56 Quotes About Cinema

Use filmmaking to eliminate racism — use to it terminate misogyny — use it to destroy homophobia and all other primitiveness. Abhijit Naskar

The art of filmmaking is the most influential form of art that has ever existed throughout the history of human artistic endeavors. Abhijit Naskar

A movie is not a movie, it is a potential nuclear furnace of inspiration, courage and conscience. Abhijit Naskar

Make movies my friend — make nice, inspiring and bold movies that will penetrate the darkest corners of the human mind and illuminate the soul. Abhijit Naskar

Use filmmaking for a greater purpose, than to just entertain some drowsy minds. Wake the whole world up with your movies. It has been sleeping for long. Its eternal sleep has become its darkest nemesis. Now is the time to wake it up. Abhijit Naskar

Take the clapper and become the alarm that the world so desperately needs. Abhijit Naskar

Whatever genre you deem suitable for your taste — romance, comedy, action, mystery, sci-fi or anything else, make sure it has the plain everyday human kindness. Abhijit Naskar

The Government set the stage economically by informing everyone that we were in a depression period, with very pointed allusions to the 1930s. The period just prior to our last 'good' war.. Boiled down, our objective was to make killing and military life seem like adventurous fun, so for our inspiration we went back to the Thirties as well. It was pure serendipity. Inside one of the Scripter offices there was an old copy of Doc Smith's first LENSMAN space opera. It turned out that audiences in the 1970s were more receptive to the sort of things they scoffed at as juvenilia in the 1930s. Our drugs conditioned them to repeat viewings, simultaneously serving the ends of profit and positive reinforcement. The movie we came up with stroked all the correct psychological triggers. The fact that it grossed more money than any film in history at the time proved how on target our approach was.'' Oh my God.. said Jonathan, his mouth stalling the open position.' Six months afterward we ripped ourselves off and got secondary reinforcement onto television. We pulled a 40 share. The year after that we phased in the video games, experimenting with non-narcotic hypnosis, using electrical pulses, body capacitance, and keying the pleasure centers of the brain with low voltage shocks. Jesus, Jonathan, can you *see* what we've accomplished? In something under half a decade we've programmed an entire generation of warm bodies to go to war for us and love it. They buy what we tell them to buy. Music, movies, whole lifestyles. And they hate who we tell them to.. It's simple to make our audiences slaver for blood; that past hasn't changed since the days of the Colosseum. We've conditioned a whole population to live on the rim of Apocalypse and love it. They want to kill the enemy, tear his heart out, go to war so their gas bills will go down! They're all primed for just that sort of denouemment, ti satisfy their need for linear storytelling in the fictions that have become their lives! The system perpetuates itself. Our own guinea pigs pay us money to keep the mechanisms grinding away. If you don't believe that, just check out last year's big hit movies.. then try to tell me the target demographic audience isn't waiting for marching orders. ("Incident On A Rainy Night In Beverly Hills") . David J. Schow

Gene [Siskel] often mentioned something François Truffaut once told him: the most beautiful sight in a movie theater is to walk down to the front, turn around, and look at the light from the screen reflected on the upturned faces of the members of the audience. Roger Ebert

There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life. Federico Fellini

Reality is not art, but a realist art is one that can create an integral aesthetic of reality. Unknown

She was born under the sign of Gemini. And that stands for the good and evil twin. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde both hiding and residing inside her heart. Her good twin was not bad at all. But her evil twin was even better, and showed up to be way too fatal! Ana Claudia Antunes

I look at the world and I see absurdity all around me. People do strange things constantly, to the point that, for the most part, we manage not to see it. David Lynch

He sank back into his black-and-white world, his immobile world of inanimate drawings that had been granted the secret of motion, his death-world with its hidden gift of life. But that life was a deeply ambiguous life, a conjurer's trick, a crafty illusion based on an accidental property of the retina, which retained an image for a fraction of a second after the image was no longer present. On this frail fact was erected the entire structure of the cinema, that colossal confidence game. The animated cartoon was a far more honest expression of the cinematic illusion than the so-called realistic film, because the cartoon reveled in its own illusory nature, exulted in the impossible--indeed it claimed the impossible as its own, exalted it as its own highest end, found in impossibility, in the negation of the actual, its profoundest reason for being. The animated cartoon was nothing but the poetry of the impossible--therein lay its exhilaration and its secret melancholy. For this willful violation of the actual, while it was an intoxicating release from the constriction of things, was at the same time nothing but a delusion, an attempt to outwit mortality. As such it was doomed to failure. And yet it was desperately important to smash through the constriction of the actual, to unhinge the universe and let the impossible stream in, because otherwise--well, otherwise the world was nothing but an editorial cartoon. Steven Millhauser

A movie that gets closer to the life's reality of the society finds always more words of mouth publicity in entirety. Testy McTesterson

Dying is not a solution.. I want to live with You..! K. Hari Kumar

In childhood we inhabit a world of wonderful contrasts that later we often come to see as bizarre and do our best to rearrange, with everything in its 'proper' place. Unusual juxtapositions we label surrealistic. Yet what is surrealism but a second childhood with Freudian overtones which we have to be re-educated to enjoy? -- part of the tragedy of growing up Ken Russell

