ENGL 3870, Film History Online: Movie Quotes

Movie Quotes

Balázs, Béla, Hungarian filmmaker and theorist	Now the film has brought us the silent soliloquy, in which a face can speak with the subtlest shades of meaning without appearing unnatural and arousing the distaste of the spectators. In this silent monologue, the solitary human soul can find a tongue more candid and uninhibited that in any spoken soliloquy, for its speaks instinctively, subconsciously. The language of the face [its "physiognomy"] cannot be suppressed or controlled.
Bazin, André, French film critic	[The neo-realists] are concerned to make cinema the asymptote of reality but in order that it should ultimately be life itself that becomes spectacle, in order that life might in this perfect mirror be visible poetry, be the self into which film finally changes it. Only the impassive lens, stripping its object of all those ways of seeing it, those piled-up preconceptions, that spiritual dust and grime with which my eyes have covered it, is able to present ii in all its virginal purity to my attention and consequently to my love. By the power of photography, the natural image of a world that we neither know nor can know, nature at last does more than imitate art: she imitates the artist.
Berger, John, British art historian	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.
Bergman, Ingmar, Swedish film director	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.
Brakhage, Stan, American underground filmmaker	And then we have the camera eye, its lenses ground to achieve 19th-century Western compositional perspective . . . in bending the light and limiting the frame of the image just so, its standard camera and projector speed for recording movement geared to the feeling of the ideal slow Viennese waltz, and even its tripod head, being the neck it swings on, balled with bearings to permit it that Les Sylphides motion (ideal to the contemplative romantic and restricted to horizontal and vertical movements (pillars and horizon lines) a diagonal requiring a major adjustment, its lenses coated or provided with filters, its light meters balanced, and its color film manufactured to produce that picture post card effect (salon painting) exemplified by those of so blue skies and peachy skins.
Braudy, Leo, American film scholar	Genre films essentially ask the audience, "Do you still want to believe this?" Popularity is the audience answering, "Yes." Change in genre occurs when the audience says, "That's too infantile a form of what we believe. Show us something more complicated." And genres turn to self-parody to say, "Well, at least if we make fun of it for being infantile, it will show how far we've come." Films and television have in this way speeded up cultural history.
Bresson, Robert, French director	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.
Burch, Noel, French film theorist	Whatever his level of critical awareness, a viewer sitting in the dark alone and suddenly face to face with the screen is completely at the mercy of the filmmaker, who may do violence to him at any moment and through any means. Should the viewer be forced beyond the pain threshold, his defense mechanisms may well be called forth and he may remind himself that "it's only a movie" . . . but it will always be too late . . . the harm will already have been done; intense discomfort, and perhaps even terror, will already have crept across the threshold. (125-25)
Cavell, Stanley, American critic	How do movies reproduce the world magically? Not by literally presenting us with the world, but by permitting us to view it unseen. This is not a wish for power over creation (as Pygmalion's was), but a wish not to need power, not to have to bear its burdens. It is, in this sense, the reverse of the myth of Faust. And the wish for invisibility is old enough. Gods have profited from it, and Plato tells it at the end of the Republic as the Myth of the Ring of Gyges. In viewing films, the sense of invisibility is an expression of modern privacy or anonymity. It as though the world's projection explains our forms of unknownness and our inability to know. The explanation is not so much that the world is passing us by, as that we are displaced from our natural habitation within it, placed at a distance from it. The screen overcomes our fixed distance; it makes displacement appear as our natural condition.
Chandler, Raymond, American novelist and screenwriter	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. The motion picture is like a picture of a lady in a half-piece bathing suit. If she wore a few more clothes, you might be intrigued. If she wore no clothes at all, you might be shocked. But the way it is, you are occupied with noticing that her knees are too bony and that her toenails are too large. The modern film tries too hard to be real. Its techniques of illusion are so perfect that it requires no contribution from the audience but a mouthful of popcorn.
Cocteau, Jean, French filmmaker and poet	A film is a petrified fountain of thought.
DeLillo, Don, American novelist	Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It’s another part of the twentieth-century mind. It’s the world seen from inside. We’ve come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film. . . . You have to ask yourself if there’s anything about us more important than the fact that we’re constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.
Deutsch, Babette, American poet and critic	The cinema studio creates a looking-glass universe where, without bottles labeled "Drink me" or cakes labeled "Eat me" or keys to impossible gardens, creatures are elongated or telescoped, movements accelerated or slowed up, in a fashion suggesting that the world is made of India rubber or collapsible tin. The ghost of the future glimmers through the immediate scene, the present dissolves into the past.
