“Models. What they lose in apparent prominence during the shooting, they gain in depth and truth on the screen. It is the flattest and dullest parts that have in the end the most life.” – Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer
“I suppose, my general sense of anxiety and disquiet about the cinema we’ve got after 100 years — a cinema which is predicated on text. So whether your name is Spielberg or Scorsese or Godard, there’s always a necessity to start with text and finish with image. I don’t think that’s particularly where we should […]
Orson Welles: I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won’t contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That’s what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.
From a 2005 interview with Xan Brooks for the Western release of Howl’s Moving Castle: Personally I am very pessimistic… But when, for instance, one of my staff has a baby you can’t help but bless them for a good future. Because I can’t tell that child, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have come into this life.’ And […]
From Sculpting in Time by Andrei Tarkovsky: I think that one of the saddest aspects of our time is the total destruction in people’s awareness of all that goes with a conscious sense of the beautiful. Modern mass culture, aimed at the ‘consumer’, the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people’s souls, setting up barriers between man and […]
From Abbas Kiarostami, “10 On Ten” I don’t believe the job of a filmmaker is to excite or move the viewer merely through creating special moments. By simply showing the reality, one can make people think about their own and other people’s acts or behaviour, and see and accept reality as it is. It’s from […]
David Dark (author of recently reviewed Sacredness of Questioning Everything) slapped up a clip from Vivre sa vie over at his blog Peer Pressure Is Forever. And it compelled me to do the same here: There is a very fine line between Godard the ad hoc blowhard intellectualese grammarian, and Godard the conjuror of incisively […]
People ask what are my intentions with my films — my aims. It is a difficult and dangerous question, and I usually give an evasive answer: I try to tell the truth about the human condition, the truth as I see it. This answer seems to satisfy everyone, but it is not quite correct. I […]