A Quote by Pablo Larrain
Cinema is always a political art, at the end.
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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?
The definition of political cinema is one I don't agree with, because every film, every show, is typically political in nature. Political cinema is simply the brainchild of bad journalists.
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.
Art makes people do a double take and then, if they're looking at the picture, maybe they'll read the text under it that says, "Come to Union Square, For Anti-War Meeting Friday." I've been operating that way ever since - that art is a means to an end rather than simply an end in itself. In art school we're always taught that art is an end in itself - art for art's sake, expressing yourself, and that that's enough.
Film is pop art. It's not whether it's auteur cinema or not; that's a false distinction. Cinema is cinema.
Basically, I have always wanted to have an art-house cinema. A cinema where we can show films that are not necessarily the current offerings on circuit and films that are not commercial.
Let me see: art and activism. I can always fall back on, "the question should be, what isn't political? Everything you do is political, even if it's abstract. You're making a political statement even if it's unwittingly." I think so much of art is unconscious anyway, the artist doesn't know the real reason they're doing it. They're just kind of going along with it intuitively.
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.
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.
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.
I hate political films that have one particular message that they're trying to convey. I think propaganda is very dangerous, and it's very easy for anything to slip into it. I also think that propaganda is something that defies the identity of cinema. I hate propaganda in cinema, even if it was promoting the political stance that I myself am allied with. I always say that the responsibility of a film is first and foremost: To be a film. It's not a manifesto, it's not an op-ed.
Cinema is a form of art, and like every other art form, cinema also needs freedom of expression.
In art school we're always taught that art is an end in itself - art for art's sake, expressing yourself, and that that's enough.
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.
It didn't even occur to me that I could use my strong image in cinema to propagate my political ideas. To me, cinema was cinema and politics was politics.
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.
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