CINEMA

"The cinema….that temple of sex with its goddesses, its guardians and its victims….a film is a petrified fountain of thought."

            Jean Cocteau

"Cinema is half-way between life and art….cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world….the cinema is truth 24 times a second."

            Jean-Luc Godard

 

"My invention....can be exploited for a certain time as a scientific curiosity, but apart from that it has no commercial value whatsoever."

-Auguste Lumiere (French co-inventor of the Lumiere motion-picture camera) 1895

 

"It is probable that the fad will die out in the next few years."

-The Independent, Mar 17,1910

 

"The cinema is little more than a fad. It's canned drama. What audiences really want to see is flesh and blood on the stage."

-Charlie Chaplin 1916

 

"Many modern people have a sort of imaginative reverence for (the cinema) not only because a lot of money is got out of it, but merely because a lot of money is put into it."

-G.K. Chesterton

 

"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?"

-Harry M. Warner (President of Warner Bros. Pictures)

 

"The great directors, from D.W. Griffith to Alfred Hitchcock, have never lost sight of the fact that the art of the movies is not a verbal art. Words have come in with the "talkies" but a decade of effort has so absorbed them into the primary function that they are no longer disturbing as they once were-and indeed the term "talkie" has ceased to be in common use. We still go to "movies' and can take the dialogue in our stride. The gloomy predictions that dialogue would kill the art have only their historical interest....A silent picture of 1927 or 1928 was likely to be superior in sophistication to any talkie of 1931. Had not audiences been trained to interpret movement, gesture, change of scene and flutter of symbol-and to interpret these things with the eye alone? Sometimes we had to lean over and talk to our neighbors about what was going on behind the door." That window was not open before; the burglar must have entered while the party was going on downstairs." This is the girl who fainted at the factory," And so on. We can no longer indulge in such confidences. We must be as silent as the films themselves used to be."

-Mark Van Doren "Let the Movies Be Natural" Autumn 1937

 

"Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates. Film culture is not analysis but agitation of the mind."

            Werner Herzog

"Drama is life with the dull bits cut out. The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder. The cinema is not a slice of life, it’s a piece of cake."

            Alfred Hitchcock

 

"The cinema like the detective story, makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be suppressed in a humanitarian ordering of society."

            Carl Jung

 

"Film is a dog; the head is commerce, the tail is art, and only rarely does the tail wag the dog."

            Walter Wagner

 

"Cinema is the culmination of the obsessive, mechanistic male drive in western culture. The move projector is an Apollonian straightshooter, demonstrating the link between aggression and art. Every pictorial framing is a ritual limitation, a barred precinct

-Camille Paglia

Sexual Personae

 

"The lights flicked away; the screen glowed silver, and soon life began to unfold, beautiful and passionate and sad,  till the young men and girls entered, scented and sibilant in the half dark, their paired backs in silhouette delicate and sleek, their slim, quick bodies awkward, divinely young, while beyond them the silver dream accumulated, inevitably on and on."

            William Faulkner
            "Dry September"

 

"No romance has ever unfolded on the silver screen...no fantastic tale from the pen of Jules Verne has ever depicted the glamorous drama of Hollywood, America's real, live fairyland-the dreamer's dream come true. Brilliant as the eternal California sunshine, soft and languid as the California moon, the beauty of Hollywood is the glorious envy of the artist, the never-to-be obtained goal of the poet.'"

-Nathaniel West

 

"No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls."

-Ingmar Bergman

 

 

"Movies are one of the bad habits that corrupted our century. Of their many sins, I offer as the worst their effect on the intellectual side of the nation. It is chiefly from that viewpoint I write of them-as an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming a culture people."

-Ben Hecht (1893-1964)

 

   "It was not, however, the mere depiction of the act that gave smoking such a boost, but rather who was smoking on screen that turned the people on. For the first time the population had public figures other than their rulers to adore. The cinema, like nothing before it, elevated the cult of appearance. Its idols moved, and after 1927 learned to speak and sing. Although only two-dimensional Pygmalions, they were so different, so much more convincing than the static representations people had hitherto respected, that their passions were inflamed. The actors and actresses played up to this adulation-some even saw it as their duty to live out their fans' fantasies in real life as well as on screen. Gloria Swanson, star of Male and Female and Why Change Your Wife?, vowed 'I will be every inch and every moment a star.' Not only were movie stars idolized, they were imitated. And in the absence of an obvious physical resemblance, the best way of impersonating a hero or heroine was via their tobacco habit. People began to smoke because their favourite film star did. The cheapness and availability of cigarettes were to their advantage. The average audience member in the Great Depression (now global) could not afford the mansions, the yachts, the furs or the diamonds their idols enjoyed in flickering black and white, but they could buy the cigarettes and so share a portion of the dream. Smoking was an aspiration everybody could fulfill."

-Iain Gately

La Diva Nicotina: The Story of How Tobacco Seduced The World

 

 

'ANDRE BAZIN put movie directors in their place, as the true "authors" of films. The question of who could claim authorship of fils has been fought out in court cases since the 1930s. But in 1951, when Bazin founded his French journal Cahiers du Cinema, he proceeded to make a very convincing case that it was, indeed, the director (not the producer, actors, cameraman, screenwriter, etc.) who was the author of a film. Bazin did this by publishing articles in his journal pointing out the distinctive styles of the different directors. You would have thought this would be obvious, but generally it wasn't. But the articles Bazin wrote or edited made it clear that each director did have a distinct style , and this revelation caused a revolution in how many people viewed films. With the coming of television and VCRs, it was possible for the growing number of movie buffs to appreciate the films of a director over many viewings. Bazin died in 1958, but not before he opened the eyes of millions and got directors the respect they deserved."

