David Lynch:
"I keep hoping people will like abstractions, space to dream, consider things that don't necessarily add up."
"Film can do amazing things with abstraction, but it rarely gets a chance. People are treated like idiots, and people are not idiots. We're hip to the human condition, the human experience, and we love mysteries."
"Creating a place is super important. Like Sunset Boulevard, for instance, which is one of my favorite films. I want to be there in that house. I can drive up Sunset Boulevard even now, and I say, If only I could turn off and go to that house, and I just can´t believe that I can´t do it. That´s why I love looking at that film over and over. I don´t care about the story or even about knowing it - I love to experience that place."
"But what's so fantastic is to get down into areas where things are abstract and where things are felt, or understood in an intuitive way that, you can't, you know, put a microphone to somebody at the theatre and say 'Did you understand that?' but they come out with a strange, fantastic feeling and they can carry that, and it opens some little door or something that's magical and that's the power that film has."
"Personally, I think movies should do something that books or music can´t do by themselves. The story can be about any number of things, but there should be a ringing of truth that´s completely powerful or thrilling. Movies like Sunset Boulevard or Lolita are much bigger than the stories they tell."
"It´s a very dangerous thing, this movie business. Because no one will ever know what film could be when a filmmaker has to talk about it and convince people with words. Maybe somebody´s got them in his mind and can put them on film with the right sounds, but he can´t put them into words, you know, and sell the idea. And so those guys are fresh out of luck. It´s like Bergman in Hollywood - I don´t think it would have happened."
"I want to make movies that you can´t go to in a car or plane or a boat. You´ve got to buy a theater ticket to go into that world, to have that experience. I would like to think you could be taken into a space that is film-space, even if it´s only for a moment within the film and it needs all the rest of the film to make it happen. In this sound-and-picture space, you should know something, or have a feeling that you couldn´t have unless there was cinema. I know there has to be a story. I´m interested in that. But I like the idea that film can be really film as well as do the other things"
"I know that films are going to keep getting better and better. It´s exciting. One image coming up to another image, and then a third image with this sound... It´s a character and a setting. It´s a mood. I just love mood. Underneath the surface of things - somewhere in there, it´s happening. Most films are on the surface. Most films are one-line jokes. When you walk out of the theater, it´s like you´ve been eating cotton candy. I think people really want to be able to make good films, and we´ve got to be able to get the chance."
"They can take you to another place and give you a very powerful experience. And it’s only just started. They could be so powerful, so powerful. But they have to get into this abstract, nonstory, nonlinear thing. Now the payoffs are that Rocky knocks down the Russkie, and people cheer, and it’s powerful — it’s been built to do that and it works. But there’s other things that a film could do. It could open something up inside a person, and you’d say, “I’ve never had this experience.” Maybe it doesn’t make you cry or laugh, but it just thrills you in some way you’ve never been thrilled before. A film could do that."
" I could make my films in 16 mm in my garage, but I love a big screen and good sound, and for that you need money and equipment."
GEORGE LUCAS:
"I'm a visual filmmaker. I do films that are kinetic and I tend to focus on character as it is created through editing and light, not stories. I started out as a harsh critic of story and character.
"I was always coming from pure cinema - I was useing the grammar of film to create content. I think graphically, not linearly."
"I hated scripting writing. I hated stories, and I hated plot, and I wanted to make visual films that had nothing to do with telling a story. I didn't want to know about stories and plot and characters and all that sort of stuff. And that's what I did. My first films were very abstract - tone poems, visual."
I was interested in abstract, purely visual films and cinema-verite documentaries."
"I wanted to make abstract films that are emotional and I still do."
"I don't want to be a businessman. My ambition is to make movies, but all by myself, to shoot them, cut them, make stuff I want to, just for my own exploration, to see if I can combine images in a certain way."
"My only interest in life is to make films, explore films and grow as a person."
"Making a movie is very difficult and painful, and if someone comes along after you've done all this work and says you're a fool and an idiot, it's very hard to pick it up and do it again."
"I could do "Koyaanisqatsi" but not "Taxi Driver". I've been trying to rethink the art of movies - it's not a play, not a book, not music or dance. People were aware of that in the silent era. But when the talkies started they lost track of it. Film basically became a recording medium."
"I come out of a nonstory, noncharacter type of pure cinema. For me, the idea of heavily plotted or heavily character driven drama is not where I started."
