A Quote by Andrei Tarkovsky

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.

Andrei Tarkovsky

Quote Topics

Art Cinema Drug Entertainment Experience Go Goes Had Hours Kind Like Lines Living Longer Lost Makes Need Normally Nothing Only Other People Person Play Power Room Search Shadows Sheet Spent Stars Story Takes Them Think Time Two Watch Why

Quote Author

Andrei Tarkovsky
Russian - Director
April 4, 1932 - December 29, 1986

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.

Shabana Azmi

Cinema is empathy machinery, and we multiply our life experience through cinema. When it is good cinema, it almost counts as a personal experience.

Sebastian Lelio

I think what I loved in cinema - and what I mean by cinema is not just films, but proper, classical cinema - are the extraordinary moments that can occur on screen. At the same time, I do feel that cinema and theater feed each other. I feel like you can do close-up on stage and you can do something very bold and highly characterized - and, dare I say, theatrical - on camera. I think the cameras and the viewpoints shift depending on the intensity and integrity of your intention and focus on that.

Benedict Cumberbatch

French cinema has always been very interesting, and it's still very powerful. I think it goes to show that it's great to still have a cinema that doesn't try to emulate, for example, American cinema.

Louis Leterrier

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.

Jacques Audiard

I think the novel is at one end of the art-entertainment continuum - the play in the middle - while TV and cinema veer a bit more towards entertainment.

Irvine Welsh

Film is pop art. It's not whether it's auteur cinema or not; that's a false distinction. Cinema is cinema.

Denis Villeneuve

Cinema is not just a medium of entertainment. Yes, it should entertain, but cinema is made to convey a message, to say something.

Pankaj Tripathi

People know that I have a great love for cinema. Not just for commercial cinema, but for the “cinema d’auteur.” But to me, two of the great “auteurs” are actually actors and they both happen to be French. One is Alain Delon and the other is Jean-Paul Belmondo.

Harvey Weinstein

My cinema - the '50s, '60s - is different from the cinema today so I thought that it would not be bad to show that kind of cinema where we could dream.

Gina Lollobrigida

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.

Jean-Luc Godard

I love cinema. I think the risk of the aesthetics being fixed is compensated by other advantages. Cinema is visually powerful, it is a complete experience, reaches different audience. It's something I really like. I like movies.

Yann Martel

Cinema is not about format, and it's not about venue. Cinema is an approach. Cinema is a state of mind on the part of the filmmaker. I've seen commercials that have cinema in them, and I've seen Oscar-winning movies that don't. I'm fine with this.

Steven Soderbergh

More than my other films, Uncle Boonmee is very much about cinema, that's also why it's personal. If you care to look, each reel of the film has a different style - acting style, lighting style, or cinematic references - but most of them reflect movies. I think that when you make a film about recollection and death, you have to consider that cinema is also dying - at least this kind of old cinema that nobody makes anymore.