There's no such thing as an anti-war film.
Francois TruffautRead
Is the cinema more important than life?
Interpretation
This quote questions the value and significance of cinema in relation to actual life experiences.
Francois Truffaut's quote reflects a deep philosophical inquiry into the role of cinema in our lives. It provokes thought about whether the art of film holds greater weight or importance compared to the richness and complexity of real life. By juxtaposing cinema with life, Truffaut invites us to consider the impact of storytelling through film and its ability to reflect, shape, or even distract from our lived experiences.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the role of cinema in society during a film studies class.
There's no such thing as an anti-war film.
But the cinephile is … a neurotic! (That’s not a pejorative term.) The Bronte sisters were neurotic, and it’s because they were neurotic that they read all those books and became writers. The famous French advertising slogan that says, “When you love life, you go to the movies,” it’s false! It’s exactly the opposite: when you don’t love life, or when life doesn’t give you satisfaction, you go to the movies.
I love the way she projects two facets: a visible persona and a subterranean one. She keeps her thoughts to herself; she seems to suggest that her secret, inner life is at least as significant as the appearance she gives.
I want my audience to be constantly captivated, bewitched, so that it leaves the theatre dazed, stunned to be back on the pavement.
To be a film-maker, you are almost forced to be surrounded by contradictions... You must have talents of so many different kinds - talents that are contradictory.
The film of tomorrow will not be directed by civil servants of the camera, but by artists for whom shooting a film constitutes a wonderful and thrilling adventure.
I find it relatively easy to keep my clothes on because I don't really feel like taking them off. It's not an urge I have. For me, 'risky' is revealing what really happened in my life through music. Risky is writing confessional songs and telling the true story about a person with enough details so everyone knows who that person is. That's putting myself out there, maybe even more than taking my shirt off.
I don't think art is propaganda; it should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it.
But...books are so much more. Some of them are webs; you can feel your way along their threads, but just barely, into strange and dark corners. Some of them are balloons bobbing up through the sky: totally self-contained, and unreachable, but beautiful to watch. And some of them―the best ones―are doors.
To me, music is a river. I have lived my life beside the river. Every day, I get up and look at the river. I watch it and notice when it rises and falls.
Our easiest approach to a definition of any aspect of fiction is always by considering the sort of demand it makes on the reader. Curiosity for the story, human feelings and a sense of value for the characters, intelligence and memory for the plot. What does fantasy ask of us? It asks us to pay something extra.
The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.
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