Quotes About Cinema

My father used to say that you could only access culture before cinema by learning to read and write, but that once cinema was invented, knowledge was available to anybody.

Going to the cinema is like returning to the womb; you sit there, still and meditative in the darkness, waiting for life to appear on the screen.

If I wasn't an actress I'd want to be a writer or else find a job where I got to read books and watch movies all day, everyday, for the rest of my life.

My father comes from a generation of film that actors my age don't even know about, which is really sad.

Papá, es que yo quiero estar siempre en el cine, quiero vivir en el cine...

Italian neorealism contrasts with previous forms of film realism in its stripping away of all expressionism and in particular in the total absence of the effects of montage. As in the films of Welles and in spite of conflicts of style, neorealism tends to give back to the cinema a sense of the ambiguity of reality.

and de Sica are less spectacular but they are no less determined to do away with montage and to transfer to the screen the continuum of reality.

Photography and the cinema on the other hand are discoveries that satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism. No matter how skillful the painter, his work was always in fee to an inescapable subjectivity. The fact that a human hand intervened cast a shadow of doubt over the image.

The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world more in harmony with our desires.

it was montage that gave birth to film as an art, setting it apart from mere animated photography, in short, creating a language.

The preoccupation of Rossellini when dealing with the face of the child in Allemania Anno Zero is the exact opposite of that of Kuleshov with the close-up of Mozhukhin. Rossellini is concerned to preserve its mystery.

Italian cinema is assuredly the only one to salvage, from within the very period it depicts a revolutionary humanism.

In point of fact, now that sound has given proof that it came not to destroy but to fulfill the Old Testament of the cinema, we may most properly ask if the technical revolution created by the sound track was in any sense an aesthetic revolution.

The role of cinema here is not that of a servant nor is it to betray the painting. Rather it is to provide it with a new form of existence. The film of a painting is an aesthetic symbiosis of screen and painting, as is the lichen of the algae and mushroom. To be annoyed by this is as ridiculous as to condemn the opera on behalf of theater and music.

neorealism runs counter to the traditional categories of spectacle—above all, as regards acting

Finally, the breaking up of the scenes into shots and their assemblage is the equivalent of an expressionism

He loved the cinema, but still more he loved life, people, animals, the sciences, the arts;

FOREWORD by François Truffaut

the literary critic is guilty of imprudently prejudging the true nature of cinema, based on a very superficial definition of what is here meant by reality. Because its basic material is photography it does not follow that the seventh art is of its nature dedicated to the dialectic of appearances and the psychology of behavior. While

In a world already once again obsessed by terror and hate, in which reality is scarely any longer favored for its own sake but rather is rejected or excluded as a political symbol, the Italian cinema is certainly the only one which preserves, in the midst of the period it depicts, a revolutionary humanism.

Is not neorealism primarily a kind of humanism and only secondarily a style of film-making?

The lamentable expression: 'But it was only a dream", the increasing use of which - among others in the domain of the cinema - has contributed not a little to encourage such hypocrisy, has for a long while ceased to merit discussion.

It is at the movies that the only absolutely modern mystery is celebrated.

Painting was forced, as it turned out, to offer us illusion and this illusion was reckoned sufficient unto art. Photography and the cinema on the other hand are discoveries that satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism.