Top 1200 Cinema Quotes & Sayings

I grew up understanding cinema from early on and was soon cinema-literate.

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.

I am extremely proud that our cinema is being recognised in the West. I want Indian cinema to get its dignity, not by giving them the kind of films they expect from us, but by making cinema in a way that carries the legacy of the mainstream masters forward.

To me, cinema is cinema. Cinema is one big tree with many branches. The same as literature. In literature, you don't just say, 'Oh, I bought some literature.' No, you say, 'I bought a novel' by so-and-so, or a book of essays by so-and-so.

MORE CONSISTENTLY THAN EVER I WAS TRYING TO MAKE PEOPLE BELIEVE THAT CINEMA AS AN INSTRUMENT OF ART HAS ITS OWN POSSIBILITIES WHICH ARE EQUAL TO THOSE OF PROSE. I WANTED TO DEMONSTRATE HOW CINEMA IS ABLE TO OBSERVE LIFE, WITHOUT INTERFERING, CRUDELY OR OBVIOUSLY, WITH ITS CONTINUITY. FOR THAT IS WHERE I SEE THE POETIC ESSENCE OF CINEMA.

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

Seventies cinema - 'Taxi Driver,' 'Deliverance' - that was the best period of American cinema.

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.

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

Nadunisi Naaigal' is new age Tamil cinema. I have tried to break the rules of regular cinema with this film.

Cinema is capitalism in its purest form.... There is only one solution - turn one's back on American cinema.

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.

I was criticised for making 'Devdas' so ostentatious. But stark and realistic cinema isn't the only real cinema in this country.

Cinema is not truth. Even when you make documentary films, you can choose to show this shot and not the other shot - this side and not the other side. In cinema, there's one truth - not 'the truth.' It's only 'my point of view.' Cinema is powerful because of that.

Cinema is a slice of reality. You have school and college kids being intimate and marriage is not even in question and that is what they show in cinema.

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.

Cinema is diversifying; there's room for every kind of cinema today.

With 'The Conjuring,' I really wanted to create classical cinema-style film-making, pure cinema as it were.

The main difference I'd say is that European cinema has always used less music than American cinema for historical reasons.

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?

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

If you're going to break cinema, film, and movies apart, very rarely to you get the opportunity to even think that you've been a part of cinema.

'Black cinema' I don't even know what that means. It's just cinema. When Paul Thomas Anderson makes a movie, we don't just say it's 'white cinema.'

There is more to Indian cinema than just Bollywood. I think regional cinema, especially Tamil and Marathi cinema are exploring some really bold themes.

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

My sense of cinema improved slowly as I started watching South cinema, got to know that cinema is much appreciated here.

I know there is one kind of cinema that exists in the world, that is good or bad cinema.

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.

Cinema is not Bible writing. It doesn't teach you morals, good values to live. Cinema is not meant for that. If you're looking at cinema that it'll tell you good values then you're mistaken.

Everybody in the two Telugu states, especially the residents of Vijayawada, love both cinema and politics. And 'NOTA' is a cinema with a political subject.

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.

Indian cinema is no more limited to audiences in India. We have viewers all around the world, and hence, understanding the global perspective is a must. Cinema Beyond Boundaries would get the viewers and the filmmakers together and would help us in serving them with good quality cinema.

I'm a huge fan of world cinema, because each country uses cinema in a very individual way.

I am the last person who has any judgement about any kind of cinema, least of all commercial cinema because I am a product of commercial cinema.

I don't really follow television so much, but in the old days there was a certain way TV was, and it wasn't really like cinema. I don't know how many ways it was different or the same, but it was not quite like cinema. Now, cinema can happen on television.

Music was the only voice of cinema for a very long time before we had sound; it's organically linked to cinema itself.

I think American cinema, particularly, has become so disposable. It's not even cinema, It's just moviemaking.

I was this classic film school snob who thought mainstream cinema was synonymous with bad cinema.

Napoleon is pure cinema, and cinema was designed for sharing.

I decided that I have certain taste in cinema and I will take it forward. I know there is an audience for such cinema.

I don't think I've done anything important or magnificent. I'm a worker, and the thing I prefer in my life is cinema. When I'm working in cinema, I'm happy. And that's all, you know?

I grew up in England, and at the time, cinema was very heavy arthouse cinema, and there was no one making movies that were designed to be in multiplexes.

I took to cinema because I found cinema was the medium for what I wanted to say through 'Shutter;' it was something beyond the scope of a play.

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.

What I'm really trying to do is recreate classic Hollywood cinema and classic genre cinema from a woman's point of view. Because most cinema is really made for men, how can you create cinema that's for women without having it be relegated to a ghetto of "chick flick" or something like that?

There is more to Indian cinema than just Bollywood. I think regional cinema, especially Tamil and Marathi cinema, are exploring some really bold themes.

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.

Any cinema has to be entertaining. Boring cinema won't work. If you want to make one, then screen it for free on TV.

I've always believed that true cinema is cinema of the imagination.

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.

I believe there's only good cinema and bad cinema.

For me, cinema is very important. I grew up with television; then, as a teenager, you discover cinema.

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.

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.

The reason I am in cinema is because of the passion I have for cinema.

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.

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.

'Napoleon' is pure cinema, and cinema was designed for sharing.

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?

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