.

I think that it's not a bad thing to not be too versed in the vocabulary of cinema, because you start to think that certain things are allowed and not allowed.

I'd wanted to be a writer and when I came back to New York worked as a musician too, but I found my writing starting to get more and more referential to cinema.

The Last Of England works with image and sound, a language which is nearer to poetry than prose. It tells its story quite happily in silent images, in contrast to a word-bound cinema.

I think that in the realm of commercial, popcorn cinema, the amount of message or smuggling of ideas you can get in there is quite limited. Like, if you think you're going to make a difference or change anything, you're on pretty dangerous thin ice.

The chief attraction of the opposite sex for all of us, old and young, men and women: we need someone to save us from the sympathetic smiles in the Sunday-night cinema queue, someone who can stop us from falling down into the pit where the permanently single live with their mums and dads.

Modern-day cinema takes the form of a sermon. You don't get to think, you only get to receive information.

There's a lot of downsides to social media, but one of the nice things is that you can cut through all the BS and go straight to the person and ask them directly. I think that's a wonderful thing. I love talking to people who are true fans or who have a true love of cinema, and so if I can talk to them directly, great.

In Lithuania, I am known as a poet, and they don’t care about my cinema. In Europe they don’t know my poetry; in Europe, I am a filmmaker. But here, in the United States, I am only a maverick!

Is the cinema more important than life?

What I expect of a movie reviewer is that he should love cinema as much as I do.

I think that cinema has always progressed through exchanges.

Studio movies are looking more like independent movies and independent movies are looking more like studio movies, and I think cinema is better now because of it.

We wanted to not necessarily tell the story of the video or the song, but create an ambience. And I think now, I think that's gone now. There's nothing wrong with that. But I think we were all trying to make mini feature films. I remember when we were making the Duran videos, I would crop the top and bottom of the screen with black. So that it looked more like cinema.

In terms of making TV drama, not everything has to make sense. In cinema, you usually strive for reality and a natural environment, but in TV, it's more acceptable to do something crazy and break with naturalism.

The lamentable expression: 'But it was only a dream", the increasing use of which - among others in the domain of the cinema - has contributed not a little to encourage such hypocrisy, has for a long while ceased to merit discussion.

So, if falling crime rates coincide with the rise of violent video games and increasing violence on TV and at the cinema, should we conclude that media violence is causing the drop in crime rates?

The appeal of cinema lies in the fear of death.

Some holiday traditions are sacred. In our house one such tradition is the annual Christmas classic cinema celebration.

In my mind it's so much fun to have something that has clues and is mysterious - something that is understood intuitively rather than just being spoon-fed to you. That's the beauty of cinema, and it's hardly ever even tried. These days, most films are pretty easily understood, and so people's minds stop working.

There's not much of a difference shooting something for TV and shooting something for film; the difference is film is in a cinema and TV is in your home.

What is fiction or cinema if not escape?

I think you do have to attend to the sort of core values of film, which is that the audience wants to have a relationship with the characters, they want to understand what's going on there. There are certain things that comics can have a little bit more freedom in then when you're asking an audience to engage in it as a piece of cinema, but I do feel like the canvas is much bigger and wider and that we're being invited and frankly challenged to take risks, to be a little bit different. And that's fun, that's exciting.

I like the cinema of people like Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton. I am not keen on trying to reproduce reality - for that you should do documentaries.

And that is how I employ my time in cinema, saying things about people who I think have touched us in terms of our value judgement and by example.

Cinema Paradiso, because it reminds me of why I make movies, the magic of movies, the romance of movies.

Chris Marker has a brilliant mind and heart and appetite for life, and it's a privilege to travel with him to whatever he chooses to remember and to evoke. He is one of cinema's all time greats - the most important reflective or non-narrative filmmaker after Dziga Vertov.