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.

I think cinema is needed throughout Africa, because we are lagging behind in the knowledge of our own history. I think we need to create a culture that is our own. I think that images are very fascinating and very important to that end. But right now, cinema is only in the hands of film-makers because most of our leaders are afraid of cinema.

As the acting class was going on, I just realized I just knew more about cinema than the other people in the class. I cared about cinema and they cared about themselves. But two, was actually at a certain point I just realized that I love movies too much to simply appear in them. I wanted the movies to be my movies.

The American public is a very specialized public. The reason it is taken as a realistic film is because inside the fable, I've put that kind of reality in. And it could easily be called, instead of Once Upon a Time in America, Once Upon a Time There Was a Certain Kind of Cinema. Because it was also an homage to cinema.

What is most important is that the brand African cinema is going beyond African cinema.

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

Well, as a visual artist working with the phenomenon of cinema, the grammar of cinema, [making a feature] was bound to happen. Everything I do is like sculpting with image and sound.

I'm very pessimistic about adaptations from one medium to another. I've got a very kind of primitive, Puritan view of it. I tend to think that if something was derived for one medium, then there's no real immediate reason to think that it's necessarily going to be as good or better if adapted into another one. There have been very good stage plays that have made some very good films. But there are not so many differences between the theater and the cinema as there are between the cinema and, say, reading a book or reading a comic.

I believe there's only good cinema and bad cinema.

My favourite way of watching the cinema is the biggest possible cinema you can find, with the biggest possible screen, and the loudest possible Dolby - but just me. Nobody else.

Jean-Luc Godard said that cinema is the truth 24 frames a second. I think cinema is lies 24 frames a second.

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

Let us start with the title of War and Cinema. The important part of the title is not War and Cinema.

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.

I want viewers want to talk about The Conquest. I want the dialogue to start after the movie. The cinema is there to leave a trace. I hope my film leaves a trace and that it will open a door for French cinema and that tomorrow other directors will make political movies. The job of a filmmaker today is to talk about the world surrounding him and, through his movies, to both entertain and raise questions about modern society.

When I grew up, you'd see shorts before movies. I know it happened a lot more before I started going to the cinema.

I'm still fighting. I don't know how much longer, but I'm still fighting a struggle, which is to make cinema alive and not just make another film.

My life is existing. Cinema is certainly not my life

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

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.

When I make a film, I never stop uncovering mysteries, making discoveries. When I'm writing, filming, editing, even doing promotional work, I discover new things about the film, about myself, and about others. That is what I'm subconsciously looking for when shooting a film: to glimpse the enigmas of life, even if I don't resolve them, but at least to uncover them. Cinema is curiosity in the most intense meaning of the word.

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.

To me, a revolutionary film is not a film about a revolution. It has a lot more to do with the art form. It's a film that is revolting against the old established language of cinema that had been brainwashing the people for decades. It is a film that is trying to find ways to use sound and image differently.

Frankly speaking, I hate comparisons. Two individuals are doing two different films, playing two different characters: how can you compare them? It is not fair to get into ratings. It really doesn't matter what I think about other actresses; what matters is what the directors think of them when they are casting them in a project, because I think it's the director who's behind a successful piece of cinema.

The 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.

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

Everyone is looking for a purpose in life. The reason we all go to the cinema, or online, is because we haven't found a purpose yet. We are always wondering why we're here. But I've learned that we have to create that purpose for ourselves. My purpose, which I finally found thanks to social media, is helping all of these people find their purpose.

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.

I never sit in a cinema and go, "Ah! I want to be in that film!"

Even the great bad guys in cinema history, they're likable.

I would argue that something dark is lurking between the sexes, and that it is seeping out into cinema.

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.

There are thus two tasks for the Mass Media division of Unesco, the one general, the other special. The special one is to enlist the press and the radio and the cinema to the fullest extent in the service of formal and adult education, of science and learning, of art and culture. The general one is to see that these agencies are used both to contribute to mutual comprehension between different nations and cultures, and also to promote the growth of a common outlook shared by all nations and cultures.

Cinema is always a political art, at the end.

To me, not every black filmmaker who is making black films is trying to make black cinema.

At one point cinema and photography weren't treated as art. Now it's crazy to think they're not. The key question is "What is art today?" The most important artists of the last 20 years are Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive, because the influence they have had is incredible and they've changed the world. That is art.

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.

Cinema is a world of imagination.

Why would anything change that has not been changed since the existence of cinema? [James] Baldwin somehow wakes you up to reality. It takes you out of the dream - or out of the nightmare.

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.

For the best part of my childhood I visited the local library three or four times a week, hunching in the stacks on a foam rubber stool and devouring children's fiction, classics, salacious thrillers, horror and sci-fi, books about cinema and origami and natural history, to the point where my parents encouraged me to read a little less.

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.

The best cinema is about ethics.

I 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.

For me, any kind of thing that has stood for 100 years tells me of the health of that thing. So, cinema completing a hundred years in India just says that it is very healthy.

I don't go to the cinema much.

Americans have a certain idea of what films are and the French have a much deeper sense of cinema. The cinémathèque is like a temple for them. And the people who write about it are really intellectuals. It's just a sensibility that they appreciate it.

Strangers 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.