Cinema Verite Quotes

I came from the school of cinema verite documentaries, which was: Do not manipulate reality as it was happening but create a narrative in the editing room. ~ Mira Nair

I think Direct Cinema's trying to be insightful by looking at reality in a very close way while, in fact, much more is staged than we like to think. In cinema verite, it's about trying to make something invisible visible - the role of fantasy and imagination in everyday life. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer

Realism is always subjective in film. There's no such thing as cinema verite. ~ Crispin Glover

I was inspired by Maya Deren because she was the first woman filmmaker whose films I saw. I also loved Fellini and Goddard because they were so different from Hollywood films. But when I saw the cinema verite films that were made by Drew Associates with Leacock and Pennebaker I found my passion. ~ Chris Hegedus

I don't think there's any border between science and art. All the fiction films I have made were always on the same subject, - a discovery of the "Other," an exploration of difference. ~ Jean Rouch

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 do not believe in the Cinema verite. Sometimes a really good lie is better than any truth. ~ Werner Herzog

Campaign may invite a certain skepticism about democracy, but it will surely restore your faith in cinema verite. ~ A.O. Scott

I've always considered movies evil; the day that cinema was invented was a black day for mankind. ~ Kenneth Anger

My cinema is an extension of myself. A sort of life-testimony of my vital experience, with my few virtues and my numerous limitations. ~ Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

I think "Avatar" is kind of a unique category where people are enjoying the unique theatrical experience even though they may have seen it on the small screen. They want to have that immersive, transportive experience. "2001: A Space Odyssey" played for three years at the Loews cinema in Toronto. I remember that. It just kept playing. People wanted to return to that experience. That may not be the best example because I think "2001" took 25 years to break even. ~ James Cameron

It's the golden age of French cinema again but it's because Sarkozy had the guts to push through copyright law. ~ Harvey Weinstein

Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philtre, when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced. ~ Greta Garbo

I did not make this a long film for its own sake. I wanted to make an entertaining film and offer it out there for those who want to see it. If word of mouth suggests there is an audience out there, hopefully their cinema will show it. ~ Kenneth Branagh

The longing for improvement and the fear of waste and worse - it is a pattern still with us, and maybe it speaks to the medium's essential marriage of light and dark, or as Mary Pickford put it in her autobiography (published in 1955), Sunshine and Shadow. Light and dark were the elements of film, and they had their chemistry in film's emulsion. They had a moral meaning, too. But not everyone appreciated that prospect, or credited how it might make your fortune. ~ David Thomson

I'm getting a little bored by the juxtaposition of American and other cinema. I no longer think this division is as true as it might have been in the 1980s, or the early part of the 90s. ~ Wim Wenders

I really believed that Batman had the potential to be one of the coolest guys in cinema. ~ Michael Keaton

If cinema is a woman then certainly there are many shores. ~ Gerard Depardieu

In film you can use images exclusively and narrate a whole story very quickly, but you don't always so easily find the form in cinema to dig deeper into human thoughts and emotions. And in a novel you can much more easily express a character's inner thoughts and feelings. ~ Laura Esquivel

On the outside, America looks like this great melting pot, but on the inside, there's this segregation in American cinema. Why does a Latino film have to be for Latinos? Why is a black film just for black people? Why? ~ Gurinder Chadha

A movie tends to box you in, at least as far as the aesthetics. You have an incredibly kinetic experience, which is the joy of cinema. ~ Yann Martel

Egyptian comedy has a very, very old tradition. Our theater and our movies are just, like, amazing. And Egypt is kind of like the Hollywood of the Middle East. I mean, we had cinema maybe decades before the other Arab countries ever got independence. ~ Bassem Youssef

I like it when I go into a cinema and I'm not aware that I'm there; I'm totally involved in the film for two hours. ~ Atticus Ross

Animation, for me, is a wonderful art form. I never understood why the studios wanted to stop making animation. Maybe they felt that the audiences around the world only wanted to watch computer animation. I didn't understand that, because I don't think ever in the history of cinema did the medium of a film make that film entertaining or not. What I've always felt is, what audiences like to watch are really good movies. ~ John Lasseter

