Cinema Quotes

Borges's extreme architecture attempts to visualize the universe by assigning to every object real and unreal, now and yet to come, a code or sign, a corresponding figure within the Library. It seeks to render totality visible, to effect a total visibility and visuality. The Library of Babel is a view of the universe inside and out, an X-ray of the universe and universal X-ray, seen from within and without. It is a representation of everywhere: a perfect duplication of the universe. And of you: universal. An endless and eternal cinema, an imaginary archive that extends into the universe until it is indistinguishable from it, until you are indistinguishable from the universe.

~ Akira Mizuta Lippit

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

Bette Davis lived long enough to hear the Kim Carnes song, 'Bette Davis Eyes'. The lyrics to that song were not very interesting. But the fact of the song was the proof of an acknowledgement that in the twentieth century we lived through an age of immense romantic personalities larger than life, yet models for it, too - for good or ill. Like twin moons, promising a struggle and an embrace, the Davis eyes would survive her - and us. Kim Carnes has hardly had a consistent career, but that one song - sluggish yet surging, druggy and dreamy - became an instant classic. It's like the sigh of the islanders when they behold their Kong. And I suspect it made the real eyes smile, whatever else was on their mind.

~ David Thomson

But this is the ultimate contradiction of cinema. It's a medium BORN of technology, AFRAID of technology and evolving towards the future BECAUSE OF technology.

~ Edward Ross

Today cinema can place all its talent, all its technology in the service of reanimating what it itself contributed to liquidating. It only resurrects ghosts, and it itself is lost therein.

~ Jean Baudrillard

In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call 'photographs of people talking.' When we tell a story in cinema we should resort to dialogue only when it's impossible to do otherwise. I always try to tell a story in the cinematic way, through a succession of shots and bits of film in between.

~ Alfred Hitchcock

An artist is a provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one. It’s this in-between that I’m calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one. That is the realm of the artist.

~ Federico Fellini

A Film has the potential to kindle such a spark of inspiration in an individual that it can alter the course of human progress.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Entertain, but also, give the viewer something to think about.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Healthy entertainment does not evoke raw emotions in the mind of a viewer only to make them wreak havoc, rather it guides those emotions in a healthy direction.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Healthy entertainment is a beautiful blend of stimuli that can connect with the viewer at a sentimental level, then sow the seeds of a certain idea or feed the mind with inspiration and courage. In short, healthy entertainment does not evoke raw emotions in the mind of a viewer only to make them wreak havoc, rather it guides those emotions in a healthy direction. This leads to not only an entertained viewer, but also an inspired soul. And that should be the purpose of film-making, and indeed the entire entertainment industry, rather than feeding the general population with garbage.

~ Abhijit Naskar

The cinema is an invention without any future.

~ Louis Lumière

All you need for a movie is a gun and a cat.

~ Jean-Luc Godard

That spring was the start of everything, for me. Before then, I might have been half-asleep, drifting through life.

~ Lucy Foley

I foresee no possibility of venturing into themes showing a closer view of reality for a long time to come. The public itself will not have it. What it wants is a gun and a girl.

~ D.w. Griffith

Some stories, some visions, demand celluloid film and what it can deliver.

~ Kodak Eastman

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 Almodóvar

Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing

~ Robert Bresson

Oh how Shakespeare would have loved cinema!

~ Derek Jarman

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 Almodóvar

Franklin knew that the truth lay with the winter night: the world was silent and black-and-white.

~ Steven Millhauser

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.)

~ Martin Amis

Sometimes, watching a movie is a bit like being raped.

~ Luis Buñuel

When less than everything has been said about a subject, you can still think on further. The alternative is for the audience to be presented with a final deduction (...) no effort on their part.What can it mean to them when they have not shared with the author the misery and joy of bringing an image into being?

~ Andrei Tarkovsky

Am I in the wrong place here, or in the wrong life? Did I not recognize, as I sat in a train that raced past a station and did not stop, that I was on the wrong train, and did I not learn from the conductor that the train would not stop at the next station, either, a hundred kilometers away, and did he not also admit to me, whispering with his hand shielding his mouth, that the train would not stop again at all?

~ Werner Herzog

R means under 18 accompanied by an adult. Therefore all corporately funded films in the US must be made with the concept that those under the age of 18 are able to view the film. This means all corporately funded films in the US are made for the eyes of children.

~ Crispin Hellion Glover

Avoid the tyranny of the reasonable voice...it will guarantee a complacency of never trying anything adventurous...

