Best 605 quotes in «cinema quotes» category

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

Stahl trailed him upstairs, across a mezzanine, and out into the darkness of the sloping balcony. Tom gave the aisle his torch so his guest could see. On the screen below a woman's head was wavering, two or three times larger than life. A metallic voice clanged out, echoing sepulchrally all over the house, like a modern Delphic Oracle. 'Go back, go back!' she said. 'This is no place for you!' Her big luminous eyes seemed to be looking right at Lew Stahl as she spoke. Her finger came out and pointed, and it seemed to aim straight at him and him alone. It was weird; he almost stopped in his tracks, then went on again. He hadn't eaten all day; he figured he must be woozy, to think things like that. ("Dusk To Dawn")

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

Take things into your own hands, first off your hypnotic mind gazing back at all that's happened. Unlearn, speak up and your will is on the line every lifetime. Don't intrust authority, even your own.

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

The cellphone barometer is my method of judging audience engagement with a movie in a cinema. The number and frequency of phones lighting up the dark auditorium (or lack of them) tells you if the film is working or not.

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

The body lay outside an abandoned, boarded-up theater. The theater had started as a first-run movie house, many years back when the neighborhood had still been fashionable. As the neighborhood began rotting, the theater began showing second-run films, and then old movies, and finally foreign-language films.

The ideal way to ensure a healthy digestion is to go to the movies. The movie house is a place of truce, a non-combat area where, once the lights are dimmed and the film is running, the only reality is the movie itself. All the little realities of the individuals in the audience are canceled.

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")

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

The projector's beam lay warm on Walt's neck, and he knew they'd all been plucked from danger and love, from another time, another place, and set back into this dark, sticky-floored theater, in the heart of nothing much that mattered.

The Wikipedic superficiality and political frivolity with which these grand historical and psychological themes are applied to the gory drama are matched by the appropriation of a few jingling baubles of feminist dialogue meant to get viewers hungry for “substance” to salivate. They’re the product and the fruit of lazy filmmaking. The movie has nothing to say about women’s history, feminist politics, civil violence, the Holocaust, the Cold War, or German culture. Instead, Guadagnino thrusts some thusly labelled trinkets at viewers and suggests that they try to assemble them. The result is sordid, flimsy Holocaust kitsch, fanatical chic, with all the actual political substance of a designer Che T-shirt. When a few riffs of dialogue, midway through the film, speak of a character’s fate in Theresienstadt, one wants to tell the script to get that word out of its mouth.

They went along a balcony that looked down over the dining room and the dance floor. The lisp of hot jazz came up to them from the lithe, swaying bodies of a high-yaller band. With the lisp of jazz came the smell of food and cigarette smoke and perspiration. The balcony was high and the scene down below had a patterned look, like an overhead camera shot. (Nevada Gas)

This Satan who ruled over the lush dreams of the female sex.

To Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider... To all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to all men who act and become women, to all the people who want to be mothers. To my mother. - Dedication, Todo Sobre Mi Madre

Ton public n'est ni le public des livres, ni celui des spectacles, ni celui des expositions, ni celui des concerts. Tu n'as à satisfaire ni le goût littéraire, ni le théâtral, ni le pictural, ni le musical.

Ugarte: You despise me, don't you? Rick: If I gave you any thought I probably would.

Usually when you see females in movies, they feel like they have these metallic structures around them, they are caged by male energy.

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

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.

A film in which the speech and sound effects are perfectly synchronized and coincide with their visual image on the screen is absolutely contrary to the aims of cinema. It is a degenerate and misguided attempt to destroy the real use of the film and cannot be accepted as coming within the true boundaries of the cinema.

Well, as I was saying, it costs a lot to be authentic, madam. And one can't be stingy with these things, because you are more authentic the more you resemble what you've dreamed you are. - Agrado from "Todo Sobre Mi Madre

...we’re not even really hiking, more like meandering in cinematic light.

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.

