Quotes about cinema




These are quotes tagged with "cinema". You can also search for quotes containing the word cinema.

"Curiosity doesn't matter any more. These days people don't want to be transported to emotional territories where they don't know how to react."

Babenko, Hector on cinema    Share


"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."

Berger, John on cinema    Share

"Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls."

Bergman, Ingmar on cinema    Share

"My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water."

Bresson, Robert on cinema    Share

"Films can only be made by by-passing the will of those who appear in them, using not what they do, but what they are."

Bresson, Robert on cinema    Share

"The making of a picture ought surely to be a rather fascinating adventure. It is not; it is an endless contention of tawdry egos, some of them powerful, almost all of them vociferous, and almost none of them capable of anything much more creative than credit-stealing and self-promotion."

Chandler, Raymond on cinema    Share

"If you can't believe a little in what you see on the screen, it's not worth wasting your time on cinema."

Daney, Serge on cinema    Share

"All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl."

Godard, Jean-Luc on cinema    Share

"The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't."

Godard, Jean-Luc on cinema    Share

"As far as the filmmaking process is concerned, stars are essentially worthless -- and absolutely essential."

Goldman, William on cinema    Share

"Pictures are for entertainment, messages should be delivered by Western Union."

Goldwyn, Samuel on cinema    Share

"We have taken beauty and exchanged it for stilted voices."

Griffiths, David Wark on cinema    Share

"I discovered early in my movie work that a movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it. There are times when this distinction may be given to the writer or director. Most often it belongs to the producer."

Hecht, Ben on cinema    Share

"You should look straight at a film; that's the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates."

Herzog, Werner on cinema    Share

"Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms."

Hitchcock, Alfred on cinema    Share

"For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake."

Hitchcock, Alfred on cinema    Share

"All television ever did was shrink the demand for ordinary movies. The demand for extraordinary movies increased. If any one thing is wrong with the movie industry today, it is the unrelenting effort to astonish."

James, Clive on cinema    Share

"The preserve of ambition and folly in pursuit of illusion, or delusion."

Jarman, Derek on cinema    Share

"The cinema, like the detective story, enables us to experience without danger to ourselves all the excitements, passions, and fantasies which have to be repressed in a humanistic age."

Jung, Carl on cinema    Share

"The words Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies. This appeal is what attracts us, and ultimately what makes us despair when we begin to understand how seldom movies are more than this."

Kael, Pauline on cinema    Share

"The movies today are too rich to have any room for genuine artists. They produce a few passable craftsmen, but no artists. Can you imagine a Beethoven making $100, 000 a year?"

Mencken, H. L. on cinema    Share

"Cinema is the culmination of the obsessive, mechanistic male drive in western culture. The movie projector is an Apollonian straight-shooter, demonstrating the link between aggression and art. Every pictorial framing is a ritual limitation, a barred precinct."

Paglia, Camille on cinema    Share

"I guess I think that films have to be made totally by fascists -- there's no room for democracy in making film."

Pennebaker, Don Alan on cinema    Share

"My belief is that no movie, nothing in life, leaves people neutral. You either leave them up or you leave them down."

Puttnam, David on cinema    Share

"There's only one thing that can kill the movies, and that's education."

Rogers, Will on cinema    Share

"Does art reflect life? In movies, yes. Because more than any other art form, films have been a mirror held up to society's porous face."

Rosen, Marjorie on cinema    Share

"In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret."

Sontag, Susan on cinema    Share

"One of the joys of going to the movies was that it was trashy, and we should never lose that."

Stone, Oliver on cinema    Share

"Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has to the book I am reading."

Stravinsky, Igor on cinema    Share

"All film directors, whether famous or obscure, regard themselves as misunderstood or underrated. Because of that, they all lie. They're obliged to overstate their own importance."

Truffaut, Francois on cinema    Share

"People sometimes say that the way things happen in the movies is unreal, but actually it's the way things happen to you in life that's unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it's like watching television -- you don't feel anything."

Warhol, Andy on cinema
5 fans of this quote    Share

"I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it -- yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don't give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by."

Welles, Orson on cinema    Share

"The director is simply the audience. So the terrible burden of the director is to take the place of that yawning vacuum, to be the audience and to select from what happens during the day which movement shall be a disaster and which a gala night. His job is to preside over accidents."

Welles, Orson on cinema    Share

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