Eco, Umberto, Italian semiotician and novelist	I think that in order to transform a work into a cult object one must be able to break, dislocate, unhinge it so that one can remember only parts of it, irrespective of their original relationship with the whole. In the case of a book one can unhinge it, so to speak, physically, reducing it to a series of excerpts. A movie, on the contrary, must be already ramshackle, rickety, unhinged in itself. A perfect movie, since it cannot be reread every time we want from the point we choose, as happens with a book, remains in our memory as a whole, in the form of a central idea or emotion; only an unhinged movie survives as a disconnected series of images, of peaks, of visual icebergs. It should display not one central idea but many. It should not reveal a coherent philosophy of composition. It must live on, and because of, its glorious ricketiness.
Fellini, Federico, Italian film director	For me the only real artist is the visionary because he bears witness to his own reality. A visionary-Van Gogh, for instance-is a profound realist. That wheat field with the black sun is his; only he saw it. There can't be greater realism. (Samuels 226) Making a film is something quite other . . . than a simple professional fact. It's a way of realizing myself and giving my life a meaning. That's why, when you ask me which of my films I prefer, I'm stuck. I don't know what to say. I don't consider my films as professional facts; if I did so, I might be able to look at them objectively enough to say this one seems more of a success than that. But as it is, I find getting such a detached position absolutely impossible. The way I want to speak about a film is, not to say what I'm expressing in it, but the stages of my life I pass through making it. I have just the same difficulty as I would if somebody asked me "Which do you prefer, your military career, or your marriage, your first love, or meeting your first friend?" They are all facts of my life. I like it all, it's my life and consequently I can't choose. (Burgeon 91)
Fowles, John, British novelist	It is not perhaps entirely chance that the invention of motion photography, this sudden great leap in our powers of exploring and imitating the outward of perception, coincided so exactly with the journey into inner space initiated by Freud and his compeers. The year 1895 saw not only the very first film but also the publication of Studies in Hysteria, that is, the birth of psychoanalysis.
Frampton, Hollis, American underground filmmaker and theorist	I was born during the Age of Machines. A machine was a thing made up of distinguishable "parts," organized in imitation of some function of the human body. . . How a machine "worked" was readily apparent to an adept, from inspection of the shape of its working parts. . . . The cinema was the typical survival form of the Age of Machines. Together with still photographs, it performed prizeworthy functions: it taught and reminded us (after what then seemed a bearable delay) how things looked, how things worked, how we do things . . . and of course (by example) how to feel and think. We believed it would go on forever, but when I was a little boy, the Age of Machines ended. . . . Cinema is the Last Machine. It is probably the last art that will reach the mind through the senses.
Godard, Jean-Luc, French film director and theorist	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. All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl. "Movies should have a beginning, a middle and an end,’ harrumphed French film maker Georges Franju. . ." "Certainly," replied Jean-Luc Godard. "But not necessarily in that order."
Goldman, William, American screenwriter	As far as the filmmaking process is concerned, stars are essentially worthless—and absolutely essential.
Goldwyn, Sam, American film producer	Pictures are for entertainment, messages should be delivered by Western Union. Sincerity's the main thing, and once you learn to fake that everything else is easy.
Hecht, Ben, American playwright and screenwriter	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.
Herzog, Werner, German film director	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. We are surrounded by worn-out images, and we deserve new ones. Perhaps I seek certain utopian things, space for human honor and respect, landscapes not yet offended, planets that do not exist yet, dreamed landscapes. Very few people seek these images today which correspond to the time we live, pictures that can make you understand yourself, your position today, our status of civilization. I am one of the ones who try to find those images.
Hillman, James, American archetypal psychologist	Screened, watched stories are different because they enter imagination via perception, reinforcing the confusion between perceptual pictures and imaginative images. Pictures we perceive with our sense perception; images we imagine. Or, as Edward Casey puts it: an image is not a content that we see but a way in which we see.
Hitchcock, Alfred, British/American film director	For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake.
James, Clive, British critic	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.
Jung, Carl, Swiss archetypal psychologist	The cinema, like the detective story, makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be repressed in a humanitarian ordering of life.
Kael, Pauline, American film critic	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.
Kafka, Franz, Austrian writer	Of course [the cinema is] a marvelous toy. But I cannot bear it, because perhaps I am too "optical" by nature. I am an Eye-man. But the cinema disturbs one's vision. The speed of the movements and the rapid change of images forces men to look continually from one to another. Sight does not flood one's consciousness. The cinema involves putting the eye into uniform, where before it was naked. . . . Real life is only a reflection of the dreams of poets. The strings of the lines of modern poets are endless strips of celluloid.
Mc Carthy, Mary, American writer	The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.