When it comes to the selections, I heard several observers claim that the Academy was embracing “nostalgia” by honoring The Artist and Hugo. Give me a break! Hugo represents cutting-edge storytelling by a world-class director—in 3-D, no less. The Artist dares to revisit a form of cinema that was abandoned in the late 1920s. The Academy members admired these films for making the past seem immediate and relevant. That has nothing to do with nostalgia; it has everything to do with great moviemaking, which is what the Academy Awards are all about.

When people see things that are strange & creative & they're like "the creator must have been on drugs!" it's like "no. you are just boring

When we leave the realm of cinema, it is obvious that the dynamics of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy---which has historically represented black females as "undesirable mates" even if they are desirable sex objects, and so rendered it socially unacceptable for powerful white males to seek committed relationships with black women---continue to inform the nature of romantic partnership in our society. What would happen to the future of white supremacist patriarchy if heterosexual white males were choosing to form serious relationships with black females? Clearly, this structure would be under mined. Significantly, The Bodyguard reaffirms this message. Frank Farmer is portrayed as a conservative Republican patriarch, a defender of the nation. Once he leaves the black woman "she devil" who has seduced and enthralled him, he returns to his rightful place as keeper of the nation's patriarchal legacy. In the film, we see him protecting the white male officers of state. These last scenes suggest that loving a black woman would keep him from honoring and protecting the nation.

While routine and mundane jobs may be ridiculed or looked down upon in some circles, the fact is that these jobs provide livelihood to millions of people. A good information technology company in India employs thousands of professionals every year giving them decent salaries. However, in fields such as politics, writing, cinema or arts, there are very few people who come on top, and those who do, end up taking home almost all the rewards, leaving little for the runners-up or the bottom rankers.

90 percent of Indian cinema is crap

A decade or so ago, all over the world, cinemas underwent one of those prince-into-frog mutations, and became, instead popcorn-restaurants, which offered the option of visual diversions for diners.

After 100 years, films should be getting really complicated. The novel has been reborn about 400 times, but it's like cinema is stuck in the birth canal.

There's a line in David Lean's punishingly long 1962 desert flick, Lawrence of Arabia: 'Truly for some men nothing is written unless they write it.' Duh.

A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.

African cinema doesn't have an African industry at all and that's where our problem arises. We come to all of these initiatives with a lot of suspicion because we're so inhabited by the notion of being colonized, the post-colonial thought that someone wants us to do something that is their interest and not ours and even it's not true, there's the suspicion of it like where is this going?

After you've learned two or three basic rules of cinema grammar, you can do what you like - including breaking those rules.

A large part of my filmmaking self has to do with my love of being in the cinema audience, and my relationships to what I want to see on the screen, what I have seen on the screen and what I don't want to see on the screen again.

[Alfred] Hitchcock was very interested in the image on the screen.As is any good cinema director. That is the language they speak. It is not literature, it is images on screen.

All history is defined by shifting modes of reality and time and how things change. That’s what I love about cinema. It changes in the moment.

All my life, I have loved and been inspired by French cinema, and as a studio head it has been my pride and joy to have the ability to bring movies to audiences around the world.

American capitalism finds its sharpest and most expressive reflection in the American cinema.

American cinema is international like the fairy tales were international.

American films are the best films. This is a fact. Cinema is - along with Jazz - the great American art form. And cinema in a very real sense created the American identity that has been exported around the world.

A lot of times in cinema today the women are overly sentimental, so I constantly try to do the opposite. I like strident women.

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

American films, it's a money-making industry. And in France, you can find great respect for cinema as art.

A literary work can only be received through symbols, through concepts - for that is what words are; but cinema, like music, allows for utterly direct, emotional, sensuous perception of the work.

Americans don't understand what metaphor in cinema is about. They're extremely good at making straightforward, linear narrative movies, which entertain superbly. But they very rarely do anything else.

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.

A movie tends to box you in, at least as far as the aesthetics. You have an incredibly kinetic experience, which is the joy of cinema.