Quotes on Cinema

I'm one of those people who says, 'yes, cinema died when they invented sound.'

Feudal societies don't create great cinema; we have great theatre. The egalitarian societies create great cinema. The Americans, the French. Because equality is sort of what the cinema deals with. It deals with stories which don't fall into 'Everybody in their place and who's who,' and all that. But the theatre's full of that.

I never studied anything about film technique in school. Eventually, I realized that cinema and theater are not so different: from the gut to the heart to the head of a character is the same journey for both.

I was born at a bad time for Spain, but a really good one for cinema.

What happened in the late Fifties, early Sixties in French cinema was a fantastic revolution. I was in Italy, but completely in love with the nouvelle vague movement, and directors like Godard, Truffaut, Demy. 'The Dreamers' was a total homage to cinema and that love for it.

Cinema is a little over 100 years old, and a lot of what we do is built around film emulsion. Those things were calibrated for white skin. We've always placed powder on skin to dull the light. But my memory of growing up in Miami is this moist, beautiful black skin.

If, in 2014, we're still making 'white savior movies,' then it's just lazy and unfortunate. We've grown up as a country, and cinema should be able to reflect what's true. And what's true is that black people are the center of their own lives and should tell their own stories from their own perspectives.

A message I've been telling myself: the cinema is very conservative, and unless you have a story that satisfies you, that is within the unchallenging zone, but you love it, you can't do it as cinema. Otherwise, you better go do it for television, which is more daring now.

Everybody has something that chews them up and, for me, that thing was always loneliness. The cinema has the power to make you not feel lonely, even when you are.

I like it when somebody tells me a story, and I actually really feel that that's becoming like a lost art in American cinema.

If there's specific resistance to women making movies, I just choose to ignore that as an obstacle for two reasons: I can't change my gender, and I refuse to stop making movies.

If you don’t like the films of Samuel Fuller , then you just don’t like cinema.

Juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, collating him with a countless number of people passing by close to him and far away, relating a person to the whole world, that is the meaning of cinema.

Hong Kong cinema is something you can't duplicate anyway.

ALL ART, OF COURSE, IS INTELLECTUAL, BUT FOR ME, ALL THE ARTS, AND CINEMA EVEN MORE SO, MUST ABOVE ALL BE EMOTIONAL AND ACT UPON THE HEART.

IN CINEMA IT IS NECESSARY NOT TO EXPLAIN, BUT TO ACT UPON THE VIEWER'S FEELINGS, AND THE EMOTION WHICH IS AWOKEN IS WHAT PROVOKES THOUGHT.

Certainly, the Hollywood cinema, there's almost nothing of interest coming out of there.

Cinema without risk is like having no sex and expecting to have a baby.

Cinema is consistently making a claim to particular memories, histories, ways of life, identities, and values that always presuppose some notion of difference, community, and the future. Given that films both reflect and shape public culture, they cannot be defined exclusively through a notion of artistic freedom and autonomy that removes them from any form of critical accountability.

The task of cinema or any other art form is not to translate hidden messages of the unconscious soul into art but to experiment with the effects contemporary technical devices have on nerves, minds, or souls.

Very broadly, literature concerns itself with the internal, cinema with the external.