On the sixties experimental film scene and Canyon Cinema (http://www.canyoncinema.com) : "I came from a very avant garde documentary kind of film making world. I like cinema verité, documentaries. I liked nonstory, noncharacter tone poems that were being done in San Francisco at that time."
On THX 1138: "I wanted it to look like a very slick, studied documentary in terms of technique. I come from a background of graphics, photography, art and painting-and I'm very graphics-conscious."
Peter Greenaway:
"I don't think we've seen any cinema yet. I think we've seen 100 years of illustrated text."
"If you want to tell stories, be a writer, not a filmmaker."
"I still would like you to feel the enthusiasm that all those people felt in the twenties and thirties, that indeed we had discovered, with cinema, the great 20th-century, all-embracing medium. There were extraordinary apologists for what it could become, but I feel it hasn't become that. Cinema has been dragged down by mimetic association with all the other art forms, predominantly with the 19th century novel, and because of its distribution situation and its apparent desire to appeal to the lowest common denominator, it has gone in directions which have not fulfilled those extraordinary promises, in general terms. But I still have this sneaking, hopeful suspicion that we can return to those optimistic, ambitious days and make something of what could be a most extraordinary medium."
"My favourite film-maker west of the English Channel is not English - but to me doesn't seem American either - David Lynch - a curious American-European film-maker. He has - against odds - achieved what we want to achieve here. He takes great risks with a strong personal voice and adequate funds and space to exercise it. I thought Blue Velvet and Eraserhead were masterpieces."
"I am looking for cinema that is non-narrative."
SLAVKO VORKAPICH:
"two conditions must exist to transform a film into a form of art: there must be a kinaesthetic organisation of movement and, at the same time, the literal meaning of the shots must be transcended; the shots must become images."
"My principle interest is whether film can become an autonomous form of art."
"A photograph of a work of art is not a work of art. Simply recording a scene which depends on photography of acting alone will simply make a photo-chemical recording of something....A true work of art lives right here. It has the quality of presence; It's a living creature."
"Please forget the story or the dramatic values as you watch these films. Simply let your eye be your guide. If you can, try to achieve an innocence of the eye by wiping away all past knowledge."
"By seeing, I mean let your perception be your complete guide, without reading them. Almost any mistake can be accepted if you 'read' the story."
"to me, film by the virtue of movement is directly sensory the way music is directly sensory....Literature, you must read and then interpret....That's where [film's] possibilities lie of being an independent form of art." (Kevles, p43)
"...two conditions must exist to transform a film into a form of art: there must be a kinesthetic organisation of movement and, at the same time, the literal meaning of the shots must be transcended..."
Francis Coppola:
It combines so many other art forms, as do theater and opera, but the essence of cinema is editing. It's the combination of what can be extraordinary images, images of people during emotional moments, or just images in a general sense, but put together in a kind of alchemy. A number of images put together a certain way become something quite above and beyond what any of them are individually.
“This, of course, was one of the elements of the Eisenstein film that was so exciting. How the editing was able to take -- that's always fascinating -- take this, and this, and put it together, and have something come out that was neither of those two things. Of course, the sense of rhythm that editing can do! I was struck, I remember, on Ten Days That Shook The World, how although it was a silent film, there were sequences where you actually almost could hear the machine guns firing, because of the way it was edited. So it's a form of alchemy, of magic, that is very appealing. I think cinema, movies, and magic have always been closely associated. Because the very earliest people who made film were magicians. One of the aspects of it was the idea of an illusion, a magical illusion, in the early days of movies.
A lot of early magicians began experimenting, using basically what is cinema to do their illusions. And of course we know that some of the early pioneers, like Meliès and what have you, were magicians who used cinema to create illusions. So I think cinema always had -- as did theater for me -- this ability to create some kind of magic, either through lighting -- but to use technology to create magic is what appealed to me, I think.”
ALFRED HITCHCOCK:
On Vertigo: "The story was of less importance to me than the over-all visual impact, once the picture was completed."
On Psycho: "I don't care about the subject matter, I don't care about the acting, but I do care about the pieces of film, the photography, the sound-track, and the other technical ingredients that made the audience scream. I feel it is tremendously satisfying for us to use the cinematic art to achieve a mass emotion."
.... "It wasn't the audiences' enjoyment of the book, or the performance, that caused them to scream. They were aroused by pure film".
...."It's the kind of film where the technique is more important than the content."
"Walt Disney has the best casting system. If he don't like an actor, he just tears him up.”
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