A Quote by John Berger

What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind. It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.
What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.
MORE CONSISTENTLY THAN EVER I WAS TRYING TO MAKE PEOPLE BELIEVE THAT CINEMA AS AN INSTRUMENT OF ART HAS ITS OWN POSSIBILITIES WHICH ARE EQUAL TO THOSE OF PROSE. I WANTED TO DEMONSTRATE HOW CINEMA IS ABLE TO OBSERVE LIFE, WITHOUT INTERFERING, CRUDELY OR OBVIOUSLY, WITH ITS CONTINUITY. FOR THAT IS WHERE I SEE THE POETIC ESSENCE OF CINEMA.
The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't.
Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions.
Film is pop art. It's not whether it's auteur cinema or not; that's a false distinction. Cinema is cinema.
Some people feel that the purpose of cinema is entertainment - which in itself is a healthy enough goal, provided you define what constitutes entertainment. But I come from a family where I grew up believing that cinema - art - should be used as an instrument for change and that's the kind of cinema I've largely done and been attracted to.
I come from a mixed family, where my mother is art house cinema and my father is B-movie genre cinema. They're estranged, and I've been trying to bring them together for all of my career to one degree or another.
It's just odd that something as essential in life as sex has been flattened out in mainstream cinema - and in art cinema. Even in art movies, sex always seems to be treated negatively. Why does it always end in disaster?
For me, there was no great myth around the movies when I was a young child. My father was very simple about the whole thing. He did not consider cinema an art. Cinema was entertainment. Literature and music were art.
You know, comics were created at the same time as the cinema. And the cinema very quickly became a major art. Cartooning didn't become a major art. There's a reason for that. People don't know how to deal with drawings.
Cinema is a form of art, and like every other art form, cinema also needs freedom of expression.
The great thing about cinema is that it's a great binder. It brings people from across the world together, often erasing the lines between geographies, languages, familiarity, and the like. Cinema is art and art, they say, is a reflection of life and society, so the way we tell our stories is the main differentiator for me.
I think that narrative, fiction filmmaking is the culmination of several art forms: theater, art history, architecture. Whereas doc filmmaking is more pure cinema, like cinema verite is film in its purest form.
The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life.
Why do people go to the cinema? What takes them into a darkened room where, for two hours, they watch the play of shadows on a sheet? The search for entertainment? The need for a kind of drug? ..I think that what a person normally goes to the cinema for is time: for time lost or spent or not yet had. He goes there for living experience; for cinema, like no other art, widens, enhances and concentrates a person’s experience-and not only enhances it but makes it longer, significantly longer. That is the power of cinema: ‘stars’, story-lines and entertainment have nothing to do with it.
To the question, ‘Is the cinema an art?’ my answer is, ‘what does it matter?’... You can make films or you can cultivate a garden. Both have as much claim to being called an art as a poem by Verlaine or a painting by Delacroix… Art is ‘making.’ The art of poetry is the art of making poetry. The art of love is the art of making love... My father never talked to me about art. He could not bear the word.
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