Quotes About Cinema

Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions.

A message I've been telling myself: the cinema is very conservative, and unless you have a story that satisfies you, that is within the unchallenging zone, but you love it, you can't do it as cinema. Otherwise, you better go do it for television, which is more daring now.

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.

I know there is one kind of cinema that exists in the world, that is good or bad cinema.

The world of the cinema and of painting are very different; precisely, the possibilities of photography and the cinema reside in that unlimited fantasy which is born of things themselves... a piece of sugar can become on the screen larger than an infinite perspective of gigantic buildings.

There are those who think that Zeffirelli's Hamlet is the way to treat Shakespeare. I think that cinema can handle much more. We somehow expect cinema to provide us with meaning, to console us. But that's not the purpose of art.

I don't believe in proper cinema; it doesn't have the strength of television. People having to go out to the cinema is really archaic. I'd much rather sit at home.

I don't think I've done anything important or magnificent. I'm a worker, and the thing I prefer in my life is cinema. When I'm working in cinema, I'm happy. And that's all, you know?

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

I didn't have a list of things I should do this year, next year, find a good novel, sign two stars and make a deal - because I think cinema should come from cinema. I never adapted anything. Beautiful books are beautiful books, that's it. I don't know why we should transform them.

I have a very simple mantra and it's this: I want to make black cinema with the power, beauty, and alienation of black music. That's my big goal. The larger preoccupation is how do we force cinema to respond to the existential, political, and spiritual dimensions of who we are as a people.

In the theater you can chain a blue-assed baboon in the stalls and with a good script, good actors, and a good set you'd have what is called a production. With the cinema someone has to know about lenses and fine things. I have no time for the "auteur de cinema." To me, it's meaningless.

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

The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life.

Just look at the cinema itself: It's comprised of lots of movies about graphic novels, and if you're not 20 years old and wearing a cape and a mask and white, you're out of business. Today's cinema is a proliferation of comedies, which are in some ways creating caricature images. They're one-dimensional.

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.

I'm working in a form of cinema that can be described, and has been described, as a diaristic form of cinema. In other words, with material from my own life. I walk through life with my camera, and occasionally I film. I never think about scripts, never think about films, making films.

One absolutely crucial change is that feminist film theory is today an academic subject to be studied and taught. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" was a political intervention, primarily influenced by the Women's Liberation Movement and, in my specific case, a Women's Liberation study group, in which we read Freud and realised the usefulness of psychoanalytic theory for a feminist project.

We have the talent, just not the money and not the audience. People in France don't really like fantasy. You need to go to Spain, England and Germany for that. Many of the people from my crew come either from Spain or England. But I hope to be able to work with them again and I wish to create European cinema on that scale. It could happen and attitudes may be changing. Animated fantasy movie Despicable Me was made entirely in France, so there is the talent here and now maybe the desire too.

I like watching film, I go to the cinema, but a lot of times I go to see kids' films.

I never studied anything about film technique in school. Eventually, I realized that cinema and theater are not so different: from the gut to the heart to the head of a character is the same journey for both.

Film has become a marketed commodity, and the opportunities and audiences for art cinema have grown smaller. There is a general downturn in cultural literacy, perhaps because of television.

Film is something that reaches so many people. How many people are going to go into a gallery? And understand what they're seeing? I think about the guy walking down the street, the guy who drove me here - this guy has the opportunity to go the cinema.

I think cinema should provoke thoughts, sure, but using it as I soapbox I think is the wrong place.

We like people who look good, we like people who elevate our standards, who have things we do not have, it's all about our fantasies. Yes, you can make millions of people dream about somebody who's not good looking, and that's the beauty of cinema, but people don't take the chance that often.

All my life, I have loved and been inspired by French cinema, and as a studio head it has been my pride and joy to have the ability to bring movies to audiences around the world.

Look, I wasn't saying the Beatles are better than God or Jesus. I said 'Beatles' because it's easy for me to talk about Beatles. I could have said TV or the cinema, motor cars or anything popular and I would have gotten away with it.

The task of cinema or any other art form is not to translate hidden messages of the unconscious soul into art but to experiment with the effects contemporary technical devices have on nerves, minds, or souls.

I'd like to be for cinema what Shakespeare was for theatre, Marx for politics and Freud for psychology: someone after whom nothing is as it used to be.

Movie queens diffuse into Cinema haze, while libertines read pornozines in street cafes.

If you love cinema as much as I do, and not many people do, and if you are focused and actually have something to offer, you will get somewhere with it.

One of my assistants was on Instagram and showed me how it was working. I thought it was playful, the way you go through images, a little like cinema. It's a bit like a filmstrip that's animated by your finger.

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.

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.

The whole point of art, as far as I’m concerned, is that art doesn’t make any difference. And that’s why it’s important. Take film: you can have quite extreme emotional experiences watching a movie, but they stop as soon as you walk out of the cinema. You can see people being hurt, but even though you feel those things strongly, you know they’re not real.

Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing they're whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.

For me,it is very important to believe in the kind of movies I do. Rang De Basanti made me feel good about Indian cinema. The movie instilled in me,a confidence so strong,that I wanted to be a part of the revolution in Bollywood.

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.

Norway is a small country, about half the size of Sweden, but it has a very good film climate because they have municipal cinemas, so even in the smallest towns you have a cinema that shows art house films from all over the world.

In truth, the cinema as a delivery system obviously has its days numbered. And that's not a bad thing. When you can buy any book in the world on your iPad, or off Amazon, you don't go the public library. The public library becomes about homeless gentlemen sleeping in chairs.

In the '60s when I started to see everything I could see, you could see pretty much everything which was still available from the '30s, '40s, '50s, '60s, and therefore I had an education which was really large and vast in different cinema. That's probably the reason I did not fall for the New Wave. It's really the love of the movies that made me want to become a cameraperson, definitely. I was really a film buff.

I mean, "The Jinx" is an amazing piece of cinema and amazing television moment, it`s rare documentarians can feel the direct impact of their work.

I think my dyslexia was a vital part of my development because my inability to read and write meant that I had to find knowledge elsewhere so I looked to the cinema.

One of the more problematic aspects of the current state of cinema in Japan is that the movies playing in the theaters are by and large made not by film studios but by broadcasting companies. They're either extensions of popular television dramas or adaptations of manga or anime. Younger Japanese are simply not being exposed to good films. That situation needs to change.

There are some films that arrive here from the international festival circuit almost incandescent with self-importance. They hover into the cinema in a kind of floating trance at how challenging and moving they are. They are films with a profound reluctance to get over themselves. They look up at the sceptical observer with the saucer-eyed saintliness of a baby seal in culling season, or a charity mugger smilingly wishing a nice day on the retreating back of a passer-by. One such is Babel.

I think 3-D across the board both in a home format and cinema is, it's going to be very big.

People have curiosity, they have intelligence, they have interest in understanding their peers. But producers and directors of cinema have decided that the seats in the theaters have been made to transform people's minds to lazy minds.

It might be David Adjaye talking about how the structure of jazz music informs his architecture, it might be the musician Terry Riley talking about how he thinks so much about cinema. I'd love to see more of a rupture between mediums and a flow between them.