What critics call dirty in our pictures, they call lusty in foreign films.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the double standards in how critics assess art from different cultures.
Billy Wilder's quote exposes the hypocrisy in the way critics label and judge artworks based on cultural biases. What is deemed inappropriate or 'dirty' in one context may be celebrated or viewed as passionate and expressive in another, particularly when it comes to foreign films versus domestic ones. This reflects larger societal attitudes toward sexuality, art, and the subjective nature of criticism.
In practice
In a film studies class while discussing cultural differences in film reception.
Film’s thought of as a director’s medium because the director creates the end product that appears on the screen. It’s that stupid auteur theory again, that the director is the author of the film. But what does the director shoot-the telephone book? Writers became much more important when sound came in, but they’ve had to put up a valiant fight to get the credit they deserve.
I have ten commandments. The first nine are, thou shalt not bore. The tenth is, thou shalt have right of final cut.
Happiness is working with Jack Lemmon.
Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.
I'd worship the ground you walked on if only you walked in a better neighborhood.
He has Van Gogh's ear for music.
Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.
Writers write these male stereotypes, and it makes it ten times more interesting if a woman says the lines.
What I've learned over the years is that the craft of songwriting is trying to take the personal and make it universal - or in the case of telling a story, taking the universal and making it personal.
If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed.
Science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.
Jazz is not just 'Well, man, this is what I feel like playing.' It's a very structured thing that comes down from a tradition and requires a lot of thought and study.
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