#cinenotes

[thecinenotes]

Good films by real filmmakers aren't made to be decoded, consumed or instantly comprehended. They're not even made to be instantly liked. They're just made, because the person behind the camera had to make them. And as anyone familiar with the history of movies knows all too well, there a very long list of titles — The Wizard of Oz, It’s a Wonderful Life, Vertigo and Point Blank, to name just a few — that were rejected on first release and went on to become classics. Tomatometer ratings and Cinemascoregrades will be gone soon enough. Maybe they'll be muscled out by something even worse.

Or maybe they'll fade away and dissolve in the light of a new spirit in film literacy. Meanwhile, passionately crafted pictures like mother! will continue to grow in our minds.

- Martin Scorsese

[thecinenotes]

The film drama is the opium of the people…down with bourgeois fairy-tale scenarios…long live life as it is!

- Dziga Vertov

[thecinenotes]

A movie is like a person. Either you trust it or you don’t.

- Mike Nichols

[thecinenotes]

Cinema doesn't connect with the body as artists have in two thousand years of painting, using the nude as the central figure which the ideas seem to circulate around. I think it is important to somehow push or stretch or emphasize, in as many ways as I can, the sheer bulk, shape, heaviness, the juices, the actual structure of the body. Cinema basically examines a personality first and the body afterward.

- Peter Greenaway

[thecinenotes]

I’m interested in seeing films that confront me with new things, with films that make me question myself, with films that help me to reflect on subjects that I hadn’t thought about before, films that help me progress and advance. Those are the kinds of films that interest me. For me, personally, I think watching a movie that simply confirms my feelings is a waste of time.

- Michael Haneke

[thecinenotes]

Edwin Adrian Nieves from A-BITTERSWEET-LIFE on work of Robert Bresson:

The heart of Robert Bresson’s films is the revelation of cinema as art. In his works, we find a simplification of film elements and a resistance to the aesthetics of popular movies. The filmmaker’s style is one directed at experience. Bresson states, I’d rather people feel a film before understanding it. The power of a film rests in the emotional experience it stirs within the engaged audience, and it is the experience of the film that generates the meaning and truthfulness of the work. True cinema is a cinema of feeling.

[thecinenotes]

The motion picture is still such a magical and mysterious combination of reality, art, science and the supernatural—as well as the gateway to the nature of Time, and perhaps even the first clue in solving the puzzle of what we’re doing here on this world.

- Nicolas Roeg

[thecinenotes]

I know what I want to tell you, and I know what I want to show you. That’s the reason I am doing it. I have no reason to do if I can not “do” in my way. In this case, I don’t do. There’s really no reason to do a movie just to do a movie. No. If I’m not able to tell you really what I want to tell you, I don’t.

- Béla Tarr