A Quote by Michael Haneke
My films are intended as polemical statements against the American 'barrel down' cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus.
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I am not interested in making didactic polemical statements. That is not the way I want to make films. There is a place for polemics, but I don't think that it is in fictional cinema. Fictional cinema works subtly and deeply.
American films are the best films. This is a fact. Cinema is - along with Jazz - the great American art form. And cinema in a very real sense created the American identity that has been exported around the world.
The American public is a very specialized public. The reason it is taken as a realistic film is because inside the fable, I've put that kind of reality in. And it could easily be called, instead of Once Upon a Time in America, Once Upon a Time There Was a Certain Kind of Cinema. Because it was also an homage to cinema.
Film is pop art. It's not whether it's auteur cinema or not; that's a false distinction. Cinema is cinema.
Well, I think by and large, certainly in terms of cinema, American culture dominates our cinema, mainly in the films that are shown in the multiplexes but also in the way that it has a magnetic effect on British films.
Mainstream cinema raises questions only to immediately provide an answer to them, so they can send the spectator home reassured. If we actually had those answers, then society would appear very different from what it is.
When I first envisioned 'Funny Games' in the mid-1990s, it was my intention to have an American audience watch the movie. It is a reaction to a certain American cinema, its violence, its naivety, the way American cinema toys with human beings. In many American films, violence is made consumable.
My feeling, however, is that films that are open are more productive for the audience. The films that, if I'm in a cinema, and I'm watching a movie that answers all the questions that it raises, it's a film that bores me. In the same way, if I'm reading a book that doesn't leave me with questions, moving questions, that I feel confronted with, then for me it's a waste of time. I don't want to read a book that simply confirms what I already know.
. . . you [film critics] always overstress the value of images. You judge films in the first place by their visual impact instead of looking for content. This is a great disservice to the cinema. It is like judging a novel only by the quality of its prose. I was guilty of the same sin when I first started writing for the cinema. . . . Now I feel that only the literary mind can help the movies out of that cul de sac into which they have been driven by mere technicians and artificers.
Because you see darling, darling, there are no false questions. All questions in life are true questions. Answers may be false, but questions cannot be false. Sure,they can be dumb, they can be stupid, but never false.
I think, for an actor, the whole world is a place of work because if you focus on characters and on stories, they are everywhere, so yeah, I feel very privileged to have had this great opportunities in the international cinema and especially in the American cinema.
At times doc filmmaking feels more rewarding creatively. Because you are creating something out of pure cinema - instead of narrative cinema, where you've got a script and a cast and you build from your foundation, whereas in documentary, you're building out of chaos.
I feel American comedy is a little too light. World cinema, and Latin cinema, is much more comfortable with darker emotions.
I believe in cinema! Unfortunately, 90 per cent of Hindi cinema is non-cinema. Only marketing works here. Even the item songs in these films are an extension of marketing.
The third line of cinema today is neither art nor commercial but categorized as good and bad cinema. I think two films - 'Main, Meri patni aur Who' and 'Main Madhuri Dixit Banna Chahti Hoon' were the base films for this new line of cinema.
Cinema builds memories; great films continue to exist in the spectator's mind. We are naturally capable of and prone to nostalgia. A spectator will reconstruct a film he or she has seen, years later, and may even change their original opinion. One critic, for example, once gave the finger to one of my films; later he wrote me to apologize.
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