James F. Dunnigan

Dirty Little Secrets of the Twentieth Century

                 ***********************************

Cinema: "Baraka" www.mpimedia.com

NETFIX….rents DVDs on all you can watch subscription basis…. www.netfix.com

www.kino.com  The Best World Cinema

******

Book: "The Whole Equation" by David Thomson

Book: "How To Read A Film: The World of Movies, Media, Multimedia: Language, History, Theory, 3rd Edition" by James Monaco

Book: "The Power Of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact" by Colin McGinn

Book: "The Language of Cinema" by Kevin Jackson

Book: "Cinema Year By Year: The Complete Illustrated History of Film" by Ronald Bergan et al.

Book: "Cinema Today" by Edward Buscombe

Book: "The Birth of the Motion Picture: Discoveries" by Emmanuelle Toulet

Book: "Savage Theory: Cinema As Modern Magic" by Rachel O. Moore

Book: "The A List: The National Society of Film Critics' 100 Essential Films" by Jay Carr

Book: The American Film Institute Desk Reference" by Gene Brown et al.

Book: "Film review, 2000-2001,56th edition" by James Cameron-Wilson

Book: "Film Theory and Criticism, Fifth Edition: Introductory Readings" Ed. by L. Brandy & M. Cohen

Book: "Film: The Critics' Choice" Ed. by Geoff Andrew

Book: "World Cinema: Diary of a Day" Ed by Peter Cowie

Book: "the Films of the Seventies: A Filmography of American, British and Canadian Films,1970-1979" by Marc Sigoloff

Book: "Revolution! The Explosion of World Cinema in the Sixties" by Peter Cowie

Book: "The Noir Style" by A. Silver & J. Ursini

Book: "The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900-1910" by Richard Abel

Book: "Hallwell's Film & Video Guide 2003 18th edition" Ed. by John Walker

Book: "The Art of the Moving Picture" by Vachel Lindsay

Book: "Four-Star Movies: The 101 Greatest Films of All Time" by G. Kinn & J. Piazza

Book: "African American Films Through 1959: A Comprehensive Illustrated Filmography" by Larry Richards

Book: "Black Cinema Treasures: Lost and Found" by G. William Jones

Book: "Julie Taymor, Playing With Fire: Theater, Opera, Film" with Eileen Blumenthal

Book: "The 100 Best Films of the Century" by Barry Norman

Book: "Cult Movies" by Karl & Phillip French

Book: "Watching Movies: The Biggest Names in Cinema Talk About the Films That Matter Most' by Rick Lyman

Book: "The World in a Frame: What We See in Films" by Leo Braudy

Book: "Icons of Film: The 20th Century" Ed. by Peter W. Engelmeier

Book: "Film Follies: the Cinema Out of Order" by Stuart Klawans

Book: "Film Facts" by Patrick Robertson

Book: "The 100 Best Films to Rent You've Never Heard Of" by David N. Meyer

Book: "Time Out Film Guide, Revised Thirteenth Edition" Ed. by John Pym

Book: "The Last Mogul: Lew Wasserman, MCA, and the Hidden History of Hollywood" by Dennis McDougal

Book: "Seventy Light Years" by Freddie Young

Book: "Who's Who in Hollywood: The Largest Cast of Film Personalities Ever Assembled" by David Ragan

Book: "Film: An International History of the Medium" by Robert Sklar

Book: "Film: A Concise History" by Andrea Gronemeyer

Book: "The Film Snob's Dictionary: An Essential Lexicon of Filmological Knowledge" by David Kamp with Lawrence Levi

Book: "Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema" by Jeffrey Vance

Book: "Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film." by Peter Biskind

Book: "The Hollywood Archive: The Hidden History of Hollywood in the Golden Age" by P. Calistro & F.E Basten

Book: The Hollywood Book of Scandals: The Shocking, Often Disgraceful Deeds and Affairs of More than 100 American Movie and TV Idols" by James Robert Parish

Book: "Sex Lives of the Hollywood Idols" by Nigel Cawthorne

Book: "Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only-the life of America's First Black Filmmaker" by Patrick McGilligan

Book: "Profoundly Disturbing: Shocking Movies That Changed History" by Job Bob Briggs

Book: "I'm A Born Liar: A Fellini Lexicon" Ed. by Damian Pettigrew

Book: "Cassell's Movie Quotations" by Nigel Rees

Book: "Reel Views: The Ultimate Guide to the Best 1,000 Modern Movies on DVD and Video" by James Beradinelli

Book: "The Coen Brothers" by Ronald Bergan

Book: "The Films of Oshima Nagisa: Images of a Japanese Iconoclast" by Maureen Turim

Book: "Celluloid Mavericks: The History of American Independent Film" by Greg Merritt

Book: "The 50 Greatest Movies Never Made" by Chris Gore

Book: "Mr & Mrs. Hollywood: Edie and Lew Wasserman, and Their Entertainment Empire" by Kathleen Sharp

Book: "Twentieth Century's Fox: Darryl F. Zannuck and the Culture of Hollywood" by George F. Custen

Book: "The Movies That Changed Us: Reflections on the Screen" by Nick Clooney

Book: "The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, Third Edition" by David Thomson

Book: "The Great Women Of Film" by Helena Lumme

Book: "Film Composers In America, Second Edition: A Filmography 1911-1970" by Clifford McCarty

Book: "The Golden West: Hollywood Stories" by Daniel Fuchs

Book: "Lion Of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer" by Scott Eyman

 

Back to Chrestomathy            Next Page