The Cinenotes

Cinenotes is a film lovers notebook. For those days when you're missing that magic of film.

[thecinenotes]

Order creates. Chaos gives life.

- Robert Bresson

[thecinenotes]

"We need less perfect but more free films."

Jonas Mekas

[thecinenotes]

For me, all art is subversive in some way. That means that it cannot possibly abide by the rules of politeness and decorum that most mainstream movies thrive on. Mainstream cinema is a cinema of comfort, it’s meant to make you feel good. Even if it has some scary moments everything resolves okay and in the end it reinforces the status quo. It’s really just there to get you out of your own life for a few minutes. To me, that is not what art does. Art is reflective, it forces you to reflect on your own situation, good or bad, to think about things like the human condition, what our existence is really about. Art is subversive of the status quo. It doesn’t mean that you have to preach about political revolution, although that would be an option. So, it’s inevitable then, if you consider yourself an artist, that you’re going to bother people, disturb them.

- David Cronenberg

[thecinenotes]

You only find yourself when you disobey. Disobedience is the beginning of responsibility

- Guillermo del Toro

[thecinenotes]

And as film criticism written by passionately engaged people with actual knowledge of film history has gradually faded from the scene, it seems like there are more and more voices out there engaged in pure judgmentalism, people who seem to take pleasure in seeing films and filmmakers rejected, dismissed and in some cases ripped to shreds.

- Martin Scorsese

[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]

It is not only my dreams, my belief is that all these dreams are yours as well. The only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them. And that is what poetry or painting or literature or filmmaking is all about... and it is my duty because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are. We have to articulate ourselves, otherwise we would be cows in the field. 

- Werner Herzog

[thecinenotes]

To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.

- “The Great Dictator”, Charlie Chaplin

[thecinenotes]

A filmmaker doesn’t have to suffer to show suffering. You just have to understand it. You don’t have to die to shoot a death scene.

- David Lynch

[thecinenotes]

When you feel perpetually unmotivated, you start questioning your existence in an unhealthy way; everything becomes a pseudo intellectual question you have no interest in responding whatsoever. This whole process becomes your very skin and it does not merely affect you; it actually defines you. So, you see yourself as a shadowy figure unworthy of developing interest, unworthy of wondering about the world - profoundly unworthy in every sense and deeply absent in your very presence.

- Ingmar Bergman

[thecinenotes]

I understand, all right. The hopeless dream of being - not seeming, but being. At every waking moment, alert. The gulf between what you are with others and what you are alone. The vertigo and the constant hunger to be exposed, to be seen through, perhaps even wiped out. Every inflection and every gesture a lie, every smile a grimace. Suicide? No, too vulgar. But you can refuse to move, refuse to talk, so that you don't have to lie. You can shut yourself in. Then you needn't play any parts or make wrong gestures. Or so you thought. But reality is diabolical. Your hiding place isn't watertight. Life trickles in from the outside, and you're forced to react. No one asks if it is true or false, if you're genuine or just a sham. Such things matter only in the theatre, and hardly there either. I understand why you don't speak, why you don't move, why you've created a part for yourself out of apathy. I understand. I admire. You should go on with this part until it is played out, until it loses interest for you. Then you can leave it, just as you've left your other parts one by one.

- Persona, Ingmar Bergman

[thecinenotes]

You may be right, but when it comes to making movies, dreams aren't enough.

- “Contempt”, Jean-Luc Godard

[thecinenotes]

Take your broken heart, make it into art.

- Carrie Fisher

[thecinenotes]

Emmanuelle Riva - Hiroshima Mon Amour - Cinema.

[thecinenotes]

When I begin to consider a film project, I always have in mind a number of ideas that feel as if they would be the sort of thing I’d like to film. From among these one will suddenly germinate and begin to sprout; this will be the one I grasp and develop. I have never taken on a project offered to me by a producer or a production company. My films emerge from my own desire to say a particular thing at a particular time. The root of any film project for me is this inner need to express something. What nurtures this root and makes it grow into a tree is the script. What makes the tree bear flowers and fruit is the directing.

- Akira Kurosawa

[thecinenotes]

I think [my films] are the films of a woman and I think that their characteristic time quality is the time quality of a woman. I think that the strength of men is their great sense of immediacy. They are a now creature and a woman has strength to wait because she’s had to wait. She has to wait 9 months for the concept of a child. Time is built into her body in the sense of becomingness. And she sees everything in terms of it being in the stage of becoming. She raises a child knowing not what it is at any moment but seeing always the person it will become. Her whole life from her very beginning, its built into her, is the sense of becoming. Now in any time-form, this is a very important sense. I think that my films, putting as much stress as they do, upon the constant metamorphosis. One image is always becoming another. It is what is happening that is important in my films, not what is at any moment. This is a woman’s time-sense and I think it happens more in my films than in almost anyone else’s.

- Maya Deren

[thecinenotes]

Cinema as a tool of resistance is something I am totally behind. I will tell you why: you don’t judge a nation by their weapons, but by their poets. You judge nations by what they contribute as a culture. Israelis and Zionists in general want us to stop believing we are a nation. By making Palestinian cinema, it’s already destroying this [idea]. They have tanks and airplanes. But how can they stop a beautiful movie? Tell me? How can they fight this? How? Just by killing me, by the way. [Laughs] But even then, how are they going to kill The Idol? They kill me and the movies live. We produce someone like Edward Said or Mohammad Bakri, now we have Mohammed Assef. Israelis freak out about this. Even with all the destruction they are doing to our society, still we are producing such humanity. But I don’t just want to exist as a culture under the occupation. This is what I mean by a resistance: by making cinema, the film, culture, will continue to exist after the occupation ends.

- Hany Abu-Assad director of Paradise Now (2005), Omar (2013) & The Idol(2015)