~ J. Michael Straczynski

In my experience there are billions of dollars available for pieces of shit. As soon as the material distinguishes itself by something interesting, financing becomes a problem.

~ Rutger Hauer

The body lay outside an abandoned, boarded-up theater. The theater had started as a first-run movie house, many years back when the neighborhood had still been fashionable. As the neighborhood began rotting, the theater began showing second-run films, and then old movies, and finally foreign-language films.

~ Ed Mcbain

[Luchino] Visconti came from the Milanese branch of one of Europe’s oldest families, whose roots can be traced back to the early 13th century. He might have appeared as a character in one of his own films about the aristocracy, such as Senso or The Leopard – that’s the life he was born into. But at a certain point in the 1930s, his passion for theatre, opera and the cinema set him on a radically different path.(...)He has often been referred to as a great political artist, but that’s too limiting and frozen a description. His sense of European history was vast and he knew the lives of the rich and powerful first hand – but at a certain point he became drawn to understand the other side of life, that of the poor and powerless. He had a strong sense of the particular manner in which absolutely everyone, from the Sicilian fishermen in his neorealist classic La Terra Trema to the Venetian aristocrats in Senso, was affected by the grand movements of history.

~ Martin Scorsese

Cinema is a language. It can say things—big, abstract things. And I love that about it. I’m not always good with words. Some people are poets and have a beautiful way of saying things with words. But cinema is its own language. And with it you can say so many things, because you’ve got time and sequences. You’ve got dialogue. You’ve got music. You’ve got sound effects. You have so many tools. And you can express a feeling and a thought that can’t be conveyed any other way. Its a magical medium. For me, it’s so beautiful to think about these pictures and sounds flowing together in time and in sequence, making something that can be done only through cinema. Its not just words or music-it’s a whole range of elements coming together and making something that didn’t exist before. It’s telling stories. It’s devising a world, an experience, that people cannot have unless they see that film. When I catch an idea for a film, I fall in love with the way cinema can express it. I like a story that holds abstractions, and that’s what cinema can do.

~ David Lynch

If California is a state of mind, Hollywood is where you take its temperature. There is a peculiar sense in which this city existing mainly on film and tape is our national capital, alas, and not just the capital of California. It's the place where our children learn how and what to dream and where everything happens just before, or just after, it happens to us.

~ Ross Macdonald

Outside the cinema I had not yet learned to live, but within it I had most certainly learned to die. I could die for you in every way known to man, and in a few ways known only to scriptwriters. I could see now that provided that I remained fit, the future held many more deaths yet. I could only hope that they would serve some purpose, and that perhaps a reputation may come in the same way as a coral formation, which is made up of a deposit of countless tiny corpses.

~ Christopher Lee

People see a Macbeth film. They imagine they have seen Macbeth, and don't want to see it again; so when your Mr. Hackett or somebody comes round to act the play, he finds the house empty. That is what has happened to dozens of good plays whose authors have allowed them to be filmed. It shall not happen to mine if I can help it.

~ George Bernard Shaw

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.

~ Werner Herzog

[Cinema]… obeys the laws of the mind rather than those of the outer world.

~ Hugo Munsterberg

For such an advanced civilization as ours to be without images that are adequate to it is as serious a defect as being without memory.

~ Werner Herzog

Hey, I got an idea, let’s go to the movies. I wanna go to the movies, I want to take you all to the movies. Let’s go and experience the art of the cinema. Let’s begin with the Scream Of Fear, and we are going to haunt us for the rest of our lives. And then let’s go see The Great Escape, and spend our summer jumping our bikes, just like Steve McQueen over barb wire. And then let’s catch The Seven Samurai for some reason on PBS, and we’ll feel like we speak Japanese because we can read the subtitles and hear the language at the same time. And then let’s lose sleep the night before we see 2001: A Space Odyssey because we have this idea that it’s going to change forever the way we look at films. And then let’s go see it four times in one year. And let’s see Woodstock three times in one year and let’s see Taxi Driver twice in one week. And let’s see Close Encounters of the Third Kind just so we can freeze there in mid-popcorn. And when the kids are old enough, let’s sit them together on the sofa and screen City Lights and Stage Coach and The Best Years of Our Lives and On The Waterfront and Midnight Cowboy and Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show and Raging Bull and Schindler’s List… so that they can understand how the human condition can be captured by this amalgam of light and sound and literature we call the cinema.

~ Tom Hanks

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

In all of its operations, cinema ceaselessly strives, and fails, to make present a world hopelessly beyond grasp. For this reason cinema is, in its very nature, a nihilistic medium.

~ John Marmysz