Miller, Mark Crispin, American film and television scholar	Today's movies offer no utopia, because, they say, everything you'd ever want is here on sale. The movies make this pitch first by concentrating on, and glamorizing, the closed sites of shopping and consumption: nice restaurants and luminous department stores, and the clean and roomy cell wherein the star keeps his or her posters, sweaters, jackets, copper pots, appliances. And the movie makes the pitch by packaging itself as a commodity. Like any smoke or Coke or fast-food burger, it is an item whose appeal fails to outlast the moment that it takes to suck it in. And so going to the movies has become about as memorable as going to the airport. “Conceived and sold as product,” just like the many products that it sells, the movie passes right through you, leaving nothing in you but a vague, angry craving for another one. Today that craving is what keeps the movies going—and so they sell that kind of appetite, that infantile ravenousness, even as they offer you a daydream of your own tremendous strength.
Munier, Roger, French film theorist	Up to that time[of the first movie images] one said: the smoke is rising into the blue, the leaves are trembling; or the painting suggests such movements. In the cinema, however, the smoke itself is rising, the leaf really trembles: it declares itself as a leaf trembling in the wind. It is like a leaf that one encounters in nature and at the same time it is much more, from the moment when, in addition to being real, it is also, indeed primarily, a represented reality. If it were only a real leaf, it would wait for my observation in order to achieve significance. Because it is represented, divided in two by the image, it is already signified, offered in itself as a leaf trembling in the wind. (90-91) We try with our pathetic film syntax, with our editing and camera placement, to organize discourse or at least a view of the world. . . . it is always the world which has the last word. Forever opaque, it outlives the transparence of human speech. We have created machines and tools which no longer serve us but which serve a world that now commands us. (89) A world complete without me which is present to me is the world of my immortality. This is the importance of film--and a danger. It takes my life as my haunting of the world, either because I left it unloved (the Flying Dutchman) or because I left unfinished business (Hamlet). So there is reason for me to want the camera to deny the coherence of the world, its coherence as past: to deny that the world is complete without me. But there is equal reason to want it affirmed that the world is coherent without me. That is essential to what I want of immortality: nature's survival of me. It will mean that the present judgment upon me is not yet the last. (160)
O'Brien, Geoffrey, American film critic	It was for the construction of those micro-bubbles that human intelligence and science had evolved, that savants and engineers and whimsical caricaturists had put together the separate pieces of the great invention. In a roundabout, absurdly elaborated fashion- requiring special effects laboratories, wagonloads of art directors and prop men, years of systematic alchemical research-the brain had set about creating an image of itself, with a view toward projecting it into every corner of This Island Earth.
Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Italian poet and filmmaker	The cinema is substantially and naturally poetic. . . . it is dreamlike, because it is close to dreams, because a cinema sequence and a sequence of memory or of a dream and not only that but things in themselves are profoundly poetic: a tree photographed is poetic, a human face photographed is poetic because physicity is poetic in itself, because it is an apparition, because it is full of mystery, because it is full of ambiguity, because it is full of polyvalent meaning, because even a tree is a sign of a linguistic system. But who talks through a tree? God, or reality itself. Therefore the tree as a sign puts us in communication with a mysterious speaker. Therefore, the cinema by directly reproducing objects physically . . . is substantially poetic. This is one aspect of the problem, let's say pre-historic, almost pre-cinematographic.
Pennebaker, Don, American documentary filmmaker	I guess I think that films have to be made totally by fascists—there’s no room for democracy in making film.
Percy, Walker, American novelist	In the evenings I usually watch television or go to the movies. Week-ends I often spend on the Gulf Coast. Our neighborhood theater in Gentilly has permanent lettering on the front of the marquee reading: Where Happiness Costs So Little. The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in book. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.
Puttnam, David, British film producer	My belief is that no movie, nothing in life, leaves people neutral. You either leave them up or you leave them down.
Rogers, Will, American humorist	There’s only one thing that can kill the movies, and that’s education.
Robinson, W. R., American literary and film scholar	Once regarded as a puerile, cowardly escape from life because they begot and simulated dreaming, the movies are now recognizable as an extension of the supreme power inherent in a universe of energy, chance, evolution, explosiveness, and creativity. In such a youthful, exuberant universe the movies' kind of dreaming gives concrete probability and direction to the ongoing drive of energy, and as a consequence what at one time was thought to be a vitiating defect is now their greatest virtue. The new freedom they reflect and extend is freedom within the world, contingent and not absolute, a heightened vision of existence through concrete form beyond abstraction. In a world of light and a light world—unanalyzable, uninterpretable, without substance or essence, meaning or direction— being and non-being magically breed existence. Out of the darkness and chaos of the theater beams a light; out of nothingness is generated brilliant form, existence suspended somewhere between the extremes of total darkness and total light. Performing its rhythmic dance to energy's tune, the movie of the imagination proves, should there be any doubt, that cinema, an art of light, contributes more than any other art today to fleshing out the possibilities for good within an imaginative universe.
