I’m just a storyteller, and the cinema happens to be my medium. I like it because it recreates life in movement, enlarges it, enhances it, distills it. For me, it’s far closer to the miraculous creation of life than, say, a painting or music or even literature. It’s not just an art form; it’s actually a new form of life, with its own rhythms, cadences, perspectives and transparencies. It’s my way of telling a story.
Interpretation
Fellini highlights cinema as a powerful art form that captures and enriches life through storytelling.
In this quote, Federico Fellini expresses his profound appreciation for cinema as a unique medium for storytelling. He believes that film not only represents life but also enhances and transforms it into an experience that is dynamic and multifaceted. Unlike static forms of art like painting or literature, cinema possesses its own distinct qualities—rhythms and perspectives—that allow for a deeper engagement with storytelling and life's complexities.
In practice
This quote could be used in a film studies class to discuss the significance of cinema as an art form.
Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second, and you can hop from one place to another. It's a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.
No critic writing about a film could say more than the film itself, although they do their best to make us think the oppposite.
A created thing is never invented and it is never true: it is always and ever itself.
What's important is the way we say it. Art is all about craftsmanship. Others can interpret craftsmanship as style if they wish. Style is what unites memory or recollection, ideology, sentiment, nostalgia, presentiment, to the way we express all that. It's not what we say but how we say it that matters.
We can all pretend to be cynical and scheming, but when we’re faced with purity and innocence, the cynical mask drops off.
What is an artist? 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 - which is really the realm of the artist.
They say that to be a writer you must first have an unhappy childhood. I don't know if unhappiness is necessary, but I think maybe some children who have suffered a loss too great for words grow up into writers who are always trying to find those words, trying to find a meaning for the way they have lived
It is important that we have the inner richness to be able to look up at the stars or the moon and compose a poem once in a while. When we open wide our minds and fix our gaze on the universe, we fix our gaze on our own life.
It's a constant challenge to get your arrangement and musical expression across to a new audience, especially when you're playing live every night like we are.
All my adult life I have been searching for the right adjective to describe my father's peculiarly aggressive comic style. I recently settled on 'defamatory.'
Cinema gives you the opportunity to be both a grandparent and a grandchild whereas in life you cannot be both at the same time.
For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.
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