My favourite movie is: "Dr Strangelove". (I haven't seen any films released in the past 2-5 years, I'm afraid: I don't do TV/cinema). ~ Charles Stross

In this type of cinema, whether working with actors or non-actors, as much as you do direct them, if you allow yourself to be directed by them, then the end result will be much more pleasing. The real and individual strengths of the actors is allowed to be expressed and is something that does affect the audience very deeply. ~ Abbas Kiarostami

Television and cinema were all very well, but these stories happened to other people. The stories I found in books happened inside my head. I was, in some way, there.
It's the magic of fiction: you take the words and you build them into worlds. ~ Neil Gaiman

The novelist is the vestigial bone on the body cinema. We're like the little toe that can be cut off. ~ Don Winslow

Wherever you turn you cannot live without internet, phones .. So I think the film industry will change, but I still believe that the TV will survive in the same way the cinema survives. ~ Tommy Wiseau

You do remember things that people say in movies. You remember particular lines and things that are funny. But, you also remember really strong images. Images have a way of bypassing your brain and hitting you emotionally. There are so many things from movies that are remembered, that are just looks on people's faces or incredible vistas or beautiful pictures. That is a very important part of cinema. ~ Miranda Otto

Cinema, for me, has always been something like music composed with photographic images. ~ Roger Ebert

I am sure that the two main forms of English, American English and British English, separated geographically from the beginning and severed politically since 1776, are continuing to move apart, and that existing elements of linguistic dissimilarity between them will intensify as time goes on, notwithstanding the power of the cinema, TV, Time Magazine, and other two-way gluing and fuelling devices. ~ Robert Burchfield

When I was ten, I had a weird cinema party where I invited everyone from my street to come. I pretended I was an usher and tried to sell them all popcorn. ~ Sophie McShera

Each time I had an internship to do or an essay to write, I would always do it in the field of cinema. Nobody in my family worked in film and nobody could understand it. ~ Thomas Bidegain

I think films would get a lot better if people paid leaving the cinema. There's a whole business plan of opening terrible films in hundreds of cinemas and then closing them when the word of mouth gets out. ~ Graham Linehan

Everyone who makes films has to be an athlete to a certain degree because cinema does not come from abstract academic thinking; it comes from your knees and thighs. ~ Werner Herzog

I may discuss contemporary cinema, how to shop at a mall without losing energy, how to use the power of mind to increase career and academic success, the Zen of sports, reincarnation, karma, sex, the experience of "suchness" or a new book by Stephen King. ~ Frederick Lenz

Are we all not, when we sit in the cinema, in the position of humans in The Matrix, tied to chairs, immersed in the spectacle run by a machine? However, a more appropriate allegory is that of the viewer himself: beneath the illusion that we "just look" at the perceived objects from a safe distance, freely sliding along them, there is the reality of the innumerable ties that bind us to what we perceive. ~ Slavoj Zizek

In L.A., cinema and television might be seen as more interesting places for architecture than ever before. ~ Neil Denari

I'm in the early stages of a film called 'Freezing Time' about Eadweard Muybridge, the Victorian photographer who was really the forefather of cinema. Digital animators still treat his images like the Bible. He was a very obsessed man. ~ Andy Serkis

I don't have any particular wish to be polemical or didactic; I don't have a 'message', but what I do thoroughly enjoy are those works of art, not necessarily in the cinema, but in the other arts as well, which have an encyclopaedic world. ~ Peter Greenaway

Sometimes you also work with people who don't explain or express to you what they're actually looking for from the shot but you haven't got that problem with this because whatever you're going to do, whether it's good or bad, will get picked up. So, in that way I guess it's pure cinema. ~ Ray Winstone

In this particular business [cinema], you don't choose your own experiences. They start to happen and then they start to peel off and make other ones happen, and then you can start choosing. But it happens to you. ~ Kelli O'Hara

American films, it's a money-making industry. And in France, you can find great respect for cinema as art. ~ Woody Allen

I foresee no possibility of venturing into themes showing a closer view of reality for a long time to come. The public itself will not have it. What it wants is a gun and a girl. ~ D.W. Griffith

A cinema villain essentially needs a moustache so he can twiddle with it gleefully as he cooks up his next nasty plan. ~ Mel Brooks