Schatz, Thomas, American film scholar	Thomas Schatz's life history of a genre (from Hollywood Genres) : an experimental stage, during which its conventions are isolated and established, a classic stage, in which the conventions reach their “equilibrium” and are mutually understood by artist and audience, an age of refinement, during which certain formal and stylistic details embellish the form, and finally a baroque (or “mannerist,” or “self-reflexive”) stage, when the form and its establishments are accented to the point where they “themselves become the “substance” or “content” of the work.” (37-38)
Sontag, Susan, American critic, theorist, and novelist	In good films, there is always a directness that entirely frees us from the itch to interpret.
Stone, Oliver, American film director	One of the joys of going to the movies was that it was trashy, and we should never lose that.
Stravinsky, Igor, Russian composer	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.
Tolstoi, Leo, Russian novelist	You will see that this little clicking contraption with the revolving handle will make a revolution in our life in the life of writers. It is a direct attack on the old methods of literary art. We shall have to adapt ourselves to the shadowy screen and to the cold machine. A new form of writing will be necessary. I have thought of that and I can feel what is coming. But I rather like it. The swift change of scene, this blending of emotion and experience it is much better than the heavy, long-drawn-out kind of writing to which we are accustomed. It is closer to life. In life, too, change and transitions flash by before our eyes, and emotions of the soul are like a hurricane. The cinema has divined the mystery of motion. And that is greatness.
Truffaut, Francois, French film director and critic	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.
Warhol, Andy, American pop artist, painter, and filmmaker	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.
Welles, Orson, American film director	The camera . . . is more than a recording apparatus, it is a means whereby messages from another world come to us, a world not ours, leading us to the heart of the great secret. 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. 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.
Wenders, Wim, German film director	The paradoxical thing is that films begin with words, and that words determine whether the images are allowed to be born. The words are like the headland that a film has to steer round to reach the image. It's at that point that many films go under. For all sorts of reasons (of which lack of money is the worst), they remain locked up in scripts that are never shot. Looked at like that, film history is like an iceberg: you only ever see the 10 per cent or so of completed films, the liberated image; the majority of them remain imprisoned in the ice, forever below the surface. As a boy, I often used to ask myself if there really was a god who saw everything. And how he managed not to forget any of it: the motion of the clouds in the sky, every individual's gestures and footsteps, the dreams . . . I said to myself that while it was impossible to imagine such a memory existing, it was even sadder and more desolating to think that it didn't and that everything was forgotten. This childish panic still upsets me. The story of all phenomena would be infinitely great, the story of all surviving images infinitesimally small. For centuries only poets and painters have taken up this gigantic work of memory. Then photographers made a valuable contribution, then cinema people, with ever greater sums of money and ever less understanding. Nowadays it's mostly television that conserves images. But the inflation of electronic images offered us by television seems so unworthy of being recalled that you have to ask yourself whether it wouldn't be better to return to the old traditions of poets and painters. It's better to have a few images that are full of life than masses of meaningless ones.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Culture and Value	A modern film is to an old one as a present-day motor car is to one built 25 years ago. The impression it makes is just as ridiculous and clumsy and the way film-making has improved is comparable to the sort of technical improvement we see in cars. It is not to be compared with the improvement—if it’s right to call it that—of an artistic style. It must be much the same with modern dance music too. A jazz dance, like a film, must be something that can be improved. What distinguishes all these developments from the formation of a style is that spirit plays no part in them.
Wolfenstein and Leites, American psychologists	What novels could tell, movies can show. Walls drop away before the advancing camera. No character need disappear by going off stage. The face of the heroine and the kiss of lovers are magnified for close inspection. The primal situation of excited and terrified looking, that of the child trying to see what happens at night, is recreated in the theater; the related wish to see everything is more nearly granted by the movies than by the stage. The movie audience is moreover insured against reaction or reproof from those whom they watch because the actors are incapable of seeing them. The onlooker becomes invisible.
Woolf, Virginia, British novelist and critic	A strange thing has happened—while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erhard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time.
Youngblood, Gene, American underground film theorist	By perpetuating a destructive habit of unthinking response to formulas, by forcing us to reply ever more frequently on memory, the commercial entertainer encourages an unthinking response to daily life, inhibiting self-awareness. Driven by the profit motive, the commercial entertainer dares not risk alienating us by attempoting new language even if he were capable of it. He seeks only to gratify preconditioned needs for formula stimulus. He offers nothing we haven’t already conceived, nothing we don’t already expect. Art explains; entertainment exploits. Art is freedom from the conditions of memory; entertainment is conditional on a present that is conditioned by the past. Entertainment gives us what we want; art gives us what don’t know we want. To confront a work of art is to confront oneself--but aspects of oneself previously unrecognized.