Cinema Quotes

“The angel said, "I like black-and-white films more than color because they're more artificial. You have to work harder to overcome your disbelief. It's sort of like prayer.”
― Jonathan Carroll, The Ghost in Love

“Don't you go to the movies?"
"Mostly just to eat popcorn in the dark.”
― Charles Bukowski, Betting on the Muse: Poems & Stories

“Everybody has something that chews them up and, for me, that thing was always loneliness. The cinema has the power to make you not feel lonely, even when you are.”
― Tom Hanks

“The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief—call it what you will—than any book ever written; it has emptied more churches than all the counterattractions of cinema, motor bicycle and golf course.”
― A.A. Milne

“Well, as I was saying, it costs a lot to be authentic, madam. And one can't be stingy with these things, because you are more authentic the more you resemble what you've dreamed you are. - Agrado from "Todo Sobre Mi Madre”
― Pedro Almodovar

“In New York I'd go to the movies three or four times a week. Here I've upped it to six or seven, mainly because I'm too lazy to do anything else. Fortunately, going to the movies seems to suddenly qualify as an intellectual accomplishment, on a par with reading a book or devoting time to serious thought. It's not that the movies have gotten any more strenuous, it's just that a lot of people are as lazy as I am, and together we've agreed to lower the bar.”
― David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

“Dying is not a solution.. I want to live with You..!”
― K. Hari Kumar, When Strangers meet..

“I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.”
― Georges Duhamel, Scènes de la vie future

“I submit that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch's Laura's muddy bothness is that it required of us an empathetic confrontation with the exact same muddy bothness in ourselves and our intimates that makes the real world of moral selves so tense and uncomfortable, a bothness we go to the movies to get a couple hours' fucking relief from.”
― David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

“To Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider... To all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to all men who act and become women, to all the people who want to be mothers. To my mother.
- Dedication, Todo Sobre Mi Madre”
― Pedro Almodovar

“Just watch any husband arguing with his wife about something insignificant; listen to what they say and watch how their residual emotions manifest when the fight is over. It’s so formulaic and unsurprising that you wouldn’t dare re-create it in a movie. All the critics would mock it. They’d all say the screenwriter was a hack who didn’t even try. This is why movies have less value than we like to pretend — movies can’t show reality, because honest depictions of reality offend intelligent people.”
― Chuck Klosterman, The Visible Man

“It’s hard to explain the fun to be found in seeing the right kind of bad movie.”
― Roger Ebert, I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie

“In this business, until you're known as a monster, you're not a star”
― Bette Davis

“In North By Northwest during the scene on Mount Rushmore, I wanted Cary Grant to hide in Lincoln's nostril and then have a fit of sneezing. The Parks Commission...was rather upset at this thought. I argued until one of their number asked me how I would like it if they had Lincoln play the scene in Cary Grant's nose.

I saw their point at once.”
― Alfred Hitchcock

“All you need for a movie is a gun and a cat.”
― Jean-Luc Godard

“Tony Williams: You’ve often mentioned that Tales of Hoffmann (1951) has been a major influence on you.

George Romero: It was the first film I got completely involved with. An aunt and uncle took me to see it in downtown Manhattan when it first played. And that was an event for me since I was about eleven at the time. The imagery just blew me away completely. I wanted to go and see a Tarzan movie but my aunt and uncle said, “No! Come and see a bit of culture here.” So I thought I was missing out. But I really fell in love with the film. There used to be a television show in New York called Million Dollar Movie. They would show the same film twice a day on weekdays, three times on Saturday, and three-to-four times on Sunday. Tales of Hoffmann appeared on it one week. I missed the first couple of days because I wasn’t aware that it was on. But the moment I found it was on, I watched virtually every telecast. This was before the days of video so, naturally, I couldn’t tape it. Those were the days you had to rent 16mm prints of any film. Most cities of any size had rental services and you could rent a surprising number of films. So once I started to look at Tales of Hoffmann I realized how much stuff Michael Powell did in the camera. Powell was so innovative in his technique. But it was also transparent so I could see how he achieved certain effects such as his use of an overprint in the scene of the ballet dancer on the lily ponds. I was beginning to understand how adept a director can be. But, aside from that, the imagery was superb. Robert Helpmann is the greatest Dracula that ever was. Those eyes were compelling. I was impressed by the way Powell shot Helpmann sweeping around in his cape and craning down over the balcony in the tavern. I felt the film was so unique compared to most of the things we were seeing in American cinema such as the westerns and other dreadful stuff I used to watch. Tales of Hoffmann just took me into another world in terms of its innovative cinematic technique. So it really got me going.

Tony Williams: A really beautiful print exists on laserdisc with commentary by Martin Scorsese and others.

