Quotes About Cinema

Feudal societies don't create great cinema; we have great theatre. The egalitarian societies create great cinema. The Americans, the French. Because equality is sort of what the cinema deals with. It deals with stories which don't fall into 'Everybody in their place and who's who,' and all that. But the theatre's full of that.

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

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

Cinema d'auteur, cinema about people, about emotions. About la difficulté d'être, the difficulty of being, existential problems. That's what the nouvelle vague is. The early '60s was all about that.

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 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.

What happened in the late Fifties, early Sixties in French cinema was a fantastic revolution. I was in Italy, but completely in love with the nouvelle vague movement, and directors like Godard, Truffaut, Demy. 'The Dreamers' was a total homage to cinema and that love for it.

My father used to say that you could only access culture before cinema by learning to read and write, but that once cinema was invented, knowledge was available to anybody.

There's a whole, that is a whole subgenre within martial arts cinema. The supernatural martial arts movie. Particularly within Asian cinema.

Do we recognize the platform that Indian cinema has been given? Of course. And typically India of us, we gracefully acknowledge our host's grace and we thank you for celebrating us and our cinema.

Narrative, fiction filmmaking is the culmination of several art forms: theater, art history, architecture. Whereas doc filmmaking is more pure cinema, like cinema verité is film in its purest form. You're taking random images and creating meaning out of random images, telling a story, getting meaning, capturing something that's real, that's really happening, and render this celluloid sculpture of this real thing. That's what really separates the power of doc filmmaking from fiction.

Without a doubt, I was born to want to make cinema, but the kind of cinema I want to make is not like commercial movies, which I enjoy myself, but I wanted to be the kind of filmmaker who wrote original work, sort of like a novelist would who deals with who we are and our times or our relationships.

My favourite movie is: "Dr Strangelove". (I haven't seen any films released in the past 2-5 years, I'm afraid: I don't do TV/cinema).

Cinema Paradiso' is a fantastic film, I love that.

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.

I was inspired by Maya Deren because she was the first woman filmmaker whose films I saw. I also loved Fellini and Goddard because they were so different from Hollywood films. But when I saw the cinema verite films that were made by Drew Associates with Leacock and Pennebaker I found my passion.

I enjoy going back to work now because cinema is going through an exciting period because young people are now going back to the movie theaters. But things are different though.

I loved cinema while growing up and, for the longest time, wanted to be a director.

I love silent cinema but don't hold it sacred. Like any branch of film there are some very boring films alongside the masterpieces.

The cinema is really built for the big screen and big sound, so that a person can go into another world and have an experience.

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

I am easily moved to tears and rarely survive a visit to the cinema without shedding them, racked, as I am, by the most perfunctory, meretricious or even callously sentimental attempts at poignancy (something about the exterior of the human face, so vast and palpable, with the eyes and the lips: it is all writ too large for me, too immediate for me.)

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

Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out.

I think most people, no matter their status now, have big screen TVs, because they're the standard TVs now. And so why would you go to the cinema?

The quality of mainstream cinema has changed. A lot of independent voices feel they can leave everything behind and make independent films.

There will be a competition among critics for the best Paris Hilton insult. Here's my first: Her attention span is so short that she can't even maintain her concentration while running away from a psycho... Maybe the ultimate insult is that she makes her co-star Elisha Cuthbert seem, by comparison, the sexiest and most interesting actress in modern cinema.

It's a way of living, cinema. And I see my family, I do this and that, I travel. It's a long process to let it happen.

The most important question in American cinema, I've learned, is 'When is lunch?'

I would not have made any of my films or written scripts such as Taxi Driver had it not been for Ingmar Bergman, What he has left is a legacy greater than any other director.... I think the extraordinary thing that Bergman will be remembered for, other than his body of work, was that he probably did more than anyone to make cinema a medium of personal and introspective value.

Cinema is entertainment, and people go to the movies because they want to feel good and forget about everything.

The cinema has the power to make you not feel lonely, even when you are.

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.

Having a movie that lasts and makes your image imprinted into the history of cinema, it's very positive.

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.

Cinema is so slow and boring compared to television.

The public has lost the habit of movie-going because the cinema no longer possesses the charm, the hypnotic charisma, the authority it once commanded. The image it once held for us all — that of a dream we dreamt with our eyes open — has disappeared. Is it still possible that one thousand people might group together in the dark and experience the dream that a single individual has directed?

The convergence of the Rhone and Saone. Paul Bocuse. The birthplace of cinema. Chateauneuf-du-Pape just a few miles down the road. It does not get much better than Lyon.

Cinema is a medium that can translate ideas.

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.

Cinema is much more than heroes and villains.

When I go to the cinema, I want to have a cinematic experience. Some people ignore the sound and you end up seeing something you might see on television and it doesn't explore the form. Sound is the other picture. When you show people a rough cut without the sound mix they are often really surprised. Sound creates a completely new world. With dialogue, people say a lot of things they don't mean. I like dialogue when it's used in a way when the body language says the complete opposite. But I love great dialogue I think expositional dialogue is quite crass and not like real life.

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 have been a film buff all my life and believe that the finest cinema is fully the equal of the best novels.

I've really only had one (dream) since I got into this business at 13 years old, which was to be in this business forever. Once I did my first television commercial, I caught that itch and that bug. I want to be a part of pieces of art - as far as cinema is concerned - that people will want to see for generations to come. That's my dream.

I think my films are always quite self-reflexive and always question 'why am I doing this, is this the right way to do it, what is cinema for, does it have a purpose?