They say you can't study Kabbalah until you are at least 40 years old. You know why? You have to have experienced at least one generation making the same mistakes as the previous one.
David MametRead
Films have degenerated to their original operation as carnival amusement - they offer not drama but thrills.
Interpretation
Mamet suggests that films have lost their artistic depth and have reverted to simple entertainment.
In this quote, David Mamet critiques the modern state of cinema, indicating that films have strayed from their purpose of delivering profound narratives and emotional experiences. Instead, they have become mere sources of excitement and adrenaline, resembling the superficial entertainment found at carnivals rather than the dramatic artistry that elevates storytelling.
In practice
During a film discussion panel, one might quote Mamet to highlight a concern about cinematic trends.
They say you can't study Kabbalah until you are at least 40 years old. You know why? You have to have experienced at least one generation making the same mistakes as the previous one.
My alma mater is the Chicago Public Library. I got what little educational foundation I got in the third-floor reading room, under the tutelage of a Coca-Cola sign.
You know, young actors say all the time, 'Should I use my own life experience?' And my response is, 'What choice do you have?'
It's hard for a Jew of my generation, an American Jew, who is philo-Zionistic, not to romanticize Israel.
You can't write about history without writing about politics at some point. History is about movements of people. 'What is criminality and what is government' is a theme that runs through every history.
Every reiteration of the idea that nothing matters debases the human spirit.
Music is the framework around the silence.
When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf-life in some corner on an out-of-the-way library somehwere in Reykjavik, Valladolid or Vancouver.
Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images β as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past.
Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.
The thing a drama school can't give you is instinct. It can sharpen instinct but that can't be taught, and you have to have intuition. It's an essential ingredient.
Beauty is a primeval phenomenon, which itself never makes its appearance, but the reflection of which is visible in a thousand different utterances of the creative mind, and is as various as nature herself.
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