A Quote by Joshua Oppenheimer
Films can't change the society, they can simply open the space for the discussion which can lead to social change and can start new forms of social activism. I feel formally that I've scratched the surface of something very important about the nature of nonfiction film, about what we're very rarely honest about: When you film anybody, they start performing.
Quote Topics
Quote Author
Related Quotes
Films can't change the society; they can simply open the space for the discussion which can lead to social change and can start new forms of social activism.
I believe the medium of film is one of the most powerful tools in the modern era to create positive social change. It has the ability to put big, complex, and controversial subjects across in an easy-to-understand and digestible form. It has the power to change someone's perspective on the world in a very short space of time - film has the power to change the world itself.
I think that film festivals, we're very often given to understand, are about filmmakers and about films and about the industry of filmmaking. I don't believe that they are, I believe that film festivals are about film audiences, and about giving an audience the encouragement to feel really empowered and to stretch the elastic of their taste.
[A]ll change, even very large and powerful change, begins when a few people start talking with one another about something they care about.
There's something that happens where you go, if you're lucky, goodness me, from film to another film to another film. And you can sort of feel that if you step off that treadmill, it might all go horribly wrong and you might never be employed again, you know. And I suddenly thought that that's not necessarily the case. And I also thought we make drama as actors about people in the world and that if you are on that treadmill, you start making films about other films.
The language of cinema as it has evolved has also excluded vast swathes of human experience. The forms we find in the process of making a film can start to redress this balance and venture into uncharted territory. This is not just about unsung identities but about the subtleties and nuances of contemplation, the drifting spaces in which the worlds of the very small and the very large collide. Camerawork is a part of that.
Social change rarely comes about through the efforts of the disenfranchised. The middle class creates social revolutions.
When you start talking about same-sex marriage, you start talking about abortion, and I think those issues are very very important and very interesting and very right for us to talk about, but when we allow those issues to cannibalize all other issues we find ourselves homeless while we debate about it.
Change life! Change Society! These ideas lose completely their meaning without producing an appropriate space. A lesson to be learned from soviet constructivists from the 1920s and 30s, and of their failure, is that new social relations demand a new space, and vice-versa.
If you publish a scientific paper it is very hard to start a nationwide debate about something. If you do this in a movie, you can start a debate. We like to create a bridge between those two worlds - film and science.
I often find in the film world, that it's very self-referring. If you talk to someone about films, they talk about them in terms of other films - rather than as something that happened to them in their life. And I'm really keen to get back to film as a reference to real things, not necessarily to other films.
There are no atheists in foxholes, they say, and I was a foxhole atheist for a long time. But after going through a midlife crisis and having many things change very quickly, it made me realize my mortality. And when you start to think about death, you start to think about what's after it. And then you start hoping there is a God.
People who have grown up in a world where this was not a concern and suddenly start hearing about climate change - it's very difficult. It's a very, very abstract concept. So we need to work on making it very educational and very, very clear, in very simple terms.
I definitely feel that films and TV shows can bring about social change.
Today, blacks are no longer the litmus paper or the barometer of social change. Blacks are in every segment of society and there are laws that help to protect them from racial discrimination. The new ‘niggers’ are gays. It is in this sense that gay people are the new barometer for social change. The question of social change should be framed with the most vulnerable group in mind: gay people.
I believe strongly that social change isn't just about demonstrations in the street against the wrongs in society. There is also the path of the social innovator who creates new institutions and the path of the reformer who goes within an institution and makes incremental changes.
Related Authors
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu Quotes
Mexican
Director
Ava DuVernay Quotes
American
Director
David Lynch Quotes
American
Director
George Lucas Quotes
American
Director
Guillermo del Toro Quotes
Mexican
Director
John Waters Quotes
American
Director
Judd Apatow Quotes
American
Director
Martin Scorsese Quotes
American
Director
Nicolas Winding Refn Quotes
Danish
Director
Oliver Stone Quotes
American
Director
Peter Jackson Quotes
New Zealander
Director
Quentin Tarantino Quotes
American
Director
Ridley Scott Quotes
British
Director
Steven Spielberg Quotes
American
Director
Werner Herzog Quotes
German
Director
Woody Allen Quotes
American
Director