Popular quotes about Cinema! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 28
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.
Tilda SwintonIn a sense I feel very much a part of the cinema now in a way where when I come back to the theater now I feel like a visitor. The cinema is really what I enjoy. I want to do more independent movies.
Brian CoxThe 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.
Salvador DaliTo evoke the classic period of Italian cinema in a little film seemed like a great, fun thing to do. I had relations to that period. I had known Fellini and I had known Antonioni. I had made a movie with Antonioni and I had visited Fellini in his studios. So, it seemed like something worthwhile doing. You bring yourself to that mythical cinema.
Wim WendersYou get a painting idea, and you go do that. You get a cinema idea, and you go in to do that. The difference is, even though the paintings might take some time to make, with cinema you are booked for a year and a half, minimum.
David LynchI think that cinema and television have nothing in common. There is a breaking point between photography and cinema on the one hand and television and virtual reality on the other hand.
Paul VirilioI seem to wonder if we can reach some kind of new destination with cinema, or touch upon human existence in a different way to what cinema usually does in its very schematic and sometimes very controlled, plot-oriented ways of thinking. Sometimes I feel like I've found the holy grail, and next week I think it's a complete mistake and I need to try something completely different. It's an ongoing process.
Christoffer BoeThe cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life.
Jean-Luc GodardWhat bothers me is that the cinema - what Fox News calls the "wholesome cinema that our children are supposed to be able to see" - is so violent. I'm not even talking about the content. I'm talking about the way in which it's cut.
Tilda SwintonWell, you cannot think of cinema now, and you cannot think of cinema in the UK and not place Chaplin in the most extraordinary elevated context, if there can be such a thing, in that he was a genius, he was unique.
Richard AttenboroughWhat is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind. It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.
John BergerNational film industries tend to move in cycles. In Australia right now, we're on a high, a feeling of potential, which as yet shows no sign of flagging. But the word "industry" is misleading. A small national cinema has no industry in the Hollywood sense.
Peter WeirWhen you're so passionate about cinema, the idea to direct your own film is really appealing.
Gaspard UllielI prefer working in good cinema, wherever it is. I like subjects that have a universal appeal.
Om PuriI had the fortune to spend some time, mostly during the summers, with Jackie Kennedy's and her sister Lee Radziwill's families and children. Cinema was an integral, inseparable, as a matter of fact, a key part of our friendship.
Jonas MekasYou can't really divorce women's struggles in the world from women's in the cinema. As long as there's hierarchy it means that women are somehow secondary or second class or less than. That's going to be reflected in movies because films are the most powerful medium to reflect back society's view of itself
Sally PotterI love silent cinema but don't hold it sacred. Like any branch of film there are some very boring films alongside the masterpieces.
Michel HazanaviciusThe close-up has no equivalent in a narrative fashioned of words. Literature is totally lacking in any working method to enable it to isolate a single vastly enlarged detail in which one face comes forward to underline a state of mind or stress the importance of a single detail in comparison with the rest. As a narrative device, the ability to vary the distance between the camera and the object may be a small thing indeed, but it makes for a notable difference between cinema and oral or written narrative, in which the distance between language and image is always the same.
Italo CalvinoCinema 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.
Billy ZaneAn important Italian critic once gave Fistful of Dollars a very bad review when it came out. Then he went to the university here [Rome] with Once Upon a Time in America. We showed it to 10,000 students. And while the man was speaking that day to the students, with me present, he said, "I have to state one thing. When I gave that review about Sergio's films, I should have taken into account that on Sergio Leone's passport, there should not be written whether the nationality is Italian or anything else. What should be written is: 'Nationality: Cinema.' "
Sergio LeoneI think cinema should provoke thoughts, sure, but using it as I soapbox I think is the wrong place.
Jeremy RennerI knew that this was the movie in which a lot of the cinema version of Burton-esque first started. So, I knew that there were things that were hugely important to him for it, but it didn't really feel that different than working on any other of these projects.
John AugustJust telling a story. That's cinema. It's not silent, black and white. It's a simple story that's well made.
Jean DujardinCampaign may invite a certain skepticism about democracy, but it will surely restore your faith in cinema verite.
A. O. ScottThe deeper I went into culture, the more confused I got. So I needed something more real. I said, "Okay, from now on, my country will be cinema."
Jonas MekasMy documentaries have always been very much constructed in the spirit of dominant cinema. From the time I started making non-fiction, I was mainly interested in designing and creating documentaries like fiction, so it was a natural evolution to try and embark on doing a dramatic narrative.
Brett MorgenIn the vast majority of movies, everything is done for the audience. We are cued to laugh or cry, be frightened or relieved; Hitchcock called the movies a machine for causing emotions in the audience. Bresson (and Ozu) take a different approach. They regard, and ask us to regard along with them, and to arrive at conclusions about their characters that are our own. This is the cinema of empathy.
Roger EbertTo me, not every black filmmaker who is making black films is trying to make black cinema.
Arthur JafaTo 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.
Paul RothaI 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.
Steven KnightA 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.
Alexander PayneThe whole point of art, as far as Iโm concerned, is that art doesnโt make any difference. And thatโs why itโs 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 theyโre not real.
Brian EnoI know Camberwell very well: I used to go to Camberwell New Baths a lot and the cinema, which used to be the Odeon. My old school is around there too, though you've got to understand that I went to a lot of schools.
Paul SimononNevertheless, in the theatre, and in the cinema, the contemporary reality of Poland has been represented only to a minuscule degree in the last 12 years.
Andrzej WajdaIt may be that we exist and cease to exist in alternations, like the minute dots in some forms of toned printing or the succession of pictures on a cinema film. It may be that reality is an illusion of movement in an eternal, static, multidimensional universe. We may be only a story written on the ground of the inconceivable; the pattern on a rug beneath the feet of the incomprehensible.
H. G. WellsStrangers used to gather together at the cinema and sit together in the dark, like Ancient Greeks participating in the mysteries, dreaming the same dream in unison.
Angela CarterModern-day cinema takes the form of a sermon. You don't get to think, you only get to receive information.
Gus Van SantI lived right on the borderline of a black neighborhood. So I could go into the black area and then there'd be these ghetto theaters that you could actually see the new kung fu movie or the new blaxploitation movie or the new horror film or whatever. And then there was also, if you went just a little further away, there was actually a little art house cinema. So I could actually see, you know, French movies or Italian movies, when they came out.
Quentin Tarantino