Quotes About Avant-garde

There is absolutely no point in not being a populist. What I feel emboldened to do is to take something which is a minority interest and make it accessible without dumbing it down. I'm such an enthusiast for peculiar things, things that are perhaps a bit avant-garde, and try and involve everyone.

Varese, Apollinaire, Ezra Pound, Leger, Gleizes, Severini, Villon, Duchamp, Duchamp-Villon, Marie Laurencin, Cocteau and many others were to me household names in the literal sense - names of familiar figures around the house.

I want to do more new-age content, look beyond conventional cinema.

I don't want to go with conventional thinking.

I'm a complete deviant. All creative work breaks new ground.

Basically, I have always wanted to have an art-house cinema. A cinema where we can show films that are not necessarily the current offerings on circuit and films that are not commercial.

I don't like most contemporary art. But I think if you talked to any person who's heavily involved in contemporary art, they'd say the same thing. If you go to a biennale, you don't expect to like much of it.

AESTHETICS OF AVANT-GARDE THEATRE Make the stage an actor Make an actor the stage.

Avant-garde means never having to say you're sorry.

I don't have a lot of patience for boring arthouse movies.

People think I write weird, but there are people at Death Equinox that make me look like Danielle Steele.

I like to take risks and do weird things and stuff that's not normal compared to other Hollywood movies. Not stuff that's totally avant garde and daring, but doing stuff that's in other languages and not using stars and using real people - things that they generally don't do in mainstream films.

I want to write weirder stuff and convince people that it's Top 40.

Living and performing in New York has allowed me to try my weirder and more experimental things.

I want to be known as a professional weirdo. There aren't many Salvador Dalis or Buckminster Fullers left. If I become popular enough, I can establish the next step for records.

In narrative cinema, a certain terminology has already been established: 'film noir,' 'Western,' even 'Spaghetti Western.' When we say 'film noir' we know what we are talking about. But in non-narrative cinema, we are a little bit lost. So sometimes, the only way to make us understand what we are talking about is to use the term 'avant-garde.'

I like to wear things that are daring but also not seem too avant-garde.

There is certainly a part of my filmmaking that harkens to a more simpler commercial kind of taste, but then with this there's certainly a kind of avant-garde, abstract, existential element to it.

In many respects, I guess I would say I was into Tea Party before there was a Tea Party.

I like fantasy. I like horror, science fiction because I can get avant-garde with those performances in those movies.

Life is difficult for those who have the daring to first set out on an unknown road. The avant-garde always has a bad time of it.

In much postmodern theatre ... the line between theatre and non-theatre is deliberately erased.

But [Ben Marcus] can't resist the urge to re-enact the great prizefights of the past--Kerouac vs. Capote, Barth vs. Gardner--as if what we really need, in 2005, is two white male writers fighting over something that can't be circumscribed, much less owned. Isn't it time we allowed the scorched-earth rhetoric of avant-gardes and ancien régimes to drift, like the tissue-thin sheets of an old aerogramme, into the dustbin of history?

You have to do stuff that average people don't understand because those are the only good things.