George Romero: I was invited to collaborate on the commentary by Marty. Pat Buba (Tony’s brother) knew Thelma Schoonmaker and I got to meet Powell in later years. We had a wonderful dinner with him one evening. What an amazing guy! Eventually I got to see more of his movies that I’d never seen before such as I Know Where I’m Going and A Canterbury Tale. Anyway, I couldn’t do the commentary on Tales of Hoffmann with Marty. But, back in the old days in New York, Marty and I were the only two people who would rent a 16mm copy of the film. Every time I found it was out I knew that he had it and each time he wanted it he knew who had it! So that made us buddies.”
― George A. Romero, George A. Romero: Interviews

“Film analysis enables us to recognize how the filmmakers have their magic on us, how all the constituent elements of the film have combined to create that magic. Rather than rob us of the pleasures of watching films, this approach affords us the even greater pleasure of deep engagement”
― Jon Lewis, Essential Cinema: An Introduction to Film Analysis

“Far from being a pack of baying butchers,critics sometimes have a perverse habit of tending to the sick and wounded on the cinematic field of battle, rushing in where angels fear to tread, even when the patient is clearly without a pulse.”
― Mark Kermode, Hatchet Job: Love Movies, Hate Critics

“Creativity is a gift each one of us is born with, irrespective of our backgrounds and entitlement of culture, The challenge is to hold onto this gift as we go through life. To nurture it. To encourage it. Because every single day we encounter forces that would rather it went away.”
― Ali Mansoor Al Ali

“MINISTER: All he has done is to find some means of bewitching the intelligence. He has only induced a radical suspension of disbelief. As in the early days of the cinema, all the citizens are jumping through the screen to lay their hands on the naked lady in the bathtub!
AMBASSADOR: And yet, in fact, their fingers touch flesh.
MINISTER: They believe they do. Yet all they touch is substantial shadow.
AMBASSADOR: And what a beautiful definition of flesh! You know I am only substantial shadow, Minister, but if you cut me, I bleed. Touch me, I palpitate!”
― Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

“Le cinéma est un des rares arts où le spectateur a un complexe de supériorité vis-à-vis de la chose qu'il voit. Il a tendance à se marrer, à se foutre de ce qu'il y a sur l'écran”
― Claude Chabrol

“THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA(1929) the 'honesty' of documentary as compared with fiction film, the 'perfection' of the cinematic eye compared with human eye.”
― Steven Jay Schneider, 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

“For the casual viewer, Kurosawa’s films can be an exercise in endurance.”
― Jerry White, The Films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa: Master of Fear

“Stahl trailed him upstairs, across a mezzanine, and out into the darkness of the sloping balcony. Tom gave the aisle his torch so his guest could see. On the screen below a woman's head was wavering, two or three times larger than life. A metallic voice clanged out, echoing sepulchrally all over the house, like a modern Delphic Oracle. 'Go back, go back!' she said. 'This is no place for you!'

Her big luminous eyes seemed to be looking right at Lew Stahl as she spoke. Her finger came out and pointed, and it seemed to aim straight at him and him alone. It was weird; he almost stopped in his tracks, then went on again. He hadn't eaten all day; he figured he must be woozy, to think things like that. ("Dusk To Dawn")”
― Cornell Woolrich

“‏@BretEastonEllis 31 Mar
After watching the delirious Room 237 I realized that the worst thing happening to movies was the empowerment of the viewer via technology.”
― Bret Easton Ellis

“Apa yang mengkaitkan antara film dan pikiran penonton 'adalah gelombang kejut atau vibrasi syaraf dimana berarti kita tak dapat lagi mengatakan 'aku melihat, aku mendengar, melainkan aku MERASA' (Time-Image 158)”
― Deleuze

“Franklin knew that the truth lay with the winter night: the world was silent and black-and-white.”
― Steven Millhauser, Little Kingdoms

“Otak itu utuh. Otak itu layar. Saya tak percaya jika linguistik dan psikoanalisa menawarkan sesuatu yang berarti untuk sinema. Berbeda halnya dengan apa yang ditawarkan biologi otak --biologi molekular. Pikiran itu molekular. Kecepatan-kecepatan molekularlah yang mampu membuat kita mengatasi betapa lambatnya kita (tubuh) merespon. Tepatnya adalah karena sinema membekerjakan imaji di dalam gerak, atau gerak-auto, dengan demikian sinema tak pernah berhenti melacak sirkuit-sirkuit otak". Deleuze: The Brain is The Screen, An Interview”
― Deleuze

“Her first really great role, the one that cemented the “Jean Arthur character,” was as the wisecracking big-city reporter who eventually melts for country rube Gary Cooper in Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936). It was the first of three terrific films for Capra: Jean played the down-to-earth daughter of an annoyingly wacky family in Capra’s rendition of Kaufman and Hart’s You Can’t Take It With You (1938), and she was another hard-boiled city gal won over by a starry-eyed yokel in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). “Jean Arthur is my favorite actress,” said Capra, who had successfully worked with Stanwyck, Colbert and Hepburn. “. . . push that neurotic girl . . . in front of the camera . . . and that whining mop would magically blossom into a warm, lovely, poised and confident actress.” Capra obviously recognized that Jean was often frustrated in her career choice.”
― Eve Golden, Bride of Golden Images

“La única comunicación adecuada con el espectador es ésta: permanecer fiel a sí mismo. Sin concesión alguna a ese ochenta por ciento de espectadores de cine que, por motivos indescifrables, exigen de nosotros, los directores, que les entretengamos. A la vez, nosotros los directores hemos empezado a despreciar tanto ese ochenta por ciento de espectadores, que estamos dispuestos a entretenerles, puesto que de ellos depende la financiación de la próxima película: una situación sin salida.”
― Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time