Creativity is a gift each one of us is born with, irrespective of our backgrounds and entitlement of culture, The challenge is to hold onto this gift as we go through life. To nurture it. To encourage it. Because every single day we encounter forces that would rather it went away. Unknown

The angel said, "I like black-and-white films more than color because they're more artificial. You have to work harder to overcome your disbelief. It's sort of like prayer. Jonathan Carroll

Merleau-Ponty's painting inhabits the same rhetoric as early cinema: it makes the invisible visible, or rather it makes visibility visible; it forms from the thresholds of the visible and invisible world, an order, mode, or aesthetic of visuality. Not only of the small or fast, but of visibility as such. The visuality of the visible and the invisible is found in the mixture of the body and its world, of your body and your world, all your worlds, all your bodies in this world and all those others. Painting is the process by which the visuality of the visible and invisible is made manifest: "Painting mixes up all our categories in laying out its oneiric universe of carnal essences, of effective likenesses, of mute meanings." Each painting is a universal archive, a picture of the universe, a universal image–and like a dream. . Akira Mizuta Lippit

Don't be a zombie for anyone, if your oppressor likes zombies, cinemas are not located in mars. Michael Bassey Johnson

Film does not replace language, for it cannot exist without it. Film displaces language, exposes the abyss that threatens to engulf every semantic signification. Film parasitizes language, much as the animal does, drawing into its imaginary panorama that which remains undisclosed in discursivity. Cinema is a parasite. Akira Mizuta Lippit

Borges's extreme architecture attempts to visualize the universe by assigning to every object real and unreal, now and yet to come, a code or sign, a corresponding figure within the Library. It seeks to render totality visible, to effect a total visibility and visuality. The Library of Babel is a view of the universe inside and out, an X-ray of the universe and universal X-ray, seen from within and without. It is a representation of everywhere: a perfect duplication of the universe. And of you: universal. An endless and eternal cinema, an imaginary archive that extends into the universe until it is indistinguishable from it, until you are indistinguishable from the universe. Akira Mizuta Lippit

The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief–call it what you will–than any book ever written; it has emptied more churches than all the counterattractions of cinema, motor bicycle and golf course. A.a. Milne

An artist is 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. That is the realm of the artist. Federico Fellini

A Film has the potential to kindle such a spark of inspiration in an individual that it can alter the course of human progress. Abhijit Naskar

Entertain, but also, give the viewer something to think about. Abhijit Naskar

Healthy entertainment does not evoke raw emotions in the mind of a viewer only to make them wreak havoc, rather it guides those emotions in a healthy direction. Abhijit Naskar

Healthy entertainment is a beautiful blend of stimuli that can connect with the viewer at a sentimental level, then sow the seeds of a certain idea or feed the mind with inspiration and courage. In short, healthy entertainment does not evoke raw emotions in the mind of a viewer only to make them wreak havoc, rather it guides those emotions in a healthy direction. This leads to not only an entertained viewer, but also an inspired soul. And that should be the purpose of film-making, and indeed the entire entertainment industry, rather than feeding the general population with garbage. . Abhijit Naskar

All you need for a movie is a gun and a cat. JeanLuc Godard

That spring was the start of everything, for me. Before then, I might have been half-asleep, drifting through life. Lucy Foley

Some stories, some visions, demand celluloid film and what it can deliver. Kodak Eastman

Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing Robert Bresson

Franklin knew that the truth lay with the winter night: the world was silent and black-and-white. Steven Millhauser

If California is a state of mind, Hollywood is where you take its temperature. There is a peculiar sense in which this city existing mainly on film and tape is our national capital, alas, and not just the capital of California. It's the place where our children learn how and what to dream and where everything happens just before, or just after, it happens to us. Ross Macdonald

People see a Macbeth film. They imagine they have seen Macbeth, and don't want to see it again; so when your Mr. Hackett or somebody comes round to act the play, he finds the house empty. That is what has happened to dozens of good plays whose authors have allowed them to be filmed. It shall not happen to mine if I can help it. George Bernard Shaw

In this business, until you're known as a monster, you're not a star Bette Davis

The appeal of cinema lies in the fear of death. Jim Morrison

Cinema sustains life. It captures death in its progress. Harmony Korine

Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater. Roman Polanski

A cinema villain essentially needs a moustache so he can twiddle with it gleefully as he cooks up his next nasty plan. Mel Brooks

Cinema is a world of imagination. Marjane Satrapi

I'd like to be for cinema what Shakespeare was for theatre, Marx for politics and Freud for psychology: someone after whom nothing is as it used to be. Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Cinema reflects culture and there is no harm in adapting technology, but not at the cost of losing your originality. Jackie Chan

I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas. JeanLuc Godard

That's what I like about film-it can be bizarre, classic, normal, romantic. Cinema is to me the most versatile thing. Catherine Deneuve

American cinema tends to express a patriotic relationship to national identity on a regular basis. Tom Hooper

A visit to a cinema is a little outing in itself. It breaks the monotony of an afternoon or evening; it gives a change from the surroundings of home, however pleasant. Ivor Novello