Quotes About Cinema

MORE CONSISTENTLY THAN EVER I WAS TRYING TO MAKE PEOPLE BELIEVE THAT CINEMA AS AN INSTRUMENT OF ART HAS ITS OWN POSSIBILITIES WHICH ARE EQUAL TO THOSE OF PROSE. I WANTED TO DEMONSTRATE HOW CINEMA IS ABLE TO OBSERVE LIFE, WITHOUT INTERFERING, CRUDELY OR OBVIOUSLY, WITH ITS CONTINUITY. FOR THAT IS WHERE I SEE THE POETIC ESSENCE OF CINEMA.

Cinema doesn't connect with the body as artists have in two thousand years of painting, using the nude as the central figure which the ideas seem to circulate around. I think it is important to somehow push or stretch or emphasize, in as many ways as I can, the sheer bulk, shape, heaviness, the juices, the actual structure of the body. Cinema basically examines a personality first and the body afterward.

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.

Restoration is to some extent part of the digital age. These days, if you re-issue a movie in theaters or on Blu-ray, it has to be in high-quality condition: You have to restore. We plan a Paris cinema theater dedicated totally to classics. If we think there's an audience, we will release classics in theaters. People will discover that it's worth going to the cinema to see great movies of the past in perfect condition. I believe a lot in that.

What 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.

I am not interested in making didactic polemical statements. That is not the way I want to make films. There is a place for polemics, but I don't think that it is in fictional cinema. Fictional cinema works subtly and deeply.

When you're so passionate about cinema, the idea to direct your own film is really appealing.

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.

Independent means one thing to me: It means that regardless of the source of financing, the director's voice is extremely present. It's such a pretentious term, but it's auteurist cinema. Director-driven, personal, auteurist... Whatever word you want. It's where you feel the director, not a machine, at work. It doesn't matter where the money comes from. It matters how much freedom the director has to work with his or her team. That's how I personally define independent movies.

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 has reached a dead end.

The saving grace of the cinema is that with patience, and a little love, we may arrive at that wonderfully complex creature which is called man.

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.

We have filmmakers who make films with some kind of responsibility and take cinema seriously like Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani, Prakash Jha. But now these people also take stars Without stars they cannot work.

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.

I've always considered movies evil; the day that cinema was invented was a black day for mankind.

Musicals and horror films can be very non-verbal and very pure cinema with movement. The camera is justified in being a character. It can really move and tell a story, and literally direct you to look here or there.

I don't think we've seen any cinema yet. I think we've seen 100 years of illustrated text.

I live cinema and passionately love music, and my efforts in both these crafts are unfolding.

Much to my chagrin, I think that cinema has gone the wrong way in America because in many ways, I pioneered the use of video which eventually became digital video. Everyone can do it; it's Pop Art time: "Everything is art, why should you take it so seriously, after all it's kind of like a clambake." I don't buy that.

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

But Hitler didn't strive for the annihilation of the Jews - he stressed that fact in public life and in the newspapers. Hitler merely said at the beginning that Jewish influence was too great, that of all the lawyers in Berlin, eighty percent were Jewish. Hitler thought that a small percentage of the people, the Jews, should not be allowed to control the theater, cinema, radio, et cetera.

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.

Romance: That's one of the things that makes Spider-Man really unique, in terms of the comic books. There is a tender, romantic quality to it. And certainly, that's something that's always fascinated me about the cinema: good romance.

There was a period of cinema, in the mid-90's, that I was a huge fan of, with Heat and Seven, and the Tarantino era. If I've ever been fanatical, it was about those films.

I think the problem with the cinema currently is that so much of the money that goes movies that offer a certain kind of repetition.

American cinema tends to express a patriotic relationship to national identity on a regular basis.

The cinema, as literature, as all the plastic arts, do not exist outside of a critical system that allows us to study them.

For me, being Christian Armenian, born into the Islamic culture in Iran and then, at the age of 13, being sent to England and embracing the English culture and becoming part of so-called swinging London and the era of euphoria and celebration that the '60s represented is very critical. It was a moment when, for the first time, the business of internationalism was being effectively represented-in music, art, cinema, design. Before that, everything was directed toward the old industry, the old school, the old format, and there was no room for varieties to evolve.

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.

I 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.

There are cinéphiles and cinéphages. Truffaut is a cinéphile. A cinéphage - a film nerd - sits in the front row and writes down the credits. But if you ask him whether it's good, he'll say something sharp. But that's not the point of movies: to love cinema is to love life, to really look at this window on the universe. It's incompatible with note-taking!

I grew up watching movies that just transformed my vision, not just in cinema, in life, and you discover that this - it's an endless tool.

I think film is a world of directors. Theater is a world of actors. Or, theater is for actors as cinema is for directors. I started in theater. Filming is as complete as directing film. In theater, you are there, you have a character, you have a play, you have a light, you have a set, you have an audience, and you're in control, and every night is different depending on you and the relationship with the other actors. It's as simple as that. So, you are given all the tools.

If people go to IMDB, they will see that I'm very comfortable with independent cinema, and doing studio films too. For me this is not an either/or situation.

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!

Relating a person to the whole world: that is the meaning of 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.

Mainstream cinema raises questions only to immediately provide an answer to them, so they can send the spectator home reassured. If we actually had those answers, then society would appear very different from what it is.

I love watching a good, freaky horror movie. I love it. It's one of my favorite things to do, to go and see at the cinema. Just to tune out and be freaked out.

Exhibition is certainly the safest part of the cinema business, but it's very capital intensive.

What I was talking about was, of course, very autobiographical - '68 was the moment when all the young people were incredibly excited, because when we were going to sleep, we knew we would wake up not tomorrow, but in the future. There was a sense of future that was the result of the mixture of politics, cinema, music, the first joints. And the movies were a very important part of that cocktail.

The essence of cinema is editing.

I still haven't played a leading role in cinema or in TV, and that's something that I long for.

I earn my living by teaching film, mostly filmmaking but also teaching courses on current cinema. I'm interested in movies. I hope that's not all I'm interested in. In that sense, it's maybe a little misleading. I don't expect to make another movie about films, but I may continue to write about them.

The great coming to age of cable is really a beautiful thing. No commercials. It's like a small theater. It's a cinema on a TV screen.

I never used to watch horror films because I was a nervous type. I believed all the publicity about The Exorcist when it was released - you know, all that nonsense about people fainting in the cinema - and decided it would definitely freak me out. I particularly remember my girlfriend telling me about Suspiria - ironic considering my first ever film work was with Argento - and how scary it was.