A Quote by Catherine Breillat

I know why I make films -cinema is a mode of expression that allows you to express all the nuances of a thing while including its opposites. These are things that can't be quantified mentally; yet they can exist and be juxtaposed. That may seem very contradictory. Cinema allows you to film these contradictions.

Catherine Breillat

Quote Topics

Cinema Contradictions Contradictory Exist Express Expression Film Films Including Know Make May Mentally Mode Nuances Opposites Seem Thing Things Very While Why

Quote Author

Catherine Breillat
French - Novelist
Born: July 13, 1948

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.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

I'm not coming from film school. I learned cinema in the cinema watching films, so you always have a curiosity. I say, 'Well, what if I make a film in this genre? What if I make this film like this?'

Wong Kar-wai

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

For people to understand, you can't speak 'cinema.' Cinema doesn't have alphabets, so you have to go to the local language. Even in England, if they make a movie in London they have to make it in the Cockney accent, they can't make a film with the English spoken in the BBC. So cinema has to be realistic to the area that it is set in.

Suhasini Maniratnam

Indian cinema needs all ingredients like emotion, action, sentiment and humour; it's not easy. It's easy to make a Hollywood film, as it goes with a pattern. Our cinema needs a lot of commercial ingredients. That's why I don't do many films.

Pawan Kalyan

Let me be very frank. I make films keeping within the mainstream and my cinema is popular cinema. I love it this way.

Mani Ratnam

I think it's a great pity in the Anglophone world that we conflate cinema verite and Direct Cinema; they're, in fact, ontological opposites. In Direct Cinema, we create a fictional reality with characters and pretend we're not that.

Joshua Oppenheimer

I'm not coming from film school, I learned cinema in the cinema watching films.

Wong Kar-wai

Realism is always subjective in film. There's no such thing as cinema verite. The only true cinema verite would be what Andy Warhol did with his film about the Empire State Building - eight hours or so from one angle, and even then it's not really cinema verite, because you aren't actually there.

Crispin Glover

The structure of my novels has nothing to do with the narrative mode of cinema. My novels would be very difficult to film without ruining them completely. I think this is the area where writers need to place ourselves: from a position of absolute modernity and contemporaneity, creating a culture of objects which cinema cannot.

Agustin Fernandez Mallo

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

Denis Villeneuve

I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between.

Francois Truffaut

We can't keep thinking in a limited way about what cinema is. We still don't know what cinema is. Maybe cinema could only really apply to the past or the first 100 years, when people actually went to a theater to see a film, you see?

Martin Scorsese

You become a film critic because you're interested in film. I don't know whether knowing so much about cinema leads you to make better films, but it certainly can't hurt.

Michael Haneke

Most cinema is not about images but text. Why on earth have we based cinema on text? Why can't we break that umbilical cord? Why do we have to pollute cinema?