Quotes on Cinema
The cinema is not a slice of life but a piece of cake.
Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) Anglo-American film director
The cinema, like the detective story, makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be repressed in a humanitarian ordering of life.
Carl Jung (1875-1961) Swiss psychiatrist
The theater is like a faithful wife. The film is the great adventure — the costly, exacting mistress.
Ingmar Bergman (b. 1918) Swedish film and theater director
They get excited about the sort of stuff I could get shooting through a piece of Kleenex.
Billy Wilder (b. 1906) American writer-director on European cinema
Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates. Film culture is not analysis but agitation of the mind.
Werner Herzog (b. 1942) German film director
Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate the great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.
Pauline Kael (b. 1919) American film critic
The trouble with a movie these days is that it’s old before it’s released. It’s no accident that it comes in a can.
Orson Welles (1915-1985) American filmmaker
All television ever did was shrink the demand for ordinary movies. The demand for extraordinary movies increased. If any one thing is wrong with the movie industry today, it is the unrelenting effort to astonish.
Clive James (b. 1939) Australian writer, critic
There’s only one thing that can kill the movies, and that’s education.
Will Rogers (1879-1935) American humorist
Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody’s piano playing in my living room has to the book I am reading.
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.
Billy Wilder (b. 1906) American writer-director
Saddest movie I’ve ever seen— I cried all the way through. It’s sad when you’re eighty-two.
Groucho Marx (1890-1977)