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.
I sit in the dark and wait for a little flame to appear at the end of my pencil.
This idea that a book can either be about character and feeling, or about politics and idea, is just a false binary. Ideas are an expression of the feelings and the intense emotions we hold about the world.
The first principle of architectural beauty is that the essential lines of a construction be determined by a perfect appropriateness to its use.
Surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do.
People expect things from art that are horrible for us who make it! They put the things we make in these restrictive places called 'museums,' then don't want to hear another word from us.
But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.
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